Reports: Massive Crowd Traps Communist Agents in Sichuan, China, over Street Vendor Beating

HONG KONG, CHINA - 2023/06/04: An old woman is arrested by police at Causeway Bay during t
Michael Ho Wai Lee/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Frances Martel

Multiple Chinese-language reports surfacing on Wednesday, including videos allegedly shot at the scene, describe an uncontrolled crowd surrounding local government officials in Sichuan province, China, to protest the abuse of a local street vendor.

The state-affiliated outlet China News appeared to confirm the incident, believed to have occurred in Neijiang, Sichuan. According to China News, local government officials punished six “urban management” law enforcement officers with a suspension related to the treatment of the abused vendor. Chinese social media accounts circulated what they claimed to be a public notice by Neijiang authorities assuring the public that the Communist Party had addressed both the alleged violations by the vendor and those by the “mobile inspectors,” who operate separately from the police but are part of China’s state repressive forces.

China News identified the vendor in question with the last name “Zhong.”

The incident, if confirmed to have occurred as reported, is the latest in a string of increasingly routine displays of disrespect towards law enforcement officials in China. As a communist totalitarian regime, China maintains one of the world’s most violent and repressive government systems, regularly silencing, imprisoning, and disappearing political dissidents. The Communist Party typically reserves its most gruesome treatment — live organ harvesting, brutal gang rape, and slavery — for members of religious communities and disfavored ethnic groups, such as the Falun Gong community, Christians, Muslims, ethnic Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, and other non-Han people.

China is currently engaging in genocide against Uyghurs and other Turkic groups in occupied East Turkistan and a campaign to erase Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan language, and culture in that region.

Despite this record of human rights atrocities, 29,000 people in China participated in over 2,000 dissent events between June 2022 and April 2023, according to the human rights organization Freedom House.

The anti-communist outlet New Tang Dynasty reported Tuesday that the Neijiang incident began when “urban management” crews confronted street vendors and assaulted one in particular, who was selling eggs in public. In response to the abuse, large crowds surrounded the officials, preventing their cars from leaving the premises and scuffling with authorities.

Videos uploaded to Western social media outlets, rescued from the strict censorship of Chinese regime-controlled sites such as Sina Weibo, show men surrounding the urban management vehicles. Videos circulating appear to have taken place both during the day and after dusk, indicating the mob of hundreds of people held its position against the officers well into the night.

A video that appears to have been recorded at the end of the incident shows a police officer addressing the crowd with a megaphone, reportedly saying police would punish the abuses of the urban management officers, and they could peacefully disperse without worrying about the abused vendor.

New Tang Dynasty claimed that the secretary of the local Communist Party came to the scene to address the disturbance, suggesting the incident necessitated the intervention of high-ranking local officials. Jimu News, a Chinese outlet whose reporters have faced police brutality in the past, reported that the man addressing the crowd was Liang Xun, the head of the local public security bureau.

“Please believe that the public security organ will investigation [the vendor’s beating] and deal with it according to law,” Jimu News quoted the man as saying.”

China News, the state-affiliated outlet, reported that the crowd in question only formed to gawk at the beating of the street vendor, not to challenge the authority of the Communist Party. It did confirm, however, a notice that claimed six urban management officers had been suspended from their jobs in response to the incident. An alleged government notice in white text is currently circulating among Chinese dissidents online outside the country, indicating that police attempted to quell public outrage by suspending the officials involved.

The Sichuan incident follows the surfacing of even more turbulent footage in late May from southwestern Yunnan province, where a community of Hui Muslims organized thousands of people to prevent the demolition of the dome and other significant parts of their local mosque. Communist Party officials had reportedly claimed the mosque violated local building codes with an expansion adding minarets, the dome, and other traditional Mideast Muslim architectural assets.

The Chinese Communist Party also faced multiple protests throughout February led by elderly citizens, dubbed “White Hair” or “Silver” protests, objecting to government cuts to their medical benefits. The central city of Wuhan, where the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic began, and the seaside retreat of Dalian experienced the largest “White Hair” protests in the country, as documented by social media users.

Freedom House, an NGO that tracks repression around the world, launched a program specifically to track anti-government actions in China, named the China Dissent Monitor, last year in response to the surge in such incidents nationwide. Its latest report documented 2,230 confirmed “dissent events” between June 2022 and April 2023, noting that the true number of such events is likely much higher, given the difficulty in confirming protests as a result of extreme censorship and repression.

Freedom House declared dissent a “daily occurrence in China” throughout 2022.

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