China: arrests after the outcry over the video of a chained woman

Demonstration against violence against women (illustrative image).

照片来源：路透社REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

After the emotion aroused in China by the video of a woman held captive by her husband, the latter was arrested and several officials sanctioned.

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With our correspondent in Beijing, 

It is a news item that has kept millions of Chinese in suspense for several weeks: that of

.

The video, shot by

[a

is a

essentially made up of videos, editor's note], caused an uproar on the Chinese web in January.

We see a woman standing in the cold, without a coat and chained at the neck.

Authorities in Jiangsu, where the woman was being held, have just announced that 17 officials from the eastern province of China have been disciplined.

Eight civil servants were removed from their posts and nine others sanctioned to varying degrees, according to the provincial administration.

Detained for ten days, the victim's husband was formally arrested along with two other people for human trafficking.

An investigation is underway against six other people suspected of having participated in this traffic.

Sold several times

We now know more about the journey of this 55-year-old woman whose name is Xiao Huamei and is from Yunnan, located more than 2,000 km from the place where she was found.

The investigation reveals that Xiao Huamei was sold several times after being abducted from her native village in the 1990s. A mother of eight children, she suffers from schizophrenia and was hospitalized.

Local authorities were slow to launch an investigation, pressed by public opinion shocked by the case.

This scandal has brought to light human trafficking, a fairly common phenomenon in rural China where marriageable women are relatively rare in a country marked by several decades of the one-child policy. 

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