(Minghui.org) A “woman in chains” who had been kidnapped and abused as a sex slave in a village of eastern China came to light during the recent Winter Olympics. The event grabbed the attention of everyone in China.
Despite the extreme cruelty the woman has suffered, it’s not an isolated case, but rather the tip of the iceberg. Millions of women and children have fallen victim to human trafficking, gang rape, and been held as sex slaves in China. These crimes continue today.
The “chained woman” was found in a village in Dongji Township, Feng County, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province.
She was first kidnapped in 1997 and sold to a villager called Dong Zhimin in 1998. Dong and his family kept her as a sex slave. The men in the family including Dong Zhimin, his father, and his brother repeatedly raped her. The family kept her chained up. They cut her tongue to prevent her from screaming and pulled out almost all her teeth so that she could not bite any of the offenders while they raped her.
The whole village helped Dong’s family to monitor her so that she could not escape. Once she tried to run away, but was found and taken back. Dong then offered her to the whole village and said he would be happy to father children that anyone had with her. Dong has eight children – it is not known whether the woman gave birth to them all or who the fathers are.
When the case was exposed, the authorities, from the township to the county to the city to the province and to the central government in Beijing, all tried to cover it up.
They locked the woman up in a mental hospital, built walls around the village in one day to block any outsider from going in, and harassed volunteers coming to the small town trying to help her.
The authorities even gave the woman a false identity. They claimed that she was a missing person, Xiao Huamei from Yunnan Province.
The public, on the other hand, came up with substantial evidence pointing out that she was Li Ying from Sichuan Province.
The reasons that the government denied she was Li Ying were, first, that Li Ying’s father served in the army and the authorities did not want soldiers to feel that they can’t even protect their own families; and second, that Li Ying was kidnapped when she was less than 13 years old. That would mean that her rapists raped an underage girl. There were unconfirmed reports on the Internet that the Feng County officials bought Li Ying as a gift for Xuzhou Mayor Yu Guangzhou to deflower.
Human trafficking and sex slave cases are common throughout China. In 2020 alone, 1 million Chinese went missing. The number was even higher before: 3.94 million in 2016.
The local authorities tolerate and even support human trafficking, which was especially severe in Xuzhou where the “chained woman” was found.
The government and police help to issue fake residence cards for these women. They also falsify marriage and birth certificates. When kidnapped women went to the court to seek “divorce,” the judges instead demand that they go back to live with their false husbands - the rapists.
Since the CCP took power 73 years ago, it has systemically destroyed the moral values among the Chinese people. It banned religion after it took power and denounced traditional Chinese culture. The Party destroyed countless cultural sites and relics. It brainwashed the people with communist atheist theory and taught them that the Party is their only savior.
When China opened up to the West during the 1980s, the CCP changed its narrative and began to promote materialism and the idea “everything after money.”
People, after losing their moral standards, start to do things good for themselves at the expense of others.
Ten years after the CCP had the bloodshed at Tiananmen Square, crushing the young students’ aspiration for democracy, they turned the entire state apparatus to Falun Gong, a Buddhist school mind-and-body practice following the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, in July 1999, due to its immense popularity and revival of traditional values that the CCP has always sought to eliminate.
Vowing to eradicate Falun Gong from China in three months, then CCP leader Jiang Zemin, who launched the persecution, gave the order “to ruin [their] reputations, bankrupt [them] financially, and destroy [them] physically.”
The Party offered financial rewards to those who managed to force Falun Gong practitioners to give up their belief. This incentivized the authorities to torture and abuse practitioners.
As a result, the CCP turned all law enforcement and judicial organs against Falun Gong and aided substantially in carrying out the persecution.
Ripple effects followed throughout China.
Authorities allow organized crime syndicates to grow and spread (including the human traffickers). Police and judges could be bribed to do the Party's will, leading to widespread abuse.
Medical doctors were turned into murderers, custom killing practitioners for their organs to fuel a lucrative international organ transplant industry.
Along with the massive arrests of Falun Gong practitioners, China also saw rapidly increasing human trafficking, the forced-demolition of people’s houses, the illegal arrest of human rights defense lawyers, and later the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
With such massive crimes taking place in every corner of the country, most Chinese people, after living through decades of political struggles and indulging in material enjoyment, stayed silent and indifferent. As long as no one is after them and they live a good life themselves, they turn a blind eye to how others are being abused.
The Party has engaged the state apparatus to commit sexual crimes against political dissidents on a grand scale, especially against Falun Gong practitioners.
The CCP applies systematic torture to Falun Gong practitioners in attempts to force them to give up their beliefs. Rape and sexual tortures are used as a means to humiliate and harm practitioners, trying to break their will. Many cases have been reported by Minghui.org over the years.
Sexual assaults on female Falun Gong practitioners include: rape, gang rape, vaginal penetration with electric batons, vaginal rubbing with toothbrushes, vaginal gouging, vaginal hooking, nipple electrocution, breast gouging, breast pinching, cigarette burns on female practitioners’ pubic areas, kicking the anus and lower part of the body, forced abortion, sexual assault of underage girls, and so on.
The following are several examples:
In 2001, guards of Wanjia Forced Labor Camp in Heilongjiang Province, injected medicine to make Ms. Tang Guanghui sleepy and unconscious. They then gang raped her. They repeatedly raped her for days on end, until she became insane.
In 2001, police at Shouguang Detention Center in Shandong Province, striped Ms. Li Yinping naked and repeatedly shocked her vagina and breasts with electric batons. They also gang-raped her. She and several practitioners were tortured to death shortly after that.
In 2001, two guards at the Changsha Detention Center in Hunan Province, raped Ms. Zou Jin who was 77 years old then. They also put an electric baton into her vagina to shock her.
Police in Changzhi City, Shanxi Province put many Falun Gong practitioners in Changzhi mental hospital to torture them. They gang-raped a 19-year-old girl named Xiao Yi 14 times in three nights. The police also burned her breasts and private part with cigarettes. Afterward, she laid in bed and was not able to move for a month.
In 2000, in Qiliqu Detention Center, Beijing, guards striped female Falun Gong practitioners naked and put them in men’s cells for gang raping. The guards forced male Falun Gong practitioners to watch.
In Masanjia Forced Labor Camp, Heilongjiang Province, guards striped 18 female practitioners naked and pushed them into male inmate cells for gang rape in October 2000. Police also video taped the naked practitioners to humiliate them or forced them to stand in the snow. The guards put another nine female practitioners, including a virgin woman, in male cells in April 2001.
The CCP’s sex crimes don't just target women. They also sexually assault male practitioners, including electric shocks to their private parts and rape.
In 2001, police officers in Tangshan City, Hebei Province, used electric batons to shock a practitioner’s penis and forced a female practitioner to watch.
In Fusong Detention Center in Baishan City, Jilin Province, guards stabbed Falun Gong practitioners’ penises with sewing needles.
Police in the Suihua Forced Labor Camp, Heilongjiang Province, put honey on practitioners’ penises to attract biting ants.
In 2011, an inmate head at Handan Forced Labor Camp, Hebei Province, with the guard’s backing, raped male practitioner Wang Gang orally and anally.
Sexual assault is only one type of torture that the CCP applies to Falun Gong practitioners.
It also tortures practitioners in many other ways including beating, injecting or force-taking conscious-losing medicines, depriving of sleep, forbidding to go to bathroom, as well as the forced organ harvesting.
Yet it is still the tip of an iceberg of all the atrocities that have taken place.
In fact, shortly after the story of the “chained woman” broke out, reports of a woman who was kept naked in a cave for six years and another woman who was kept in an underground metal cage also began to circulate on the internet.
Different from the silence over many other human rights violations that were exposed in the past, the story of the “chained woman” has attracted enormous attention from the Chinese public, despite the government’s huge effort to cover it up.
Even many celebrities and the children of previous CCP leaders who have benefited from the CCP’s rule stepped forward to speak up for the victim. Perhaps the crime was so barbaric that anyone who still had a conscience left wasn’t able to turn a blind eye.
Luckily, through this incident, the compassion and kindness buried deep in many Chinese people’s hearts has awakened.