The authorities in China cover up the news and data when it comes to women's exploitation, from the highest levels of the government to the lowest, a report said on Monday.
Two recent instances, one involving former Tennis player Peng Shuai and the other of a woman found chained by the neck inside a shed in the Jiangsu Province brought the worldwide attention to the plight of women in China, said Canada-based think tank, International Forum for Rights and Security (IFFRAS).
In November 2021, Peng in a post on Weibo accused Zhang Gaoli, a retired Vice Premier of China, of sexual harassment. The post was removed from social media and Peng disappeared for weeks. Peng reappeared in public during the winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022, denying that she ever had made any accusation.
In another instance, a woman was found in a terrible state, chained by the neck inside a shed in the Jiangsu Province. The woman was subjected to years of exploitation, forced to give birth to eight children during her ordeal.
The authorities in China made attempts to cover up both the instances without ensuring justice to the victims, said the report. Cover up is usually done by removing posts seeking justice from Chinese social media, censoring official data on the exploitation of women, and in some cases, as was seen with Peng Shuai, with incidents of disappearances.
China has one of the most serious human trafficking networks in the world, with the number of "lost people" in China hitting one million in 2020 alone, and as high as 3.94 million in 2016, the report said citing Trafficking in Persons Report 2017 of the US and the White Paper on Lost Population in China (2020).
The report also highlighted that most of the people trafficked were women, and even amongst them, ethnic minorities were at a significantly higher risk of being trafficked.
Women have been the most affected segment of the one-child policy implemented since the 1980s. As a consequence of the policy, China now has 30 million more men than women. It made the women all the more vulnerable to abuse and trafficking. Forced abortions and female infanticides increased due to this policy as people preferred a boy as their only child over a girl.
In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after reversing its objectives, seeking to increase birth rates, again has implemented new policies with no regard to the right to bodily autonomy of women.
A recent law titled 'China's law on the protection of women's rights and interests' treats women as entities other than men requiring "special considerations and protections" according to China Law Translate (CLT). CLT is a translation project run by Jeremy Daum, Yale Law Tsai Center Fellow.
Another law called, 'Family Education Promotion Law' calls for women to play their "special role" in promoting the family values of the Chinese people, to establish what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) considers a "positive family situation."
The report concluded that the case studies of China prove that most of the women the world over are chained, some by patriarchy and some by authoritarian regimes. However, chains of only a few are visible.
( With inputs from ANI )
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