In Gansu province, a pair of parents forced their 18-year-old daughter to drop out of school and marry after accepting a high bride price. The girl fled to Shenzhen, Guangdong, but her parents hired three men to apprehend her and forcefully take her back to their hometown for marriage. The parents located their daughter’s address in Shenzhen through the police, sparking a heated debate.
According to Southern Metropolis Daily, the 18-year-old girl from Gansu was unknowingly betrothed to someone due to local customs and the influence of a high bride price. Her parents cut short her education after accepting the bride price, depriving her of the right to study even after she was admitted to high school.
After the girl sought help online, a charity organization assisted her in finding temporary shelter by working at a café in Shenzhen.
To everyone’s surprise, her parents hired three individuals to track her down in Shenzhen after pinpointing her specific address through the local police. These three people staked out around the café, monitored the girl’s work schedule and travel routes, even pretending to be customers to gather information, all in preparation for forcibly capturing her.
On the evening of August 26, amid a rainy night, two strong men publicly dragged the girl onto a car in the street. Fortunately, a taxi driver in Shenzhen named Master He noticed something was wrong and immediately contacted the taxi fleet and the police.
After abducting the girl, the group switched drivers and embarked on a more than twenty-hour overnight journey to Lanzhou. Eventually, the girl was rescued in Lanzhou.
This incident sparked hot debates among netizens:
“This is suffocating. How could parents hire people to abduct across provinces and cities? They treat their daughter like a commodity. Luckily, the girl managed to escape. Such natural families are really chilling.”
“What’s even scarier is that this kind of thing happens quite frequently in rural areas. They interfere with your marriage, and even interfere if you die without getting married. Arranged marriage, some rural girls are destined to be family assets.”
“The local police station also has issues.”
“Revealing the address of an adult without their consent, parents have truly become an inescapable nightmare.”
“Has the local police station been held accountable for this?”
“This is a joint crime; this is a criminal act.”
On September 11, official Chinese media reported that women’s federations in Gansu and Shenzhen have both taken notice of this incident, with the women’s federation in Gansu already starting an investigation.
However, the Communist Party’s women’s federation, which claims to defend women’s rights, has been heavily criticized for its inaction.
The Xu Zhou Iron Chain Woman incident exposed in January 2022 shocked both at home and abroad. During the National People’s Congress in March of that year, the head of the national women’s federation made no mention of the Iron Chain Woman, but instead stated that women should “listen to the party and follow the party.” Public figures including Cao Tian, CEO of Henan Fengyashong Property Co., Ltd., Beijing University Professor Wu Bihu, and Chinese human rights lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan publicly condemned the coldness of the Communist Party’s women’s federation and called for a “national women’s federation apology, and dissolution of the Xu Zhou women’s federation.”
In recent years, the official Communist Party has continuously stated its intention to tackle the issue of high bride prices, but progress has been minimal.
Chinese expert on China issues and seasoned commentator Sheng Xue previously told Epoch Times that the various chaotic phenomena in Chinese love and marriage have deep social roots: the Communist Party’s consistent extreme and oppressive rule, combined with later deceptive reform and opening up, have broken the original social norms. Basic human ethics, morality, and the principles traditionally upheld by the public have been continuously crossed, leaving traditional concepts of marriage, love, and family relations in tatters.