A brutal attack on a group of female diners at a restaurant in northeast China over the weekend has sparked public outcry over sexual harassment and gender-based violence in the country as authorities rushed to silence a reaction.
Widely shared video footage on social media showed nine men punching, kicking and dragging three women in and out of a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan City on Friday night.
The incident has caused outrage across the country, as tens of millions of people expressed frustration online over the lack of legal protections for women and anger against patriarchal social norms.
Weibo, China’s microblogging platform, said in a statement on Saturday that it had blocked 265 accounts for breaches, including the promotion of “gender confrontation.” The social media platform also banned related hashtags such as “wishing all girls to grow up safely,” which she said did not comply with government regulations.
Analysts said the incident and the government’s efforts to control the narrative underscored Beijing’s failure to address widespread mistreatment of women, as authorities have tightened control over the #MeToo movement in the country.
“What happened in Tangshan means that any Chinese woman can be beaten at any time for any reason,” said Lu Xiaoquan, a Beijing-based lawyer who focuses on women’s rights. “There is no way to avoid it.”
The shocking incident in Tangshan, a 7.7 million city in Hebei Province, began when a man approached three women eating in a restaurant and put his hand on the back of one of the diners. . The woman asked him what he wanted before shouting “you’re sick” and pulling his hand away.
The man responded by hitting the woman in the face, triggering a melee that spilled onto the street, where the initial victim was dragged by her hair. A group of men having dinner outside joined the assault, beating the women with chairs and bottles of beer, stepping on them and shouting “kill her with blows.”
Two of the women attacked were hospitalized but were in stable condition, according to local media.
Public outrage over the attack also focused on the passivity of law enforcement. A case report reviewed by the Financial Times showed that the local police station did not respond to several calls about the attack shortly before 3 p.m. The document, prepared by the Tangshan Airport Highway Police Station, described the incident as a “normal fight”.
Tangshan police arrested nine people over the weekend who allegedly participated in the violence. Some of the suspects had a criminal record, according to court documents.
But the brutal attack sparked a crackdown on social media, with many denouncing the lack of legal protection for women in China. A Weibo post published Saturday night and read tens of thousands of times argued that the incident was not random, but a reflection of the systematic sexual violence rooted in Chinese society.
“We must admit that our environment contains forces that support, encourage and drive gender-based violence against women,” the user wrote.
The Tangshan attack followed a series of recent incidents that have drawn attention to sexual violence and gender inequality in China. This year, a video of a woman chained to a shack in a rural area of eastern Jiangsu Province provoked widespread outrage and highlighted the failure of authorities to end human trafficking and abuse.
Last December, an employee of e-commerce giant Alibaba was fired after publicly accusing her manager and a client of sexual assault on a business trip. He said he had reported the incident to the company, but did not respond.
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Earlier this month, Peng Shuai, a three-time Chinese tennis star and Olympian, accused former premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual misconduct. Peng later withdrew the allegations after disappearing from public view, but the incident, which involved the highest levels of Chinese politics, undermined Beijing’s narrative of improving women’s conditions.
Authorities have tried to minimize incidents of sexual violence, despite its prevalence, by launching numerous attacks on women’s rights groups that activists say could serve to further consolidate gender inequalities.
China’s Communist Youth League in April called “extremist feminists” an “online tumor” that undermined political priorities such as rising birth rates in the country.
This rhetoric, said Lü Pin, a Chinese women’s rights activist based in New York, meant that the Tangshan incident would not be the last. “The male-dominated government in China has no motivation to improve women’s rights because it benefits from the status quo,” she said.