A video clip of a Chinese mother of 8 children kept in a village hut with an iron chain tied around her neck;
Anger and shock in China.
According to media reports, this woman, who lives in Jiangsu Province, was kidnapped and then sold to a man with whom she bore 8 children.
The correspondent of the French newspaper "Le Monde" in Beijing said in a report on the subject that this issue erupted with the start of the Olympic Games, and caused an uproar that prompted even some official media to admit that "selling women" in China was a lived reality.
Frederic Lemaitre said that this scandal was revealed through a video posted by a blogger on social media on January 28, which was filmed in Feng Town, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province.
A woman is shown chained to a wall in a barn that is open to the outside, with many of her teeth missing and her frozen food next to her, and she appears out of her mind.
According to the video, she is the mother of 8 children between the ages of two and 23 years.
He told Maitre that the blogger initially wanted to reveal a positive story about the courage of a humble husband who takes care of his children and his mother despite his wife's madness, which enabled the man to receive local aid.
But social networks very quickly caught the case, and began to raise questions, such as who is this woman?
And where did it come from?
What do local authorities do?
And how did the couple manage to have 8 children, despite the one-child policy in place at the time, which was only repealed in 2015?
Here, the possibilities began to fade, as many accused this husband of buying this woman and taking her as a wife and driving her crazy, and in one week this topic attracted more than two billion views.
The case is far from unique, according to the reporter. One netizen claims that farmers bought at least 48,100 women in Xuzhou - a city of 9 million people made up of many rural areas - in the 1980s.
Other similar cases are surfacing, notably that of a Sichuan woman who was bought and then imprisoned by two brothers for 15 years in Inner Mongolia, and in 2007, the film Blind Mountain directed by Li Yang denounced the phenomenon. .
The reporter said that the Chinese authorities, in order not to distort the Olympic Games, initially made it clear that the woman in the video was a vagrant and that this man married her in 1998.
But netizens were not convinced by this account because the authorities often organize a forced marriage later, and one of them taunted these justifications, saying, "In California, a man was sentenced to 400 years in prison for kidnapping a young girl and having two children with her, and in China, he receives financial gifts."
The central authorities quickly realized that such a situation during the Olympic Games could take on international dimensions, according to the reporter.
That is why he says to Lamtier, they began the day before yesterday, Monday, February 7, to put out the fire, as Hu Xi Jin - a columnist for the "Global Times" - published an article acknowledging that the sale of women is "common in some regions". He implicitly called on the authorities not to hide the truth.
He said, "This issue should not taint the success of the Olympics. China is a developing country, and it has a complex reality. It is true that we astonished the world with the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and it is true that we have the largest high-speed rail network in the world, but at the same time, we still have underdeveloped areas, and these The dirty case (this woman's case) is proof of that complexity."
On Monday evening, CCTV broadcast a report showing that the authorities had finally identified the woman, adding that her name was Xiao Huami from southwestern Yunnan Province.
Also yesterday, an opinion poll spread on social networks showed that the majority of Chinese believe that local politicians are the main ones responsible for this type of drama, ahead of criminal networks, poverty and low education.