The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.

为了寻找一名因在极度贫困状态下抚养八个孩子而闻名的男子，一位视频博主来到了中国东部的董集村。这名男子已成为那些希望吸引捐款和点击量的网红们最喜欢的采访对象。

But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone who had not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.

但那天，该男子的一个孩子领着这位博主拍到了一位在其他许多视频中都没有出现过的人：孩子的母亲。

She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.

在院子里一间没有门的棚屋里，她站在床和砖墙之间的一片泥地上。尽管1月很冷，她还是只穿着一件薄毛衣。当博主问她能不能听懂他的话，她摇了摇头。她的脖子上系着一根固定在墙上的铁链。

The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.

这段视频迅速在网上传播开来，中国的评论者们立即怀疑这名女子是被卖给董集村的这名男子，并且被迫生下了他的孩子——这是一种长期存在于中国农村的人口贩卖问题。他们要求政府干预。

Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.

但当地官员并不理会人们的担忧，只是发表了一份简短声明：该女子与该男子是合法夫妻，称她并没有被拐卖。她被锁起来是因为患有精神疾病，有时还打人。

Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.

公众的愤怒与日俱增。人们写博客文章，要求知道为什么女人会被当作动物一样对待。还有人印制传单或亲自到村里调查。人们说，这不仅仅是贩卖人口的问题。这是许多年轻女性不愿结婚或生孩子的另一个原因，因为政府将婚姻视为虐待的许可证。

The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.

抗议在全国范围内蔓延了数周。许多观察人士称这是当代中国最重要的女性维权时刻。中国共产党一贯将民众的不满视为对其权威的挑战，但这一次的不满是如此强烈，似乎连党都难以平息。

And yet, it did.

然而，它做到了。

To find out how, I tried to track what happened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expansive web of intimidation at home and abroad, involving mass surveillance, censorship and detentions — a campaign that continues to this day.

为了找出原因，我试图跟踪了解“铁链女”和那些为她发声的人的近况。我发现了一个遍布国内外的庞大恐吓网络，包括大规模监视、审查和拘捕——这项行动一直持续到今天。

The clampdown shows how rattled the authorities are by a growing movement demanding improvements to the role of women in Chinese society. Though the party says it supports gender equality, under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the government has described motherhood as a patriotic duty, jailed women’s rights activists and censored calls for tougher laws to protect women from mistreatment.

这场镇压表明，要求改善妇女在中国社会中角色的运动日益壮大，这令当局非常不安。尽管中国共产党表示支持性别平等，但在中国领导人习近平治下，政府将母亲的职责描述为爱国义务，将女权活动人士投入监狱，并对要求制定更严厉法律保护妇女免受虐待的呼声进行审查。

Yet even as the crackdown forced women to hide their anger, it did not extinguish it. In secret, a new generation of activists has emerged, more determined than ever to continue fighting.

然而，尽管镇压迫使女性隐藏愤怒，但她们的愤怒没有消除。新一代的活动人士已经秘密崛起，她们比以往任何时候都更坚定地继续战斗。

Who Is the Chained Woman?

“铁链女”是谁？

At first sight, Dongji looks like any other village in China’s vast countryside. Two hours from the nearest city, it sits among sprawling wheat and rice fields in Jiangsu Province, half empty, most residents long departed to look for better lives elsewhere.

乍看之下，董集村和中国广大农村中的其他村庄没什么两样。它离最近的城市有两个小时的车程，坐落在江苏省大片麦田和稻田中，这些田地有一半是闲置的，大多数居民早就离开这里去别处寻找更好的生活。

But when a colleague and I visited recently, one house, with faded maroon double doors, appeared to be guarded by two men. A surveillance camera on a nearby pole pointed directly at the entrance.

但当我和一位同事最近造访那里时，有一所房子似乎有两名男子看守，房子的褐色双开门已经褪色。附近一根杆子上的监控摄像头正对着入口。

This was the street where the chained woman had lived.

这就是那个被锁住的女人曾经住过的那条街。

Officially, there was little reason that her house should still be under watch, since in the government’s telling, the case had been resolved.

根据官方说法，她的房子没有理由继续被监视，因为政府说案子已经了结了。

After widespread outrage over the government’s initial statement, in January 2022, officials promised a new investigation. Over the next month, four government offices released statements that at points conflicted with each other — offering different dates for when she was first chained, for example, or alternately suggesting that she had been homeless or gotten lost before arriving in Dongji. Finally, under intense public pressure, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.

在对政府最初的声明普遍感到愤怒之后，2022年1月，官员们承诺进行新的调查。在接下来的一个月里，四个政府部门发布的声明有时相互矛盾——例如，对她第一次被锁住的时间说法不一，或者不时暗示她在到达董集之前无家可归或迷路。最终，在巨大的公众压力下，该省官员于当年2月底发布了他们所谓的最终报告。

According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, an impoverished village in Yunnan Province, in China’s southwest.

根据那篇报告，这名妇女名叫小花梅。（政府没有具体说明这是昵称还是正式名字。）她出生在中国西南部云南省的一个贫困村庄——亚谷。

As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.

报道称，少女时期，她的言行举止有时“异常”。1998年，她20岁左右时，一位老乡答应帮助她寻求治疗。然而，那个村民以大约5000元的价格把她卖了。

Trafficking women has been a big business in China for decades. A longstanding cultural preference for boys, exacerbated by the one-child policy, created a surplus of tens of millions of men, many of whom could not find wives. Poor, rural men in eastern China began buying women from the country’s even poorer western regions.

几十年来，拐卖妇女在中国一直是一项大生意。长期以来的重男轻女文化，再加上独生子女政策，造成了数以千万计男性的过剩，其中许多人找不到妻子。中国东部贫穷的农村男性开始从更贫穷的西部地区购买女性。

Xiaohuamei was sold three times, finally to a man in Dongji — more than 2,000 miles from her hometown — who wanted a wife for his son, Dong Zhimin, the government said.

小花梅被卖了三次，最后卖给了董集的一个男人——那里距离她的家乡有大约1600多公里——政府说，那个男人想给儿子董志民娶个老婆。

Over the next 20 years, she gave birth to eight children, even as her mental health visibly deteriorated, the government said, citing interviews with Mr. Dong and villagers. When she first arrived in Dongji, she had been able to take care of herself; by the time she was found, she had trouble communicating.

政府援引对董志民和村民的采访称，在接下来的20年里，她生了八个孩子，但她的精神健康状况明显恶化。刚到董集时，她能照顾好自己；当她被发现时，她已经无法与人交流了。

The government report did not say whether other villagers knew she had been trafficked. But self-styled charity bloggers had been visiting Mr. Dong and presenting him as a doting father since at least 2021. (The woman appeared in some videos, but unchained.)

政府的报告没有说明其他村民是否知道她是被拐卖的。但至少从2021年开始，自称慈善博主的人就开始拜访董志民，把他描绘成慈爱孩子的父亲。（这名女子出现在一些视频中，但没有被锁住。）

“My biggest dream is to slowly bring the children up into healthy adults,” Mr. Dong told one blogger, before the video of the shack emerged.

“最大的梦想我就是慢慢把小孩都拉吧成人，看着他们健健康康地生长，”董志民在棚屋视频出现之前对一位博主说。

董志民的社交媒体帖子将他描绘成一个慈爱的父亲。

Privately, though, Mr. Dong had been chaining the children’s mother around the neck and tying her with cloth ropes since at least 2017, the government said. He also did not take her to the hospital when she was sick.

不过，政府表示，至少从2017年开始，董志民私下里就一直用铁链锁住孩子母亲的脖子，用布绳捆绑她。她生病时，他也没有带她去医院。

Censors deleted the bloggers’ videos of the family and of the woman in chains. In April 2023, Mr. Dong was sentenced to prison, along with five others accused of participating in the trafficking.

审查者删除了博主们关于这个家庭和那个被锁着的女人的视频。2023年4月，董志民和其他五人被指控参与贩卖人口，被判入狱。

The official story ended there.

官方的故事到此结束。

Step 1: Hide the Victim

第一步：隐藏受害者

As we approached the house where the men were sitting, they jumped up and asked who we were. One made a phone call, while another blocked me from taking photos.

当我们走近那座有人坐着的房子时，他们跳起来问我们是谁。一个人开始打电话，另一个人阻止我拍照。

Ten more people soon arrived, including police officers, propaganda officials and the village leader, who insisted that the scandal had been overblown. “Everything is very normal, extremely normal,” he said. When we asked where the woman was, officials said they believed that she didn’t want visitors. Then they escorted us to the train station.

很快又来了十几个人，包括警察、宣传官员和村长。村长坚持认为这件丑闻被夸大了。“都很正常，非常正常，”他说。当我们询问那名女子在哪里时，官员们说，他们相信她不希望有人来访。然后他们把我们送到了火车站。

The chained woman may be choosing to stay out of the public eye. But the Chinese government often silences victims of crimes or accidents that generate public anger. Relatives of people killed in plane crashes, coronavirus patients and survivors of domestic violence have all been shuffled out of sight, threatened or detained.

“铁链女”可能会选择远离公众视线。但中国政府经常让引起公众愤怒的犯罪或事故的受害者保持沉默。飞机失事遇难者的亲属、新冠病毒患者和家庭暴力幸存者都曾被拖出人们的视线、受到威胁或被拘留。

Some weeks later, we tried to go back. This time, we visited a hospital where China’s state broadcaster said the woman was sent after the video went viral — her last known whereabouts.

几个星期后，我们试图回去。这一次，我们去了一家医院，中国国家电视台说，在视频走红后，这个女人被送往这家医院——这是她最后的下落。

We tracked down Dr. Teng Xiaoting, a physician who had treated her. Dr. Teng said the woman was no longer there, but said she did not know where she had gone.

我们找到了曾治疗过她的医生滕晓婷医生。滕医生说，那个女人已经不在这里，但她不知道她去了哪里。

Other locals we asked had no information either. But several people in neighboring villages said it was common knowledge that many women in the area, including in their own villages, had been bought from southwestern China. Some called it sad; others were matter-of-fact.

我们询问的其他当地人也不知道这方面的消息。但邻近村庄的一些人说，众所周知，该地区的许多妇女，包括他们自己村庄的妇女，都是从中国西南部买来的。有人说这很悲哀；也有人说现实就是如此。

Still, it was clear that talking about such trafficking could be risky.

不过，很明显，谈论这种人口拐卖可能是有风险的。

As we got closer to Dongji, a black Volkswagen began tailing us. Then, at least eight villagers surrounded us, calling us race traitors (we are both of Chinese heritage) and at times pushing my colleague. One said that if we had been men, they would have beaten us.

当我们接近董集村时，一辆黑色大众汽车开始尾随我们。然后，至少有八名村民包围了我们，称我们是民族的叛徒（我们两人都是华裔），还屡次推搡我的同事。一个人说，要是我们是男人，他们就动手打我们了。

They eventually escorted us back to the main road after we called the police. Along the way, one man said it was in our own interest to be more cautious.

在我们报了警之后，他们终于把我们送回大路上。一路上，一个人说，我们应该小心点，这是为我们自己好。

“If you two were taken to the market and sold,” he said, “then what would you do?”

“把你们俩拐跑，”他说，“我看你咋整。”

Step 2: Silence Discussion

第二步：压制讨论

After the woman’s story emerged in January 2022, the controls were tightest in Dongji. But the government sprang into action across the country to suppress the debate that followed.

2022年1月，这个女人的故事曝光后，董集村的管制最为严格。但政府也在全国范围内迅速采取行动，压制随后的讨论。

Legal scholars observed that the penalty for buying a trafficked woman — three years’ imprisonment — was less than that for selling an endangered bird. Others noted that judges have denied divorce applications from women known to have been abused or trafficked, and that the government has repeatedly ignored calls to criminalize marital rape.

法律学者指出，购买一名被拐卖妇女的刑罚——三年监禁——比出售一只濒危鸟类的刑罚还轻。也有人指出，法官拒绝了已知曾遭受虐待或拐卖的女性提出的离婚申请，政府一再无视将婚内强奸定为犯罪的呼吁。

To halt such conversations, the police tracked down people like He Peirong, a veteran human rights activist, who had traveled 200 miles to the area around Dongji to try to look for other trafficked women.

为了阻止这样的对话，警方追踪像何培蓉这样的人。她是一名资深人权活动人士，跋涉160多公里来到董集村附近地区，试图寻找其他被拐卖的妇女。

After she returned home, police officers knocked on her door, asking her why she had gone. They visited her roughly 20 times over the next month, forcing her to delete online posts about her trip and threatening to arrest her.

她回到家后，警察来敲她的门，问她为什么要去。在接下来的一个月里，他们来了大约20次，迫使她删除有关她旅行的网络帖子，并威胁要逮捕她。

They also named journalists she had been in contact with, to show they were watching her communications. They even took her to nearby Anhui Province on a forced “vacation” — a common tactic used to control dissidents’ movements.

他们还列出了她接触过的记者的名字，以表明他们在监视她的通讯。他们甚至强迫她去附近的安徽省“度假”——这是控制异见人士出行活动的常用策略。

Similar crackdowns were taking place farther away. A lawyer named Lu Tingge, a resident of Hebei Province, about 600 miles from Dongji, said in an interview that a Jiangsu official had traveled to his city, urging him to withdraw a petition he’d submitted for more information about the case (he refused, but said he never received the information).

在更远的地方也有镇压。身在在距离董集村约900公里的河北省的律师卢廷阁接受采访说，一名江苏省官员来到他所在的城市，敦促他撤回要求获得更多案件信息的申请（他拒绝撤回，但表示他从未收到过相关信息）。

Bookstores that put up displays recommending feminist reading were forced to remove them. Numerous online articles about the woman were censored; China Digital Times, a censorship tracker, archived at least 100 of them, though there were many more.

陈列推荐女权主义读物的书店被迫撤下了展架。大量有关该女性的网络文章遭到审查；审查跟踪网站“中国数字时代”至少存档了100篇文章，尽管还有更多。

The campaign even extended overseas. A woman living abroad said in an interview that the police called her parents in China after she posted photos of herself in chains online.

这场运动甚至扩展到海外。一名居住在国外的女子在接受采访时说，她在网上发布了自己戴着锁链的照片后，警方给她在中国的父母打了电话。

Ms. He, the veteran activist, realized that the government was more worried about feminism than she had thought. She had been detained previously for other activism, but this monthslong pressure “far surpassed that,” she said.

资深活动人士何培蓉意识到，政府比她想象的更担心女权主义。她之前曾因其他活动被拘留，但这次长达数月的压力“远远超过了”此前对她身上用的措施，她说。

Step 3: Detain Those Who Persist

第三步：拘留坚持的人

To avoid arrest, Ms. He stopped posting about the case. She eventually left China for Thailand.

为了避免被捕，何培蓉不再发布有关此案的帖子。她最终离开中国去了泰国。

Those who refused to stop, however, suffered the consequences.

然而，那些拒绝停下来的人却承受了后果。

Two other women also traveled to Jiangsu after the video emerged, to visit the chained woman at the hospital. Identifying themselves on social media only by nicknames, Wuyi and Quanmei, they said they were just ordinary women showing solidarity.

视频曝光后，还有两名女子也去了江苏，到医院看望被那名铁链锁住的女子。她们在社交媒体上的昵称是“乌衣”和“拳妹”，她们说自己只是表示声援的普通女性。

“Your sisters are coming,” Wuyi posted.

“姐妹来了，”乌衣发微博说。

They were barred from entering the hospital or the village, according to videos on Wuyi’s Weibo. So they drove around town instead, with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.

乌衣微博上的视频显示，她们被禁止进入医院或村子。于是，她们转而开车在镇上转了一圈，用口红在车上潦草地写着关于这个女人的信息。

They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times.

她们很快吸引了大量的关注者，她们的更新被浏览了数亿次。

Before long, they were detained by the local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.

不久，她们被当地警察拘留，几天后获释，此后拳妹在网上销声匿迹。

Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. She shared a photo of her bruised arm, saying she was shocked that her small actions could elicit such ferocity.

乌衣拒绝沉默。她在微博上说，警察在她头上套袋子，殴打她。她分享了一张伤痕累累的手臂的照片，说她很震惊自己这些小小的行动会引发如此凶残的行为。

“Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.

她写道：“我一直信任的，国家一直教导我的，全部变成了谎言。”

About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, the police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She was eventually released on bail and has not spoken publicly since.

大约两周后，乌衣再次失踪。据一位熟人说，这一次，警方将她拘留了八个月。她最终获得保释，此后一直没有公开发言。

The Resistance Goes Into Hiding

抵抗者躲藏起来

After Wuyi’s disappearance, the few voices still speaking out fell silent.

乌衣消失后，少数还在发声的人都沉默了。

But the activism has not evaporated, only moved underground.

但是行动主义并没有消失，只是转移到了地下。

It includes people like Monica, a young woman who asked to be identified only by a first name. We met at her home, where she asked that I not bring my cellphone to avoid surveillance. Soft-spoken but assured, she recounted how police scrutiny forced her to embrace new tactics.

其中就包括莫妮卡这样的人，这位年轻女性要求在本文中只使用一个英文名。我们在她家见面，她要求我不要带自己的手机，以免被监听。她用轻柔但坚定的语调，解释了为什么她因为警方的监视被迫用上这个新的手段。

When the chained woman story erupted, she joined an online group of several hundred people that decided to conduct research on the trafficking of women with mental disabilities in China.

“铁链女”事件引起轰动后，她加入了一个几百人的在线群组，这个群希望对有精神障碍的女性在中国遭到贩卖的情况展开调查。

Within days, the police tracked down and interrogated participants. At around the same time, anonymous articles appeared online that doxxed some members of the group and labeled them “extreme feminists.” The group disbanded.

几天后，警方找到群组的成员并进行讯问。大约也是在这个时间，网上出现了一些匿名文章，公开了其中一些成员的身份信息，称她们是“极端女权”。群组被解散。

But the intimidation only made Monica angrier.

但是这样的恐吓只会让莫妮卡更加愤怒。

So a few months later, Monica and several others quietly regrouped, using an encrypted messaging platform. Rather than campaign publicly, they tried to impose pressure on the government behind the scenes.

于是几个月后，莫妮卡和其他一些人悄悄又建了一个群，这次使用了加密的聊天软件。她们不再公开宣传，而是尝试在幕后向政府施压。

For weeks, they studied hundreds of court cases and news stories about women who had been abused or trafficked. They wrote a 20-page report explaining the chained woman episode and laying out suggestions for reform. In July 2022, they submitted it anonymously to a U.N. committee reviewing China’s record on disability rights.

她们用几周时间研究大量有关女性被虐待或贩卖的法庭案例和新闻报道。她们写了20页的报告，解释“铁链女”事件，并提出改革的建议。2022年7月，她们匿名向一个审查中国残疾人权利纪录的联合国委员会提交了该报告。

They later submitted similar reports to two other U.N. committees. A member of one of the committees, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the reports were crucial sources of independent information from China. That person had not heard of the chained woman before.

她们后来又向另两个联合国委员会提交了类似的报告。其中一个委员会的一位成员称该报告是有关中国的独立信息的关键来源，由于涉及敏感事务，该委员要求匿名。此人此前没有听说过“铁链女”。

In May 2023, U.N. officials raised the chained woman’s story during a public meeting with Chinese government representatives. The government said it had imprisoned Mr. Dong and that the woman was being cared for. Still, Monica felt proud — and emboldened: “You feel that you can still do some risky things.”

2023年5月，联合国官员在一次与中国政府代表的公开会晤中提到了“铁链女”事件。政府称董志民已经入狱，那位女性得到了妥善照顾。莫妮卡仍然觉得很自豪——也有了更多底气：“觉得你还能够做一些危险的事情。”

“Feminism in China really is the most vocal and active movement. It’s also very hard to completely scatter or kill off,” she said. “I think the authorities are right to be worried.”

“我们能够看到，女权确实是国内现在最有声量的，最有行动力的一个，而且很不容易被完全打散打死的这么个存在，”她说。“我觉得官方他的担忧也很合理。”

Others have tried to subtly keep the chained woman’s legacy alive in other ways. An all-female band released a song called “So Who Has My Key?” An artist spent 365 days wearing a chain around her neck. A writer published a thinly disguised retelling of Snow White.

还有一些人试图让“铁链女”的故事以别的隐晦形式延续下去。一支全女子乐队发表了一首名为《所以我的钥匙在谁的手上？》的歌曲。一位艺术家在她的脖子上挂着铁链生活了365天。一位作家改编了《白雪公主》，但不难看出是在写什么。

In December, a woman whose family had reported her missing 13 years ago was found living with a man to whom she had borne two children. The authorities claimed the woman had a disability and the man had “taken her in” — the same language officials used in an early report about the chained woman.

12月，一名13年前由家属报案失踪的女子被发现与一个男人生活在一起，并且给他生了两个孩子。当局称她有残疾，那个男人“收留了她”——“铁链女”事件最初的一份报告中，官员也使用了这样的措辞。

Social media users erupted, accusing the government of glossing over trafficking again.

社交媒体一片哗然，人们指责政府再一次粉饰人口贩卖的事实。

Then the censors stepped in and stifled that discussion, too.

审查机构再次出手，压制了相关讨论。