Last week, a Chinese PhD student at University College London was found guilty by a British court of raping ten women, and detectives suspect there may be dozens more victims. The incident highlights the ongoing barriers to accessing justice for women in China and the U.K., as well as the continued censorship of reports about sexual violence on Chinese social media. Pan Pylas from the AP provided more information on the conviction of “one of the worst sex offenders in U.K. history”:
Zhenhao Zou, 28, was convicted of the attacks between 2019 and 2023 following a monthlong trial at the Inner London Crown Court. He was convicted of 11 counts of rape, with two of the offenses relating to one victim.
After more than 19 hours of deliberations, jurors concluded Zou raped three of the women in London and seven in China.
Police have only been able to identify two of the victims and said after the verdict that more than 50 other women may have fallen victim to Zou, which would make him one of the worst sex offenders in U.K. history.
Using hidden or handheld cameras to record the attacks, Zou filmed nine of the attacks as “souvenirs” and often kept a trophy box of women’s belongings.
[…] Zou, who also used the name Pakho online, befriended fellow students of Chinese heritage on WeChat and dating apps, before inviting them for drinks and drugging them at his apartments in London or an unknown location in China. [Source]
The London Metropolitan Police stated that after a woman came forward to report Zou, authorities searched his London flat and found evidence of the crimes on “hundreds of videos stored on his devices.” While British police said that China’s Ministry of Public Security “helped to facilitate one of the brave victim-survivors giving evidence against Zou,” Mary O’Connor and Kris Cheng at the Daily Mail reported that no charges have been brought in China, even though the court determined Zou had raped seven women there. O’Connor and Cheng also wrote that Zou’s father is a wealthy CCP member and director of a state-owned business who owns several homes.
A WeChat public account posted an article about Zuo’s conviction just before International Women’s Day, but the article was later censored. On Weibo, users also noted that the news was censored on Xiaohongshu and elsewhere on Weibo itself. (By contrast, as another WeChat article highlighted last week, platforms such as Tieba and Weibo appear relatively tolerant of content idolizing Dong Zhimin, the man who was sentenced to nine years in prison for torturing and imprisoning the shackled woman known as Xiaohuamei.) One commenter lamented: “I still don’t get how this kind of TV news involved sensitive content. After reading the comments, it looks like his family put out the big bucks to keep it out. […] But I like the reporting style in the U.K. The criminal is shown in HD on the big screen, while the victims’ information is extremely protected. Let’s hope they do the same in China one day.”
Censorship surrounding Zou’s conviction echoed the case of Liu Qiangdong, the billionaire founder of JD.com who was accused by Liu Jingyao of raping her when she was a college student in the U.S. in 2018. The civil trial in the American court system ended in 2022 with a settlement, which many viewed as a major step forward in the history of Chinese #MeToo cases. Liu Jingyao’s supporters reported that many of her Chinese social media accounts and posts linked to her case were deleted by censors, while JD.com mounted powerful PR campaigns against her.
Toxic environments both on- and offline underscore the lack of safety for Chinese women in China and the U.K. Some have come together in response, such as the London-based Chinese feminist activist group with the Instagram handle @weareallchainedwomen, which organized a special exhibition for International Women’s Day aimed at fostering transnational solidarity in the face of patriarchal violence. Regarding Zuo’s sexual crimes, Aamna Mohdin from The Guardian also described how societal neglect has made it harder for Chinese victims to find justice in the U.K. and elsewhere:
“There is a huge enormous cost to study as a student from China, it’s such an investment. Lots of Chinese families and Asian families put so much into it, so if that is tainted, I can imagine that there’s a lot of shame, not just for yourself but to your wider family and community.”
Sarah Yeh, the chair of SEEAWA, said: “Rape is stigmatised in all east and south-east Asian cultures. It’s often a case of victim-blaming, as it is in the wider UK community as well. Often women don’t really know their rights, especially if they’re coming to a foreign country. So it’s about building awareness and a greater understanding that there is help out there that they can tap into.”
[…] Yeh described this as a wider problem of societal neglect. “I understand that one of the women reported to the police and she didn’t have a good experience because the translator wasn’t good so they brushed off her initial complaint,” she said. “It’s stuff like this we really need to work on at a societal level to make sure that people are included, especially people that are coming into our country that haven’t got the experience and culture and understanding of how our legal system works or what protective systems there are in place for us.” [Source]