China: Violence Against Women and Girls
A chained woman in rural Jiangsu triggered a national reckoning in 2022. A restaurant attack in Tangshan did the same months later. Both conversations were censored within days.
CN
RYB’s place in this picture
RYB does not run shelters, investigate trafficking cases, or draft legislation. That work belongs to China’s All-China Women’s Federation, independent researchers, and international bodies like UN Women and UNODC. RYB’s role is to hold the picture together: to place China’s suffrage history, its Gender Gap standing, and its violence data on one connected map. This page sits alongside Culture Women’s Day China and Gender Gap China, which briefly flagged China’s domestic violence rate and sex ratio imbalance, now expanded into full detail.
China is a vast country, and its problems vary sharply by region. This page treats that variation as central, not a footnote.
VAWG in China: The Scale, in Current Numbers
Key figures
45.8%
of surveyed residents reported experiencing intimate partner violence, per a 2022 nationwide academic study across 148 cities, far above official government figures
5,596
domestic violence protection orders were issued by Chinese courts in 2024, up from just 680 in 2016, the law’s first year
21,000
women and girls from Myanmar alone were sold into forced marriages in China between 2013 and 2017, researchers estimate
30 million
more men than women live in China as of 2024, a legacy of the one-child policy and a long-standing preference for sons
These four numbers trace four different fronts of the same problem: violence inside the home, a legal system still catching up to its own data, a cross-border trade in trafficked brides, and a demographic imbalance now shaping national policy far beyond gender statistics alone.
National Legal Framework: What China Has Written Into Law
China’s legal response to gender-based violence built up gradually, often years behind the international norms it now formally recognises.
- 2015. China passed its first Anti-Domestic Violence Law, defining domestic violence in Article 2 as physical, psychological, or other harm between family members, through beatings, restraints, or recurrent verbal abuse. The law took effect on March 1, 2016.
- 2016. The Status Quo of Domestic Violence survey recorded a 30% lifetime prevalence rate among married women, up from 25% in the Third Survey on Social Status of Women in 2010.
- 2021. A new Civil Code took effect, adding a clearer definition of sexual harassment and making employers potentially liable for assault occurring in the workplace, for the first time extending protection explicitly to men as well as women.
- 2021. The Fourth Survey on Social Status of Women dropped the comparable domestic violence question entirely, leaving a data gap researchers still cite today.
- 2022. The chained woman case in Xuzhou triggered a nationwide reckoning over trafficking enforcement, discussed in full below.
- 2024. Chinese courts issued 5,596 domestic violence protection orders, more than eight times the 680 issued in the law’s first year, though researchers caution this reflects rising reporting more than rising violence.
Two patterns repeat across this timeline. First, protective law consistently arrives after public outrage, not ahead of it. Second, official data collection has, if anything, gotten thinner over time, not richer.
Domestic Violence: A Widening Gap Between Old and New Data
Official figures and independent research increasingly disagree, and the size of that gap is itself a story.
Government surveys reported a 25% lifetime domestic violence rate for married women in 2010, rising to 30% in 2016. The most recent government survey, in 2021, dropped the comparable question. Meanwhile, a 2022 academic study of 31,449 residents across 148 Chinese cities used a broader, more detailed measurement approach. It found an overall intimate partner violence prevalence of 45.8%, split into psychological violence (44.5%), physical violence (21.65%), and sexual violence (18.96%).
That gap likely reflects methodology as much as changing reality. Broader survey questions capture forms of abuse older government surveys never asked about. Even so, the direction is instructive: independent research consistently finds more violence than official statistics report, not less.
Domestic violence in China also concentrates unevenly. Roughly 40% of reported cases occur in rural regions, where poverty, isolation, and weaker access to courts compound the risk. OECD estimates from 2023 put China’s broader intimate partner violence rate, for women aged 15 to 49 who have ever been in a relationship, at 19%, below several countries this site profiles, though comparisons across differing survey methods deserve real caution.
Bride Trafficking and China’s Sex Ratio Problem
Few cases exposed China’s trafficking problem as starkly as one video from a small village in Jiangsu province.
What happened in Xuzhou. In January 2022, a video went viral showing a woman, later identified as Xiao Huamei, chained by the neck in a doorless shed in Feng County, Xuzhou. She was the mother of eight children. Local officials first denied any trafficking had occurred, claiming she was mentally ill and needed restraint. Public fury spread rapidly on Chinese social media, in what commentators called a rare moment of collective, cross-class outrage. Authorities eventually confirmed she had been trafficked and sold multiple times. Her husband was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Why this keeps happening. China’s one-child policy, combined with a long-standing cultural preference for sons, left the country with roughly 30 million more men than women by 2024. That imbalance concentrates hardest in poor, rural, inland provinces, where many men cannot find wives locally. Traffickers meet that demand by bringing women from Myanmar, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, and China’s own southwestern border regions, often deceived by promises of paid work or marriage. Researchers estimate that 21,000 women and girls from Myanmar’s Kachin and northern Shan states alone were sold into forced marriages in China between 2013 and 2017, with roughly 18,300 forced to bear children.
The response since 2022. China’s government pledged a crackdown following the Xuzhou case, and police have made mass arrests, including over 1,300 people detained in a single 2019 sweep predating the scandal. Independent researchers, including Human Rights Watch, argue that enforcement remains inconsistent: authorities that prize social stability have historically shown limited urgency in confronting a problem tied to millions of unmarried men.
A Country of Many Regions, Many Different Problems
China’s sheer size means its violence patterns cannot be told as one national story. Three separate strands of research make that clear.
Domestic violence clusters unevenly. The 2022 148-city study found a “high-high” clustering of intimate partner violence in Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces, both scoring above the national average across all three violence categories measured. By contrast, Jilin, Hebei, and Ningxia showed a “high-low” pattern, suggesting more localised or moderate rates. Shanghai, despite its wealth and development, consistently reported higher rates than the national average across every category tested.
Homicide research tells a related story. A separate academic study of 11,310 Chinese court judgments for intentional homicide, from 2017 to 2019, examined how gender inequality at the provincial level relates to female-victim intimate partner homicide. Findings varied significantly by province, reflecting real differences in local gender norms and enforcement, rather than a single uniform national pattern.
“Left-behind women” face a risk profile all their own. Over 50 million rural Chinese women live apart from husbands, who have migrated to cities for work, often for months at a time. A regional study across five provincial areas in Northwest China found depression in 35.7% of these women and anxiety in 37.6%, well above rural averages. Researchers also link the arrangement to a distinct pattern of harm: domestic violence from extended family during a husband’s absence, and sexual harassment from other men in the community once a woman is seen as unprotected. This is a rural, migration-driven problem, concentrated in labour-exporting provinces like Anhui and Sichuan, and largely invisible in the cities, where those same husbands work.
Public Reckoning, Then a Narrowed Space
China’s #MeToo movement moved in a consistent pattern: a viral case, a wave of public anger, then swift narrowing of the conversation.
The Tangshan attack. In June 2022, a video showed several men brutally beating four women at a restaurant after one woman rejected an unwanted advance. The footage drew hundreds of millions of views within a day. Police were criticised for inaction until public pressure forced arrests; all nine suspects were detained within 48 hours. State media and censors then reframed the story from gender violence toward organised crime, and Weibo suspended over 1,000 accounts, including some simply discussing the attack’s gendered nature.
The Xianzi case. Zhou Xiaoxuan, known as Xianzi, accused CCTV host Zhu Jun of sexual harassment in 2018, becoming the face of China’s #MeToo movement. Her case reached court in 2021 and was dismissed for insufficient evidence; her appeal failed in 2022. Her Weibo account, with over 300,000 followers, was suspended during the proceedings, along with accounts of supporters who publicly backed her.
A repeating pattern. Commentators note the same sequence recurs across cases: a viral moment prompts feminist framing online, officials and state media reframe it as an isolated or non-gendered incident, and platforms suspend accounts discussing the gender angle specifically. The 2021 Civil Code’s sexual harassment provisions represent real legal progress, even as public discussion of individual cases remains tightly constrained.
Looking Forward
Watch three things on this page over the next year. First, whether China’s next Survey on Social Status of Women restores a comparable domestic violence question, closing the data gap the 2021 edition opened. Second, whether enforcement against cross-border bride trafficking meaningfully increases, now that the Xuzhou case forced the issue into open political view. Third, whether the space for discussing gender-based violence online widens or narrows further, as China’s demographic pressures push the government to encourage marriage and childbirth even as feminist organising remains constrained.
The throughline across all three: China generates real, often rigorous, data on violence against women, from provincial GIS studies to court-record analysis. Whether that research can translate into open public debate, and consistent enforcement, remains the open question this page will keep tracking.
Sources
- Frontiers in Public Health, “Trends of domestic violence against women in China: an age-period-cohort analysis” — frontiersin.org
- PMC / NCBI, “Study on the current situation and spatial distribution of intimate partner violence among Chinese residents” — ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Heinrich Böll Stiftung, “When Masculinity Hurts: Domestic Violence in China” — boell.de
- Taylor & Francis Online, “The Relationship Between Gender Inequality and Female-Victim Intimate Partner Homicide in China” — tandfonline.com
- Human Rights Watch, “Chained Woman Has Become the Face of Bride Trafficking in China” — hrw.org
- Migration Policy Institute, “China’s Demand for Brides Draws Women from Southeast Asia” — migrationpolicy.org
- VICE, “Chained Mother of 8 Exposes Horrors of Human Trafficking in China” — vice.com
- CNN, “Tangshan attack: Graphic video of group attack on women shakes China to the core” — cnn.com
- CNN, “China’s leading #MeToo figure loses appeal in sexual harassment case” — cnn.com
- PMC / NCBI, “Psychological well-being of rural left-behind women in Northwest China” — ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- PMC / NCBI, “Associations of Violence Against Women With Comorbid Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Among Left-Behind Women in Rural China” — ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- UN Women / UNODC, “Femicides in 2024: Global estimates” — unwomen.org
- Wikipedia, “MeToo movement in China” — en.wikipedia.org
This page is part of RYB’s China country data series. See also: Culture Women’s Day China · Gender Gap China · Women, Culture and Peace Framework