Tangshan BBQ restaurant incident: the cause is far more than "underworld forces", but also from institutional violence

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Chen Yun China Labor Forum

In the early morning of June 10, at the "Old Seoul BBQ" barbecue restaurant in Tangshan, Chen Jizhi, a man who failed to sexually harass a female customer, became angry and beat the woman, and then turned into beating four women with a group of fellow men. The related video circulated rapidly on the Internet. The incident sparked widespread outrage. Many netizens strongly condemned the incident and tried to find out the identities of the attackers. Many women talked about the threats of sexual harassment and sexual violence they faced in their lives, and many netizens saw the case and thought of the previous Xuzhou Iron Chain Girl case, as well as similar violent incidents in Taizhou, Zhejiang, Lijiang, Yunnan and other places before. obvious correlation. Mass consciousness is changing dramatically, recognizing that such incidents are not isolated cases, but a cornerstone of China's broader problem of gender oppression, and they are beginning to see that corrupt institutions and officials are one of the culprits behind the scourge.

All the assailants were arrested after the incident, but officials do not take gender-based violence seriously. When the beating took place, the Tangshan police received multiple calls, but marked the incident as a "general fight" and arrived at the scene 30 minutes later. Most of the perpetrators were caught in Langfang and even Jiangsu, which was far away from the crime scene. Judging from the circulating photos, at least two female victims were seriously injured, but the official report said that four women were beaten with "minor injuries" or "minor injuries", and the situation of the victims is still unknown.

What officials are doing is essentially diverting the focus, portraying the case as a pure gang crime, designed to cover up gender-based violence and to strengthen police control over society. The public security bulletin focused on the perpetrator's illegal detention, money laundering and other criminal records; the CCP's official media only claimed that the incident challenged the law and "the public's sense of security", and set the case as "involving criminals and evil"; the Supreme People's Procuratorate The Tangshan government announced the normalization of "sweeping the black and eliminating evil". The underworld forces objectively threaten the safety of the masses and should be eradicated, but the official position is obviously to cover up the issue of gender-based violence caused by the systematic oppression of women under the unequal patriarchal and class social system. In fact, under the CCP's corrupt system, gangs naturally have considerable collusion with the establishment. The Ministry of Public Security of Tangshan City also announced that the case will be transferred to the Public Security Bureau of Langfang City for investigation, because the local public security department is likely to provide an "umbrella" for the evil forces involved in the case.

In addition, 265 Sina Weibo accounts have been banned for so-called "provocation of gender confrontation", and other mainland Chinese social media platforms are also blocking many comments critical of gender oppression. In the name of epidemic prevention and control, Tangshan City requires foreigners to obtain approval from the local community 48 hours before arriving in Tangshan, sign a guarantee letter guaranteeing that they will not go out, record their whereabouts in the city and take photos to prove it, etc., which actually hinders the outside world from knowing the truth. ——It is precisely because the government acts as a protective umbrella that the issue of violence against women occurs again and again, but it eventually disappears.

The CCP is, of course, distorting the facts in order to make excuses for intensifying repression, expanding police powers, and shifting the focus away from the oppression of women. The CCP smears feminism, promotes that women should submit to the concept of the nuclear family, promotes fertility and marriage, and strengthens control over women’s reproductive rights. Under the official guidance of the CCP and online censorship, there are already a large number of comments in the wall that only support the "strike hard", sentence the perpetrator to death or life imprisonment, etc., but only strong police repression will not improve China Gender-based violence against women in society. In fact, the entire CCP dictatorship machine is full of sexual violence, and domestic violence and sexual assault are often lightly sentenced or even ignored.

At the same time, the CCP is afraid of public anger over sexual violence, so it makes superficial concessions. One of the defendants, Wang Chengwen, was convicted of "obscene behavior" in the sexual assault case against a female Alibaba employee that broke out last year but did not commit a crime. However, the case took a turn on June 22 this year. A people's court in Jinan, Shandong Province pronounced the verdict in the first instance, and another defendant, Zhang Guo, was sentenced to one and a half years in prison for "compulsory indecency", showing that the judiciary was forced to change the sentence under public pressure. Defendant goes to jail.

Nor does gender-based violence arise out of thin air, but is linked to the capitalist class system—the ruling class needs violence to maintain its rule, and of course it morbidly glorifies violence; in order to try to save the fertility rate without violating the general interests of capitalists, today’s pro-capitalist The CCP is bound to strengthen the patriarchal system and "masculinity", and in order to incite nationalism against the domestic people, it advocates aggressive "wolf warrior" diplomacy - all of which will generate or encourage all kinds of violent words and deeds.

No matter how officials guide public opinion, the issue of gender-based violence has been exposed. Local underworld forces, the CCP dictatorship machine and capitalism are intertwined, and they also maintain the status quo of sexism and oppression. The so-called "Thunderstorm" rectification action will not solve the problem, it is only intended to strengthen the repression and weaken the self-resistance of the masses (this can also explain why when the incident happened, the male customers on the sidelines did not dare to dissuade the perpetrators - for fear that they would act bravely, but instead He was identified as a fight by the police, and he was socially weak and unable to bear the judicial consequences). The fundamental difference lies in the very few wealthy elites who control the vast majority of society’s wealth and power, and the vast majority of oppressed people dominated by the working class. The CCP regime stands with the former. Therefore, women, the entire working class, young people and other oppressed people need to organize themselves without any illusion of any official institutions, and use an anti-CCP dictatorship and anti-capitalist program to directly attack the root causes of gender oppression and violence against women, from Fundamentally combat gender oppression.