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Oops! We beat up the boss's wife - we thought she was a petitioner
By Wang Yong |
July 21, 2010, Wednesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WHAT a bummer. They beat the wrong person. They didn't mean to beat up the wife of one of their big bosses. They beat her black and blue on June 23 in a move to menace and muffle any petitioner taking a grievance to the government.
The scandal emerged on Monday through qq.com, one of China's leading news portals. Yesterday the online edition of Xinmin Evening News confirmed the scandal, in which six plainclothes policemen in Wuhan, capital city of Hubei Province, bullied and boxed a 58-year-old woman for 16 minutes on the morning of June 23, apparently mistaking her for an average citizen petitioner with a gripe.
She's been hospitalized, suffering a concussion and neurological damage. "Sorry, it was a mistake. We didn't mean to beat the wife of a big boss," an official of a local police bureau said in apology to the victim Chen Yulian, who was lying in a hospital on the afternoon of June 23.
That crude but truthful apology infuriated visitors and other patients in Chen's room. Xinmin quoted them as retorting: "You say you can't beat the wife of your boss, does that mean you can beat an average person?"
Chen Cuilian, a younger sister of Chen Yulian, said after watching the surveillance video of the cruel beating: "They were not like policemen, they were more like mafia.... I wonder whether they would admit their identity if the victim were just a farmer or any other ordinary person."
Despite Chen's family's request to broadcast the video, Chen Cuilian said, senior local officials decided to kill it. But the victim and her family were indeed lucky this time - at least they saw the video, they had the evidence. In many cases in the past when a victim was an ordinary citizen, a small potato, chances were that the video camera suddenly stopped working at the critical moment and missed the violence.
On June 23, Chen Yulian was about to meet a senior provincial official and talk about her retirement benefits and the death of her daughter in what she believed to be a case of medical malpractice several years ago. Chen's husband, in charge of social justice and stability of the province, happened to be away from the province so she went in person.
It was not clear whether the six plainclothes cops attacked Chen on orders of a superior or acted on their own initiative. Xinmin said the six had been suspended from their posts.
The issue of how petitioners are treated, and sometimes mistreated, is getting attention.
In Hunan Province, a local official in charge of real estate development is reported to have written clearly back in 2001 that any petitioner who refused to relocate would be treated as an enemy. Zeng Xinliang, former deputy chief of a district real estate bureau in Changsha, the provincial capital, made the "enemy" statement in his working diary, which was presented by petitioners to the Southern Metropolis Weekly on July 7.
On July 14, the weekly called Zeng to confirm the existence of the diary. He told the weekly that he might have lost the diary when he shifted his office. Even if the diary in the hands of petitioners was true, Zeng said, it would not matter to him. "I only recorded my bosses' order."
The six plainclothes, or plain thugs, and the "iron-handed" real estate official are among "a few bad apples," for sure. But "a few" doesn't mean "isolated." In the past couple of years public petitioning has been increasing, especially concerning corruption in areas such as real estate development.
Instead of tossing out these bad apples one by one, it would be better to ask: who hired them and enabled them to work against the people?
The scandal emerged on Monday through qq.com, one of China's leading news portals. Yesterday the online edition of Xinmin Evening News confirmed the scandal, in which six plainclothes policemen in Wuhan, capital city of Hubei Province, bullied and boxed a 58-year-old woman for 16 minutes on the morning of June 23, apparently mistaking her for an average citizen petitioner with a gripe.
She's been hospitalized, suffering a concussion and neurological damage. "Sorry, it was a mistake. We didn't mean to beat the wife of a big boss," an official of a local police bureau said in apology to the victim Chen Yulian, who was lying in a hospital on the afternoon of June 23.
That crude but truthful apology infuriated visitors and other patients in Chen's room. Xinmin quoted them as retorting: "You say you can't beat the wife of your boss, does that mean you can beat an average person?"
Chen Cuilian, a younger sister of Chen Yulian, said after watching the surveillance video of the cruel beating: "They were not like policemen, they were more like mafia.... I wonder whether they would admit their identity if the victim were just a farmer or any other ordinary person."
Despite Chen's family's request to broadcast the video, Chen Cuilian said, senior local officials decided to kill it. But the victim and her family were indeed lucky this time - at least they saw the video, they had the evidence. In many cases in the past when a victim was an ordinary citizen, a small potato, chances were that the video camera suddenly stopped working at the critical moment and missed the violence.
On June 23, Chen Yulian was about to meet a senior provincial official and talk about her retirement benefits and the death of her daughter in what she believed to be a case of medical malpractice several years ago. Chen's husband, in charge of social justice and stability of the province, happened to be away from the province so she went in person.
It was not clear whether the six plainclothes cops attacked Chen on orders of a superior or acted on their own initiative. Xinmin said the six had been suspended from their posts.
The issue of how petitioners are treated, and sometimes mistreated, is getting attention.
In Hunan Province, a local official in charge of real estate development is reported to have written clearly back in 2001 that any petitioner who refused to relocate would be treated as an enemy. Zeng Xinliang, former deputy chief of a district real estate bureau in Changsha, the provincial capital, made the "enemy" statement in his working diary, which was presented by petitioners to the Southern Metropolis Weekly on July 7.
On July 14, the weekly called Zeng to confirm the existence of the diary. He told the weekly that he might have lost the diary when he shifted his office. Even if the diary in the hands of petitioners was true, Zeng said, it would not matter to him. "I only recorded my bosses' order."
The six plainclothes, or plain thugs, and the "iron-handed" real estate official are among "a few bad apples," for sure. But "a few" doesn't mean "isolated." In the past couple of years public petitioning has been increasing, especially concerning corruption in areas such as real estate development.
Instead of tossing out these bad apples one by one, it would be better to ask: who hired them and enabled them to work against the people?
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