World
A Viral Video of a Chained Woman in China and the Secret Campaign to Save Her
The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.
But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.
She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.
The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.
Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.
Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.
The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.
And yet, it did.
To find out how, I tried to track what happened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expansive web of intimidation at home and abroad, involving mass surveillance, censorship and detentions — a campaign that continues to this day.
The clampdown shows how rattled the authorities are by a growing movement demanding improvements to the role of women in Chinese society. Though the party says it supports gender equality, under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the government has described motherhood as a patriotic duty, jailed women’s rights activists and censored calls for tougher laws to protect women from mistreatment.
Yet even as the crackdown forced women to hide their anger, it did not extinguish it. In secret, a new generation of activists has emerged, more determined than ever to continue fighting.
Who Is the Chained Woman?
At first sight, Dongji looks like any other village in China’s vast countryside. Two hours from the nearest city, it sits among sprawling wheat and rice fields in Jiangsu Province, half empty, most residents long departed to look for better lives elsewhere.
But when a colleague and I visited recently, one house, with faded maroon double doors, appeared to be guarded by two men. A surveillance camera on a nearby pole pointed directly at the entrance.
This was the street where the chained woman had lived.
Officially, there was little reason that her house should still be under watch, since in the government’s telling, the case had been resolved.
After widespread outrage over the government’s initial statement, in January 2022, officials promised a new investigation. Over the next month, four government offices released statements that at points conflicted with each other — offering different dates for when she was first chained, for example, or alternately suggesting that she had been homeless or gotten lost before arriving in Dongji. Finally, under intense public pressure, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.
According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, an impoverished village in Yunnan Province, in China’s southwest.
As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.
Trafficking women has been a big business in China for decades. A longstanding cultural preference for boys, exacerbated by the one-child policy, created a surplus of tens of millions of men, many of whom could not find wives. Poor, rural men in eastern China began buying women from the country’s even poorer western regions.
Xiaohuamei was sold three times, finally to a man in Dongji — more than 2,000 miles from her hometown — who wanted a wife for his son, Dong Zhimin, the government said.
Over the next 20 years, she gave birth to eight children, even as her mental health visibly deteriorated, the government said, citing interviews with Mr. Dong and villagers. When she first arrived in Dongji, she had been able to take care of herself; by the time she was found, she had trouble communicating.
The government report did not say whether other villagers knew she had been trafficked. But self-styled charity bloggers had been visiting Mr. Dong and presenting him as a doting father since at least 2021. (The woman appeared in some videos, but unchained.)
“My biggest dream is to slowly bring the children up into healthy adults,” Mr. Dong told one blogger, before the video of the shack emerged.
Mr. Dong’s social media posts portray him as a doting father
Privately, though, Mr. Dong had been chaining the children’s mother around the neck and tying her with cloth ropes since 2017, the government said. He also did not take her to the hospital when she was sick.
Censors deleted the bloggers’ videos of the family and of the woman in chains. In April 2023, Mr. Dong was sentenced to prison, along with five others accused of participating in the trafficking.
The official story ended there.
Step 1: Hide the Victim
As we approached the house where the men were sitting, they jumped up and asked who we were. One made a phone call, while another blocked me from taking photos.
Ten more people soon arrived, including police officers, propaganda officials and the village leader, who insisted that the scandal had been overblown. “Everything is very normal, extremely normal,” he said. When we asked where the woman was, officials said they believed that she didn’t want visitors. Then they escorted us to the train station.
The chained woman may be choosing to stay out of the public eye. But the Chinese government often silences victims of crimes or accidents that generate public anger. Relatives of people killed in plane crashes, coronavirus patients and survivors of domestic violence have all been shuffled out of sight, threatened or detained.
Some weeks later, we tried to go back. This time, we visited a hospital where China’s state broadcaster said the woman was sent after the video went viral — her last known whereabouts.
We tracked down Dr. Teng Xiaoting, a physician who had treated her. Dr. Teng said the woman was no longer there, but said she did not know where she had gone.
Other locals we asked had no information either. But several people in neighboring villages said it was common knowledge that many women in the area, including in their own villages, had been bought from southwestern China. Some called it sad; others were matter-of-fact.
Still, it was clear that talking about such trafficking could be risky.
As we got closer to Dongji, a black Volkswagen began tailing us. Then, at least eight villagers surrounded us, calling us race traitors (we are both of Chinese heritage) and at times pushing my colleague. One said that if we had been men, they would have beaten us.
They eventually escorted us back to the main road after we called the police. Along the way, one man said it was in our own interest to be more cautious.
“If you two were taken to the market and sold,” he said, “then what would you do?”
Step 2: Silence Discussion
After the woman’s story emerged in January 2022, the controls were tightest in Dongji. But the government sprang into action across the country to suppress the debate that followed.
Legal scholars observed that the penalty for buying a trafficked woman — three years’ imprisonment — was less than that for selling an endangered bird. Others noted that judges have denied divorce applications from women known to have been abused or trafficked, and that the government has repeatedly ignored calls to criminalize marital rape.
To halt such conversations, the police tracked down people like He Peirong, a veteran human rights activist, who had traveled 200 miles to the area around Dongji to try to look for other trafficked women.
After she returned home, police officers knocked on her door, asking her why she had gone. They visited her roughly 20 times over the next month, forcing her to delete online posts about her trip and threatening to arrest her.
They also named journalists she had been in contact with, to show they were watching her communications. They even took her to nearby Anhui Province on a forced “vacation” — a common tactic used to control dissidents’ movements.
Similar crackdowns were taking place farther away. A lawyer named Lu Tingge, a resident of Hebei Province, about 600 miles from Dongji, said in an interview that a Jiangsu official had traveled to his city, urging him to withdraw a petition he’d submitted for more information about the case (he refused, but said he never received the information).
Bookstores that put up displays recommending feminist reading were forced to remove them. Numerous online articles about the woman were censored; China Digital Times, a censorship tracker, archived at least 100 of them, though there were many more.
The campaign even extended overseas. A woman living abroad said in an interview that the police called her parents in China after she posted photos of herself in chains online.
Ms. He, the veteran activist, realized that the government was more worried about feminism than she had thought. She had been detained previously for other activism, but this monthslong pressure “far surpassed that,” she said.
Step 3: Detain Those Who Persist
To avoid arrest, Ms. He stopped posting about the case. She eventually left China for Thailand.
Those who refused to stop, however, suffered the consequences.
Two other women also traveled to Jiangsu after the video emerged, to visit the chained woman at the hospital. Identifying themselves on social media only by nicknames, Wuyi and Quanmei, they said they were just ordinary women showing solidarity.
“Your sisters are coming,” Wuyi posted.
They were barred from entering the hospital or the village, according to videos on Wuyi’s Weibo. So they drove around town instead, with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.
They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times.
Before long, they were detained by the local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.
Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. She shared a photo of her bruised arm, saying she was shocked that her small actions could elicit such ferocity.
“Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.
About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, the police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She was eventually released on bail and has not spoken publicly since.
The Resistance Goes Into Hiding
After Wuyi’s disappearance, the few voices still speaking out fell silent.
But the activism has not evaporated, only moved underground.
It includes people like Monica, a young woman who asked to be identified only by a first name. We met at her home, where she asked that I not bring my cellphone to avoid surveillance. Soft-spoken but assured, she recounted how police scrutiny forced her to embrace new tactics.
When the chained woman story erupted, she joined an online group of several hundred people that decided to conduct research on the trafficking of women with mental disabilities in China.
Within days, the police tracked down and interrogated participants. At around the same time, anonymous articles appeared online that doxxed some members of the group and labeled them “extreme feminists.” The group disbanded.
But the intimidation only made Monica angrier.
So a few months later, Monica and several others quietly regrouped, using an encrypted messaging platform. Rather than campaign publicly, they tried to impose pressure on the government behind the scenes.
For weeks, they studied hundreds of court cases and news stories about women who had been abused or trafficked. They wrote a 20-page report explaining the chained woman episode and laying out suggestions for reform. In July 2022, they submitted it anonymously to a U.N. committee reviewing China’s record on disability rights.
They later submitted similar reports to two other U.N. committees. A member of one of the committees, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the reports were crucial sources of independent information from China. That person had not heard of the chained woman before.
In May 2023, U.N. officials raised the chained woman’s story during a public meeting with Chinese government representatives. The government said it had imprisoned Mr. Dong and that the woman was being cared for. Still, Monica felt proud — and emboldened: “You feel that you can still do some risky things.”
“Feminism in China really is the most vocal and active movement. It’s also very hard to completely scatter or kill off,” she said. “I think the authorities are right to be worried.”
Others have tried to subtly keep the chained woman’s legacy alive in other ways. An all-female band released a song called “So Who Has My Key?” An artist spent 365 days wearing a chain around her neck. A writer published a thinly disguised retelling of Snow White.
In December, a woman whose family had reported her missing 13 years ago was found living with a man to whom she had borne two children. The authorities claimed the woman had a disability and the man had “taken her in” — the same language officials used in an early report about the chained woman.
Social media users erupted, accusing the government of glossing over trafficking again.
Then the censors stepped in and stifled that discussion, too.
Siyi Zhao contributed research.
World
Iran continues firing missiles, drones at neighboring states, with multiple interceptions reported
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Iran launched a new wave of attacks on Thursday, with explosions reported in the region and Tehran threatening that the U.S. would “bitterly regret” sinking an Iranian warship.
Iran’s strikes on Thursday targeted Israel, American bases and countries in the region. Israel announced multiple incoming missile attacks as air raid sirens blared in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense on Thursday said Iran used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in an attack on Nakhchivan International Airport and other civilian infrastructure. The ministry said the details of the attack and the capabilities of the UAVs were being investigated.
“The Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan strongly condemns the attacks carried out by the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran against civilian infrastructure on the territory of Azerbaijan in the absence of any military necessity. The Islamic Republic of Iran bears the entire responsibility for the incident,” the ministry’s statement read.
Explosions seen and heard in Azerbaijan as Iran launches retaliatory attacks across the Middle East. (East2West)
Iran has not acknowledged targeting Azerbaijan, despite the country’s ministry of defense pointing the finger at Tehran.
Qatar evacuated residents near the U.S. Embassy in Doha on Thursday, with its Ministry of Defense confirming that the country was “subjected to a missile attack” and that its air defense systems were able to intercept it. The ministry urged the public to remain calm and avoid unofficial information.
Abu Dhabi announced that its authorities were responding to an incident involving falling debris in ICAD 2, which is part of the Industrial City of Abu Dhabi. Six people, identified by Abu Dhabi as Pakistani and Nepali nationals, suffered minor to moderate injuries.
A plume of smoke rises over buildings in Doha, Qatar, on March 5, 2026. (Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images)
FORMER TOPGUN PILOT DECLARES IRAN MILITARY ‘OVER WITH’ AMID US AIR SUPERIORITY, BUT WARNS OF ANOTHER DANGER
Iran has carried out retaliatory strikes since the launch of Operation Epic Fury, with the latest wave coming one day after the U.S. sunk an Iranian warship, killing at least 87 Iranian sailors. Sri Lankan navy spokesman Cmdr. Buddhika Sampath said 32 people were rescued from the wreck and were admitted to a hospital.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth defended the move during a news briefing at the Pentagon.
“An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo — Quiet Death. The first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II. Like in that war, back when we were still the War Department, we are fighting to win,” Hegseth said.
Missile interceptions are seen in the sky on March 5, 2026, in Central Israel. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
ISRAEL’S MILITARY RELEASES VIDEO SHOWING OBLITERATION OF IRAN’S MISSILE LAUNCHERS, DEFENSE SYSTEMS
Iranian leaders condemned the attack, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accusing the U.S. Navy of committing “an atrocity at sea.” Meanwhile, Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi Amoli appeared on state television and called for the shedding of Israeli and “Trump’s blood.”
“Fight the oppressive America, his blood is on my shoulders,” he said in a rare call for violence from an ayatollah, one of the highest ranks within the clergy of Shiite Islam.
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The U.S. and Israel launched the war on Saturday with strikes targeting Iran’s leadership, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed. Iran’s missile arsenal and nuclear facilities were also hit.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Related Article
Iran has launched operations targeting Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in neighbouring Iraq as the regional war ignited by the United States and Israel entered its sixth day, with more than 1,000 people killed across the country.
State television, Press TV, reported early on Thursday that Tehran was striking “anti-Iran separatist forces”, referring to Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups believed to be based in mountainous, hard-to-reach areas near the Iran-Iraq border.
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Iranian missiles hit Sulaimaniyah city in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, according to local reports.
“We targeted the headquarters of Kurdish groups opposed to the revolution in Iraqi Kurdistan with three missiles,” Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported on Thursday, quoting a military statement. The Iranian military said earlier on Tuesday it used “30 drones” on Kurdish positions.
The attack comes just days after multiple publications reported that US President Donald Trump was in active talks with Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups, and that Washington hopes to use them to spur a popular uprising.
Various Iranian Kurdish groups, which share close ties with Iraqi Kurds, have long opposed Tehran from their bases in northern Iraq and along the Iraq-Iran border. These groups reportedly have thousands of fighters between them.
Here’s what we know so far:
Why are Kurdish groups cooperating with the US?
US officials said the aim is to stretch Iranian forces and take out the remains of the military-dominated Iranian government, according to reporting by CNN.
There is also speculation that the groups could be supported to take control of northern Iran to create a ground buffer for Israeli forces, possibly streaming in from Iraq.
US-Israeli bombings have heavily targeted areas along the Iraq-Iran border since the start of the war on Saturday, possibly to degrade Iranian defences and allow Kurdish opposition groups to cross fully into Iran, according to a briefing by US-based think tank, the Soufan Center.
The US has not ruled out sending ground forces, although analysts told Al Jazeera Iran’s rugged territory would make that very difficult.
If the US does support these groups against Tehran, it would mean that Washington is treating them like armed “players on a board,” Winthrop Rodgers, associate fellow at the UK think tank, Chatham House, told Al Jazeera.
Which Kurdish groups are there?
Neither the US nor Kurdish groups had confirmed any agreements by Thursday.
However, it is known that Trump has spoken to the leaders of two Kurdish groups in Iraq: Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Bafel Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), according to US publication, Axios. Talabani confirmed the call on Wednesday.
Trump also spoke to Mustafa Hijri, head of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI), on Tuesday, CNN reported, quoting a Kurdish official.
Meanwhile, Iranian Kurdish rebel groups, which have thousands of fighters along the Iraq-Iran border, formed the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (CPFIK) alliance one week before the war broke out.
The group issued statements at the start of the conflict, signalling imminent intervention and urging Iranian military members to defect. According to Israel’s I24News, thousands of its fighters were in Iran by Wednesday.
Here are the different groups:
Kurdistan Democratic Party: The ruling party in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The party controls the capital city of Erbil as well as Duhok. It has historical ties with Iranian Kurdish groups.
However, the KRG is not eager to be seen as supporting attacks on Iran, even as Iranian drones have hit US assets in Erbil. On Wednesday, Kurdistan region President Nechirvan Barzani spoke with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and told him his region “will not be part of conflicts” targeting Tehran.
In 2023, the two countries signed a security deal that saw Iraq promise to disarm and relocate Iranian opposition groups on its territory, although it appears many groups are still based there, reflecting the limited influence the government wields over them.
Iraqi Kurds, who have close ties with both the US and Iran, are in a “difficult position”, said Rodgers.
“They are under tremendous pressure from a wide range of forces, including (pro-Iran) Iraqi militias. They will try to stay out of the conflict as much as they can, but that will likely prove impossible,” he said.
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK): The PUK is the official opposition in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region and also nationally relevant as Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid is a member. In a statement on Sunday, Rashid urged dialogue and an end to the war. Iraq declared three days of mourning following the killing of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes on Tehran on Saturday.
Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (CPFIK): Formed on February 22, 2026, the group includes six Iranian Kurdish opposition groups seeking an independent state.
Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) – Based in the Kurdistan region, the group has about 1,200 members and is proscribed as a “terror” group by Iran.
Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) – Also based in Kurdistan, it has an estimated 1,000 members.
Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) – A close ally of the Turkish opposition armed group, Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), PJAK is proscribed as a “terror” group by Ankara. PJAK’s armed wing, the Eastern Kurdistan Units (YRK), is believed to have between 1,000 and 3,000 members, many of them women. It is based in the rugged Qandil Mountains near the Iran-Iraq border and in the semiautonomous Kurdistan region. It has launched numerous attacks on Iranian forces in the past decade. A recent Iranian strike reportedly killed one fighter.
Organisation of Iranian Kurdistan Struggle (Khabat) – It has an unknown number of fighters.
Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan – Based in Iraq’s KRG, it has an unknown number of fighters.
Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KPIK) – Also headquartered in the Kurdistan region, it has an estimated 1,000 fighters in 2017.
What is the history of US involvement with Kurdish resistance groups in the Middle East?
Kurds are an ethnic minority spread across the Middle East with a shared language and culture. They do not have a state of their own and have historically been marginalised across countries – mainly Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkiye.
For decades, several armed Kurdish groups have sought self-governance in Turkiye, Syria and Iran.
In Iraq, Kurdish nationalist groups gained some success during the 1991 Gulf War by working with the US, which helped establish the self-governing Kurdistan region of Iraq. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also trained and armed its army, known as the Peshmerga, after the US invaded Iraq in 2003. In 2005, the semiautonomous region was officially recognised in Iraq’s constitution.
Since 2017, Washington has also armed and trained the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Syrian Kurdish militia that Turkiye lists as a “terror” group because of its links with the proscribed PKK. The group, which successfully resisted ISIL (ISIS), now forms the main component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). It controlled Raqqa and other ISIL strongholds.
However, when it began military clashes with Syrian forces under the President Ahmed al-Sharaa-led government last August, Washington turned away from the group and backed Damascus instead. In January this year, the SDF signed an agreement with the Syrian government to integrate into the government forces. In return, the Syrian government recognised Kurdish rights.
In Turkiye, meanwhile, the PKK, whose presence in northern Iraq has long been a source of tension with Ankara, declared a ceasefire in March 2025, after a call from its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, to disarm.
How does Kurdish resistance in Iran compare with others?
Iranian Kurds opposed the Iranian government even before the formation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Rodgers said, and Tehran’s current weakness provides an opportunity for them to advance their political aims in the country.
However, the new coalition of multiple diverse groups is unprecedented, the analyst added, and their internal dynamics will be a key decisive factor in what role Kurdish groups will play in this war.
“Support from the US is helpful, especially in terms of targeting security forces’ infrastructure with air strikes, but they will likely be cautious about relying too much on Washington, especially from an administration as capricious and disorganised as Trump’s,” Rodgers said, noting how Washington abandoned the Kurds in Syria.
Unlike the split Iranian movements, Iraqi Kurds have long united to form a devolved government enshrined in the Iraqi constitution, built an advanced economy, and secured substantive relations with a wide range of foreign countries. That’s something Kurdish groups will also be hoping to establish in a democratic Iran, he said.
“I think it is unlikely that the Trump administration has made any commitments to the Iranian Kurds about supporting their political goals,” Rodgers said, adding that the US’s plan “does not look fully thought through at all”.
World
Netflix, After Walking Away From Warner Bros. Deal, Will ‘Move Forward’ With ‘$2.8 Billion in Our Pocket That We Didn’t Have a Few Weeks Ago,’ CFO Says
Netflix is no longer contemplating a future that includes Warner Bros., having ceded the heated M&A battle to Paramount Skydance. Netflix CFO Spence Neumann, speaking Wednesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, reiterated the company’s position that it bailed out of the bidding for Warner Bros. because Paramount increased its offer price.
“The short answer is, it was all about price,” Neumann said. “We said all along this opportunity was a nice-to-have at the right price, not a must-have at any price,” he added, echoing Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos’ previous statement.
Netflix, when it struck the deal to buy WB’s studios and streaming business in December, was playing “offense, not defense,” Neumann said. According to the CFO, Netflix has a “unique view” into how to value the WBD assets. “We went into it with a point of view on price,” he said. “When it became clear it didn’t make sense for us financially anymore,” the company bowed out.
“Now we move forward, and we move forward with $2.8 billion in our pocket that we didn’t have a few weeks ago,” said Neumann, referring to the breakup fee it received from Paramount Skydance.
On Feb. 26, Netflix abandoned its deal to buy Warner Bros.’s studios and streaming business after David Ellison’s Paramount upped its hostile bid for WBD in its entirety to $31/share — leaving Paramount the winner of a debt-fueled takeover of the media conglomerate. Paramount Skydance paid Netflix the $2.8 billion breakup fee once Warner Bros. Discovery terminated its agreement with Netflix in favor of Paramount’s “superior” offer.
Asked if the Warner Bros. bidding war changed Netflix’s M&A strategy, Neumann replied, “I know it sounds boring, but it’s really no change.” The company will “continue to stay focused on what are those opportunities” to accelerate the growth of the business, he said.
Neumann said Netflix, by the end of the bidding process for Warner Bros., had “a stronger belief” that “we would have been great stewards” for those assets. And, he insisted, Netflix had high confidence that it had a “clear path” to regulatory approval.
“At the end of the day, we were going to be disciplined” on the price it was willing to pay for Warner Bros., Neumann said.
In 2026, Netflix plans to boost its total cash content spending to around $20 billion, up 10% from last year. It is forecasting revenue of $50.7 billion-$51.7 billion, which would be an increase of 12%-14% year over year, and projects hitting 31.5% operating margin in 2026. The streaming heavyweight reported more than 325 million subscribers worldwide as of the end of 2025, up from 301.2 million a year prior.
The expected 10% increase in Netflix’s content spending this year is in line with its expected revenue growth, Neumann said. “It’s really no change in our approach,” he said. “We really want to be that starting point and destination for professionally produced content for creators around the world.”
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