A story of a trafficked bride shocks China

IF ALL GOES to plan for Communist Party leaders, the year 2022 should show the world that China represents the future. State television kicked off the lunar new year with greetings from the crew of the country’s first space station, the Tiangong, beamed to over a billion viewers. February saw the capital, Beijing, safely host a Winter Olympics during a global pandemic. Athletes were secluded in high-technology quarantine bubbles, before competing on slopes of artificial snow. In a sign of the country’s allure as a sporting power, a freestyle-ski champion born and raised in America, 18-year-old Eileen Gu, chose to compete for China, her mother’s homeland, earning two gold medals and one silver.

Yet news of confidence and modernity has had competition in these opening weeks of the year. Since late January, millions of Chinese have dodged online censors to follow a different story, involving horrors that seem transported from another age. The news broke when a video blogger filmed a mother-of-eight, who showed signs of mental illness, chained by the neck in a freezing village outhouse in the eastern province of Jiangsu. Nationwide public outrage reached levels not seen since the chaotic first weeks of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It peaked as local officials issued a series of defensive, contradictory statements...