In Jan 27, 2022, a TikTok video of a Chinese mother of eight locked up in a worn-out village shed with a chain
around her neck went viral and sparked widespread outrage.
While authorities released a series of conflicting reports and kept official media silent, a blow of ANGRY WIND swept through the social media.
The First Investigation Report
After the preliminary investigation verification, the
mother got married with Dong in August 1998, and there is no human trafficking.
Family members and neighbors reported that Yang often beat children and elderly people for no reason.
According to the diagnosis of medical institutions, Yang is suffering from mental illness. At present, she
has been treated and her family has been further assisted to ensure a warm Spring Festival. The details are
under further investigation and verification.
Fengxian County Publicity Department
Jan 28, 2022
@Xiaoshe Sun
53K followers
Official reports from Fengxian has already overdrawn
the credibility of local government. Interest groups are worried that when the “radish” is pull up by public
opinions, the “mud” of sloth administration, concealing and lying, together with the blood and tears of
local women and children will be revealed. We need a higher-level investigation team to overthrow the local interest network from the outside and bring fair back.
9:15 · Jan 31, 2022
813
13027
141
“
The investigation progress of this incident is largely driven by the public opinions on the
Internet. It proved that Internet public opinion has a great amount of positive energy and has
become an indispensable part of the driving force for China’s governance progress.
@
Xijin Hu, former chief editor of Global Times
When wind blows,
it blows away lies,
only the truth stands.
When wind blows,
it blows away injustice,
only peace remains.
Let the wind blow.
I collected data of 4, 725 posts about this incident on Weibo.
Later, the form of samara seeds will be used to
visualize these posts, to see what voices
were made during this incident.
This visual metaphor is selected due to its ability to spread and take root as posts on social
media, and its representation of freedom.
Each seed glyph encodes 6 attributes of post data.
Click to see detailed information of encoding rules.
And we need wisps of wind to carry these seeds.
I used data of 142 hashtags of this incident on Weibo to visualize the overview of public voices.
Hashtags and posts were both categorized into 8 groups according to which official report they related to. Then I used "windlines" to represent these 8 groups and encode hashtag data.
Click each wisp of wind to explore more. Click to see detailed information of encoding rules.
Now let's move closer, to see seeds carried in these wisps of wind...
Each seed represents a popular Weibo post with the keyword “丰县(Fengxian)” from Jan 28, 2022 to Feb 28, 2022.
Followers
Seed head size shows no. of
followers of the poster.
≤10K
10K-1M
>1M
Retweets
Seed stem length represents the
no. of retweets.
≤500
>500:
5000
Comments
Wing pattern shows the no. of comments.
(hover on the seed head to see patterns)
≤10
10-100
>100
Account Type
The dot(s) near the seed head indicates Weibo
account type of the poster.
Individual Lv.1
Individual Lv.2
Individual Lv.3
Enterprise Account
Likes
Seed wing width represents the
no. of likes.
≤5000
>5000:
5000
Sentiment
Seed head color represents the
sentiment of the post text. (hover to see the animation)
negative
positive
Hashtag Group ·
1
This hashtag group contains hashtags related to investigation report 1 (the first announcement of Fengxian)
Posts are categorized into 8 groups by the similarity of their hashtags.
And the ninth group on the right is for posts without hashtags.
All the posts from each group are presented in a vertical timeline, the more posts clustered at some time means more discussion under this hashtag topic at the moment.
Click the hashtag icon to explore details.
Investigation reports
While scrolling the timeline, the report that was released by authorities at that time shows up on the left and next to the posts.
Click the wind vane icon to see details.
Stream graph
The stream graph on the right offers a global view of all hashtag groups throughout 32 days in terms of “no. of hot posts”, “no. of view”, “no. of discussion” and “no. of original posters”
All the investigation reports are represented as circles near the stream graph. Click these circles to directly scroll to corresponding investigation report.
Samara seeds
Each seed represents a popular Weibo post with the keyword “丰县(Fengxian)” from Jan 28, 2022 to Feb 28, 2022.
Followers
Seed head size shows no. of
followers of the poster.
≤10K
10K-1M
>1M
Retweets
Seed stem length represents the
no. of retweets.
≤500
>500:
500
Comments
Wing pattern shows the no. of comments.
(hover on the seed head to see patterns)
≤10
10-100
>100
Account Type
The dot(s) near the seed head indicates Weibo
account type of the poster.
Individual Lv.1
Individual Lv.2
Individual Lv.3
Enterprise Account
Likes
Seed wing width represents the
no. of likes.
≤5000
>5000:
5000
Sentiment
Seed head color represents the
sentiment of the post text. (hover to see the animation)
negative
positive
1 / 2
WE NEED MORE WIND
The case of this mother of 8 children is not alone. After this TikTok video went viral, another woman in Fengxian was found also locked up, crawling on the ground. Netizens also dug up from news reports that there were many women bodies found in rivers of Fengxian.
And it’s not just in China, human trafficking is an international problem. An estimated 40.3 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery(ILO, 2017). We absolutely need much more awareness, voices and in turn, actions, towards human trafficking.
This visualization reveals the distribution of human trafficking cases globally. Larger wind glyph indicates more human trafficking cases, thus needing more public voices and actions.
Hover on wind glyphs and change filter options below to explore more.
The Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the darkest age of Modern China, when millions of people suffered from
political persecution
Post-truth is a time when "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal
belief" (by Oxford dictionaries)
Public Opinion and State Governance Complement Each Other
"We don't have enough to eat". My grandfather
spent 10 years in jail simply because he spoke out true condition of their lives.
Today no wonder we live in a society that allows more freedom of speech. Yet we still see
authorities censor politically sensitive topics heavily by deleting posts and accounts, banning articles,
controlling trendings, etc.
Instead of being afraid of or turning a deaf ear to public voices, the government should
embrace them, and make positive changes. Public voice CAN make a difference, it's not just about saving victims of human trafficking, it's about eliminating social injustice and prejudice.
Think Twice of What
You Say
Powerful as public voice is, we should remind ourselves not to fall into the trap of post-truth.
And let our rationality and conscience guide us, rather than irrational emotion and bias.
DATA & METHODS
This visualization work mainly utilized data of 4,725 posts, 142 hashtags, and over 97,750 victims of human trafficking.
I collected popular posts with the keyword "丰县(fengxian)" and hashtags with over 10k views on Weibo by Python crawler script. You can view the raw data here on my Github page. For posts, I
used Baidu open AI platform to predict their text sentiment. Posts and hashtags were both grouped into 8 classes based on which official report they related to.
to see detailed information of encoding rules.
Hashtag groups
Investigation reports
Stream graph
