Officials in the southern Chinese city of Jiangyou were surprised by the size and intensity of protests after a video of a 14-year-old girl being violently assaulted by school bullies went viral.
The Chinese police reacted as they usually do, by violently assaulting the concerned parents with batons and cattle prods.
The latest in a series of school horrors from China is a series of videos that show a trio of female bullies slapping, punching, and kicking another girl. The videos were evidently made by the perpetrators in late July to document their humiliation of the victim. In one of the video clips, the victim says she was beaten with a stick.
The videos were filmed in an empty building where the trio of bullies took their victim to humiliate her. The victim ends up on her knees begging for mercy while her tormentors rain blows upon her.
Officials from the Chinese Communist regime seemed surprised by how quickly the videos went viral — and how huge the response was from local parents. Naturally, Communist officials tried to address the problem by scrubbing the videos from websites and social media, but they had spread too quickly to too many foreign websites for censors to completely erase them. Jiangyou briefly became a top trending topic on Weibo, China’s version of X, before censors deleted it.
One reason Jiangyou parents were so angry was that the bullies received extremely light punishment for their sadistic acts. Two of the teen perpetrators were sent to “specialized schools for corrective education” and given 15 days in detention. The third was let off with a warning, as were other teens who gathered to watch the beating.
In one of the shocking videos, one of the bullies boasted about getting arrested and released several times, without ever facing punishment.
Another reason the incident became a sensation was that the victim had been tormented for quite some time and her mother, who is reportedly deaf, pleaded unsuccessfully with school officials for help. When protests over the incident began, the victim’s parents literally got on their knees and begged unsympathetic officials for justice.
China has a long-running problem with school bullies, exacerbated by the highly competitive nature of the school system, where slots in the best schools are coveted treasures.
Another major anti-bullying protest broke out in 2023 after a 14-year-old boy in Henan province committed suicide and his parents said he had been brutalized by bullies. The Chinese government launched a nationwide anti-bullying campaign after the incident, but the Jiangyou incident has once again sparked public outrage.
Protests broke out at government offices in Jiangyou, swelling to over a thousand people on Monday who kept marching until well after midnight.
Although they generally took pains to present themselves as patriotic Chinese subjects seeking to work constructively with the government, frequently singing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) anthem as they marched, one of their chants was, “Give us back democracy!” which is not something any Communist tyrant wants to hear.
The police cracked down hard, physically assaulting the protesters with batons and electric prods, roughly handling men and women alike.
“Are you going to drag her away?” an incredulous witness asked a police officer who was grappling with an elderly woman in a video of the protest.
“Do you want to get dragged away?” the officer snapped back. Several other police tackled the unfortunate onlooker before he had a chance to respond.
As with the bullying videos, footage of the crackdown on protesters was vigorously scrubbed from the Chinese internet by censors, but some of it leaked to overseas servers and prompted a fresh wave of indignation across China. Both Chinese officials and frightened Jiangyou residents have stopped answering questions from foreign reporters.
Among the few public comments Chinese authorities were willing to make about the Jiangyou case are efforts to squelch rumors that the bullies who abused the 14-year-old girl are the children of privileged local officials whose political connections exempted the bullies from more severe punishment.
“Your children will meet children of officials who are more senior than you. What if they beat your children?” one of the demonstrators shouted on Monday night, alluding to the rumors of political interference in the case.
“Cyber police” with jurisdiction over Jiangyou issued a statement on Thursday claiming that two of the parents of the bullies are “unemployed,” two of them “work outside the province,” and the other two are a “local shop assistant” and a “food delivery worker.”
The “cyber police” said two people who posted “false information” about the families of the bullies have been “administratively punished.”
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