Sun Liping on the Woman with Eight Children

Sun Liping, “On the Trafficking of Women: The Deep, Utilitarian Logic of Famous People and the Simple, Civilized Logic of Children”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
On January 21, 2022, an anonymous Vlogger in the Xuzhou area of Jiangsu posted a video of his visit to a locally famous “father of eight children” in Fengxian county.  This was presumably a “human interest story,” because the father, Mr. Dong, had become something of a local celebrity last year due to the size of his family—and particularly his seven sons—and had even posted his own videos on Douyin (TikTok).  In the course of his visit in January, the Vlogger happened onto the mother of the eight children, who had not been featured in previous human interest stories.  She was lightly clad (the temperature was right at freezing), toothless, and…chained at the neck to prevent her from leaving the shack she apparently inhabited. 
 
The Vlogger, visibly shocked, went to find her a coat (in a large room, full of donations from people who had presumably watched the human interest stories and sent clothing for the children) and attempted to talk to her, without much success.  The woman seemed to respond to his questions, but the sounds she made were incomprehensible (the video has been taken down in China, but is still available here; it is worth watching even if you do not understand Chinese.  Another account of the incident, among many, is available here).
 
The video shortly went viral in China, resulting in an uproar of online indignation.  Local authorities responded in a way that would have seemed comic if the situation were not so tragic, finding any number of ways to say “nothing to see here,” suggesting first that the marriage had been consensual and that the woman had subsequently developed mental illness leading to violent outbursts, later saying that the woman had been a beggar who had been kindly taken in my Mr. Dong—as if any of this justified chaining a human being.  This was during the Beijing Winter Olympics, after all.  Local authorities surely hoped it would all blow over.
 
Finally, the higher-ups intervened, and at least part of the truth came out:  the woman had been trafficked from a rural village in Yunnan.  She apparently lost her teeth because of prolonged lack of care.  Whether she had been mentally ill from the outset is not clear, but the image of her, chained to a wall in a shack while her eight children went on with their lives in the house next door, suggested to most Chinese that she had been nothing but a breeding machine.  If she had been mentally deficient all along, it also suggested that her eight children were likely the product of rape.            
 
Although mentalities have changed somewhat in China’s big cities, marriage is a virtual imperative elsewhere in the country, something which creates “marriage markets” and human trafficking, given the stubborn existence of rural poverty.  The details of this particular case throw into high relief just what this might mean, as well as the complicity of local officials and local society.  Local officials not only looked the other way—or demanded a bribe—when the marriage took place, but continued to look the other way as the couple had eight children (and were celebrated for such online), until recently a blatant violation of the one- (and then two-) child policy.  Villagers—and the local school teachers who presumably know some of the other children—ignored the situation.  Mr. Dong took no pains to conceal his wife’s condition, as the Vlog post that set off the entire affair reveals—the Vlogger simply walked in and found the woman chained to the wall.  It is hard not to come to the conclusion that “normal” can cover an extremely wide range of circumstances when it comes to the fate of women in rural China.  I might note that many Chinese discussions of the case—including the text translated here—do not use standard word for “wife”--qizi 妻子or the more highfalutin furen 夫人—but opt instead for xifur 媳妇儿, which literally means “daughter-in-law,” which is of course was a wife was—and perhaps still is—in patriarchal rural China. 
 
The text translated here, by the well-known sociologist Sun Liping (b. 1953) is short, sweet, and to the point.  Essentially, he says, , yes, it’s complicated, and yes, things can be viewed from different angles, but let’s take as our starting point the notion that chaining a woman to a wall and having eight children with her is not a good thing.
 
Translation

The reason why trafficking in women, as well as the brutalization of women that occurs in the process of trafficking, have not been completely eradicated even today, is that the soil out of which such practices grow is not completely barren.  And one of the nutrients in this soil is the ever worldly-wise and sophisticated logic of utilitarianism.
 
Concerning this logic, a famous author [Jia Pingwa 贾平凹, b. 1949] made his opinion quite clear: "If the guy does not buy himself a wife, he will never have a wife, and if the village never buys wives, the village will disappear."

A lot of people in society buy this. Some people say that if you can’t buy wives, then what are all those bachelors supposed to do? Others say that the lives those trafficked women are living are not so bad.
 
Put like this, it seems to make all kinds of sense and to serve a good cause. The standard of judgement here is whether the total benefit to society has increased or decreased, and if benefits have increased then the action is deemed to be reasonable. This is the logic that dictates that a minority make sacrifices for the benefit of the majority.

This logic has conquered countless people. It makes sense, right?
 
Might there be problems with this logic? Just as I was writing this post, I came across a conversation with a fifth-grader forwarded by someone online.
 
Question: There is village that depends on buying and selling women in order to exist, because otherwise it will disappear. So is it right to let them buy wives?
 
Child: If there is such a village, we should let it disappear.
 
Question: Why?
 
Child: You can't save civilization with barbarism. What if one day this village decides it needs to eat children to survive?
 
The child’s logic is clear and simple: you can’t use barbarism to save civilization. The logic of the famous writer is grounded in utilitarianism, and means that we can sacrifice the interests of a few people, as well as their lives and social justice itself, for utilitarian purposes. The young person’s logic,  by contrast, is simple, and consists of human nature and civilization.
 
There is something I have said repeatedly over the past five or six years:  the changes China is currently facing are complex, and for a time, we will have a hard time sorting out right and wrong in certain matters. In such a situation, it does no harm to return to the basics of human nature and look at things from that perspective. Of course, there is no guarantee that this will ensure that we make the right choices, but in terms of probability, the risk of making a mistake will be somewhat less.
 
To elaborate slightly on this, I propose the concept of “short chain justice 短链条正义.” By short chain justice, I mean that in deciding whether a thing is just or not, we set aside motive, background factors, the essence of the issue, knock-on effects and other similar considerations, and make a simple judgment about the thing itself.
 
This is because basic questions of right and wrong often get muddled or even turned upside down because we have ignored human nature and the short justice chain constructed on the basis of human nature.
 
Notes

[1]孙立平, “面对拐卖妇女：名人的深奥功利逻辑与少年的简单文明逻辑,” published on Sun’s WeChat feed on February 11, 2022.