Chinese social media has been filled with discussion of Bu Xiaohua, a woman in Shanxi province who was recently reunited with her father and other relatives 13 years after she went missing. Ms. Bu, who earned a Master’s degree in engineering in her youth, went missing from her hometown of Jinzhong in Shanxi in 2011, not long after undergoing in-patient treatment for schizophrenia. During the intervening years, she apparently lived with a man named Zhang Ruijun in a village about 100 miles distant from her hometown, and gave birth to a number of children. It is unclear, under China’s mental health law, whether Ms. Bu was legally able to consent to sexual relations, or whether she “possessed full self-awareness during her pregnancies and childbirth.” Zhang, who claimed that he found Ms. Bu wandering around and “gave her shelter,” is currently being held by local authorities on suspicion of rape.

What was first touted as an optimistic, “positive-energy” tale of family reunion contains dark undertones of possible sexual abuse, neglect, human trafficking, and official malfeasance. After a relative of Mr. Zhang released an online video seeking help locating Ms. Bu’s family, a volunteer managed to track down her family in their hometown within a day. Many social media users questioned why Zhang and his family did not alert the police or seek help earlier to reunite Ms. Bu with her family. And Ms. Bu’s physical condition—matted hair, severe malnourishment, being deprived of eyeglasses, and unable to see well—caused both her family and the general public to suspect that she had been mistreated.

Public interest in the case has been intense: between December 6 and December 10, the hashtag “Female MA Graduate Becomes a Victim of Human Trafficking” (#女硕士被拐卖#) garnered 150 million views on Weibo. As of this week, CDT editors have archived 12 articles and essays about Bu Xiaohua’s plight, at least two of which have been censored.

For many in China, Ms. Bu’s story brought to mind the notorious 2022 trafficking and abuse case of a woman named Xiaohuamei, a mother-of-eight who was found shackled in a shed in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province. The case sparked widespread public outrage, resulting in an investigation and trial: Xiaohuamei’s husband Dong Zhimin was eventually sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of torture, abuse, and illegal captivity; five other individuals were given sentences of eight to 13 years.

A WeChat post from “News Brother” described Ms. Bu’s poor physical condition and speculated that she may have been a victim of neglect or abuse. The author of the post takes umbrage at the official police notice’s use of the phrase 收留 (shōuliú, meaning to “take someone in” or “give someone shelter”) to describe a situation that very likely involved coercion, abuse, and possible trafficking:

Bu’s nickname is Huahua. During a live broadcast, her sister-in-law wept, saying that when they took Huahua to the hospital for psychiatric treatment, treatment had to be delayed because "severe malnutrition brought about by long-term hunger” had left her so weak that it was hard for her to stand. They must first strengthen Huahua’s body before they can heal her mind.

If the Zhang family had really taken such good care of Huahua, Bu’s sister-in-law asked, then why is she so malnourished? And why does she lash out the moment any man comes near her?

And though the Zhang family claimed she was incontinent, why was Huahua able to go the whole day without incident when she was in the company of her sister-in-law?

[…] It was 2011 when Huahua left home. In the intervening 13 years, there have been seven censuses and three years of the COVID pandemic. So diligent was COVID-era surveillance that the authorities could easily determine which chicken-wing restaurant you liked to eat at every day, to say nothing of noticing an extra person showing up in a household within their jurisdiction.

And yet somehow, despite all this, the unthinkable happened.

Simply by using the term "gave shelter to,” they seek to deny countless crimes and acts of coercion, and to cover up the many dirty deeds perpetrated at each step along the way.

It’s evil, pure evil. [Chinese]

Many other articles and comments about the case also denounced the pernicious use of the euphemism “take in” or “offer shelter” in cases such as Bu Xiaohua’s that involve coercion, trafficking, abuse, rape, and other crimes. WeChat blogger Lin Gu likened the phrase “Zhang offered the woman shelter” to other modern examples of bad behavior cloaked in euphemism, such as school cafeterias that serve poor-quality food and then gaslight students by “calling a rat a duck,” and landlords who “calculate damages by lantern-light” to extort tenants.

An article from the WeChat account ReSeT, titled “The Evil of ‘Sheltering’: How is That Not Exploiting Women?,” argues that such euphemisms often mask serious criminal activities against vulnerable people such as victims of trafficking or those suffering from mental illness:

A woman suffering from mental illness was "given shelter" for many years and gave birth to children. How on earth is that considered “voluntary"? Given that she was obviously a missing person and a possible trafficking victim, why didn’t the relevant authorities call the police or try to contact her family? We must never tolerate media outlets or government institutions that attempt to downplay criminal activity by mincing words or packaging exploitative behavior as good Samaritanism. The very fact that they are able to sanitize the word "trafficking" by calling it "sheltering" is indicative of how society makes excuses for the exploitation of women and other evil behavior. Seeing these tragedies continue to unfold, we must ask: what kind of society allows women’s suffering to be so easily accepted and forgotten?

[…In the official police notification about the Xiaohuamei case in 2022,] keywords such as "given shelter,” "suffering from mental illness,” and "gave birth to children" featured prominently. That carefully whitewashed notice attempted to cover up the hideous truth of the matter. Not coincidentally, the case of the woman with a master’s degree in Shanxi was made public in a very similar manner. In both cases, the female victims were identified as "mentally ill,” while the perpetrators were portrayed as "good Samaritans,” and suspicions of trafficking and illegal detention were blatantly glossed over.

The official narrative approach to the two cases is shockingly similar, even formulaic: downplaying the crime, labeling the victims, and glorifying the "good intentions" of the perpetrators.

[…] Every time women are ignored and silenced, it is a repudiation of social justice and the rule of law. For the victims who cannot use their own voices to cry out, their pain is buried, leaving them to suffer in silence. If we do not speak up for them, we become accomplices to that injustice. Society’s attitude towards these incidents reflects a lack of basic respect for women and vulnerable individuals. When we allow such incidents to be trivialized or euphemized as "mere domestic disputes,” we become complicit in condoning these and similar violent acts. [Chinese]

A now-censored article from Beijing Qianqian Law Firm, a public-interest legal-aid practice founded by Guo Jianmei, takes a legal approach by examining 671 verdicts from 2014-2020 in cases involving the trafficking of women and children. Punctuated with informative graphs, charts, and maps, the long-form article includes the following statistics on trafficking and the punishment of trafficking offenses under China’s criminal law code:

Abducted and Trafficked Girls and Women

• Although the age range of abducted and trafficked girls and women is broad, nearly half of them are minors.
• Based on information clearly stated in the verdicts, about 10% of the cases involve victims who either have intellectual disabilities or mental health problems.
• Fifty percent of trafficking victims are foreigners, mainly from Southeast Asia.
• Anhui province has the largest influx of trafficking victims, followed by Henan, Yunnan, and Hunan provinces.
• Among the many methods that traffickers use to deceive victims, the most common are promises of marriage introductions or part-time jobs.

• The price paid for trafficked girls and women varies greatly, ranging from a few hundred yuan to several hundred thousand yuan.

  The “Invisible Buyers” of Trafficked Girls and Women

• Sentencing [of buyers] has become more lenient, with the average prison term being just nine months.
• Probation is widely applied and the actual sentencing rate is low.
• Courts apply mitigating circumstances whenever possible and tend to be lenient with buyers, taking into account both statutory and discretionary circumstances.
• Although the law stipulates that those who purchase trafficked women and then commit other offenses against them [such as unlawful imprisonment, physical abuse, or rape] should be punished for multiple crimes, in practice, the proportion of cases that result in punishment for multiple crimes is extremely low. [Chinese]