To the Chinese public, the implosion of Rep. Todd Akin feels intellectually and politically remote—not only because the concept of “legitimate rape” has thwarted any effort to produce a comprehensible translation. (Very often, it has been translated as “lawful rape,” which did little to improve Akin’s image across the Pacific.) More to the point, China has been focussed on its own debate about rape, justice, and the proper role of government.
In October, 2006, an eleven-year-old girl from Yongzhou city in Hunan province was kidnapped. She was beaten, gang-raped, and sold to a brothel as a prostitute. In less than three months, the girl “performed over one hundred sexual acts before being rescued,” according to the state news service. Seven men were eventually convicted for participating in or arranging the rapes. But the child’s mother, Tang Hui, believed that the local government manufactured evidence to reduce their sentences—the brothel’s owner was related to a police official—and she campaigned for heavier penalties.
For years she continued to protest, even after a court this June handed down death sentences for two of the defendants, life sentences for four others, and a fifteen-year term for another. She continued to call for the death penalty for all seven, and by this summer the local government had had enough: it sentenced Tang Hui, without a trial, to a “re-education through labor” camp. Her crime: “disturbing social order and exerting a negative impact on society,” because, as one state paper put it, she “blocked cars and the entrances of the buildings and shouted out loud” on seven occasions. She was to serve eighteen months.
The story might have ended there. But in this case, China erupted. Online, hundreds of thousands of people denounced the local government’s handling of the case. Normally reliable government supporters, such as the Global Times, were concerned:
Even the People’s Daily—not usually quick to side with citizens who think they know more than the state, saw the case as a statement on the nation’s political health. “A country’s greatness cannot be solely supported by GDP and Olympic gold medals, but should encompass people’s rights and dignity, social fairness and justice.”
The pressure was too much. On August 10th, after less than two weeks in custody, Tang Hui was released from the labor camp. (China Digital Times has the best collection of news on the subject.) The official reason: her daughter, who is seventeen now, is still a minor and needs her mother to care for her. It would have been too much to expect the government to acknowledge the role of public pressure in this case. In Chinese political terms, the case extends a trend in which citizens have used the Web to pressure the government into action. Earlier this summer, the government fired two officials and punished others for their role in abducting Feng Jianmei, a twenty-three-year-old expectant mother, forcing her into a van with a pillowcase over her head, and bundling her into a hospital in order to abort her seven-month-old fetus—in order to adhere with the one-child policy.
Feng Jianmei’s case became known worldwide and found its way into pro-life arguments. As reported by the National Right to Life News, Rep. Chris Smith, of New Jersey, invoked Feng Jianmei’s case as an example of a mother with “absolutely no right to protect her unborn baby from state sponsored violence.”
If there has ever been a population with a case to make against abortion, it should be China. But over here, the Feng Jianmei case had virtually nothing do with the abortion debate, as it is conducted in America. It was seen as an example of how the Chinese government has fallen out of step with its population, by seeking to interfere in the rightful liberties of an individual, and by trying to legislate what cannot be legislated. When the Chinese public erupted again, a couple of months later, around the case of Tang Hui, it was for similar reasons: people were standing up for an individual’s right to defend herself from political authorities who thought they knew better.
Todd Akin took to the Missouri airwaves to explain that he would legislate with the knowledge, as Maureen Dowd put it, “that women have the superpower to repel rape sperm.” But, for all the differences between Missouri and Hunan, the debates about rape and abortion on each side of the Pacific are centered on people willing to challenge politicians about the limits of public and private, and what they expect and reject from the state. In this way, both are political, because they inspire political reactions. They also remind people how vital it is to have an official, whether a provincial police chief or a congressman from Missouri, who is, as the Global Times put it, a public servant of the “highest caliber.”
Photograph by Jeff Roberson/AP Photo.
