“If you don’t get married, your boyfriend beats you. If you are married, your husband beats you. If you are divorced, your ex-husband beats you and then kills you. What is happening in this world?”
The comment has more than 280 million views on Weibo, the Chinese brother of Twitter. A user wrote it by sharing the hashtag that referred to one of the most commented topics on the platform: the eight stabs with which a man murdered his wife in the central province of Henan. The victim’s last name was Yang, she was 24 years old and had two small children.
The fury of the comments that flooded Weibo after the event also jumped to the streets of the neighborhood where Yang lived. Several videos that circulated online showed dozens of people protesting the murder and standing up to the riot police, unaccustomed to these marches of angry neighbors, who tried to break up the demonstration.
This event coincided with the funeral in Hong Kong of the millionaire Hong Kong model Abby Choi, dismembered by her ex-husband’s family at the beginning of the year. His legs were found in a freezer and his head in a steel pot. Police never found the torso and arms. Investigators said Choi was embroiled in a financial dispute with the family of her ex-husband over a luxury property in Kadoori Hill, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the former British colony.
The murders of Yang and Choi, two women from opposite ends of the social spectrum, sparked some debates in the Asian giant about violence against women. In a social gathering on one of the channels of the state broadcaster CCTV, a psychologist recalled that, despite the fact that in China there has been a law against gender violence since 2016, which was also reinforced in October last year, it continues to be an issue taboo for a large part of society, especially within families in the most rural areas.