An outpouring of online anger at a video of a mother of eight children locked up in a hut with a chain around her neck forced officials in Xuzhou in eastern China’s Jiangsu province to intervene to free the woman. The video on the Chinese platform Douyin went viral and sparked debate among shocked netizens about governance and women’s rights in rural China. Viewers questioned how the woman was able to give birth to eight children under the country’s strict family planning controls. The woman was sent to a hospital and her children were placed in state care, said local authorities, who opened an investigation of her husband.
