Bullying sparked managed outrage with Chinese characteristics

The recent Jiangyou bullying incident – in which a 14-year-old girl was stripped, beaten and humiliated by her peers while police allegedly refused to take meaningful action – came to light only after video evidence circulated online.

The silence of local institutions, followed by delayed police action and staged apologies, ignited a firestorm of anger across Chinese social media and eventually spilled into the streets. What began as outrage over a teenager’s suffering became one of the largest grassroots protests in years, met not with justice but with force.

This is not an isolated episode. It follows a troubling pattern seen in other scandals – the high-profile Tangshan restaurant assault and Xuzhou “iron-chained woman” case and countless others where truth was obscured, accountability deflected and public anger absorbed into the Party’s official narrative.

The Jiangyou case became a test of Xi Jinping’s model of “advocacy under party guidance” – a governance strategy in which bottom-up outrage is tolerated only if it can be channeled back into reinforcing party legitimacy.

Selective transparency, propaganda reframing and performative discipline were used to contain the crisis, while deeper questions of accountability remain untouched.

The roots of distrust

What fuels the fury in Jiangyou is not only one girl’s suffering but a pattern that mirrors earlier scandals – from environmental cover-ups to trafficking cases – in which institutional self-protection trumped justice. The outcome is consistent: The system shields itself first, even at the expense of the vulnerable.

Chinese law enforcement has long suffered from opacity, collusion, and impunity. In theory, public security bureaus are impartial enforcers of law. In practice, they act as gatekeepers of the powerful and the well-connected to the party apparatus – as of a system designed to shield itself.

Reports from Jiangyou suggest that some of the bullies were linked to police or local officials. Instead of ensuring justice for the victim, authorities allegedly focused on controlling the narrative: issuing vague statements, threatening journalists and censoring online discussions. These tactics mirror responses in past scandals – from school abuse to environmental cover-ups – in which institutional interests trumped public safety and truth.

Netizens were incensed by what followed: the local police’s attempts to downplay the abuse, shield the perpetrators and suppress public scrutiny. What began as a local tragedy has evolved into a national outcry – a referendum on deeper rot: the systematic failure of Chinese law enforcement to protect the vulnerable and the long-term corrosion of public trust in state institutions.

Cases across China reinforce this distrust. More recently, this erosion of trust is reinforced by a transnational example. The mysterious Yang Lanlan, a 23-year-old Chinese woman who crashed her Rolls-Royce into another vehicle in Sydney, was granted bail with no monetary requirement.

Each incident ended without clarity or justice, feeding public suspicion that truth is deliberately suppressed when it implicates powerful interests. The depth of public cynicism has never been higher. Every scandal – from Tangshan to Jiangsu to Jiangyou – reinforces the same conclusion: Privilege means impunity, and the system will bend to protect the well-connected.

 What this kind of repeated episode truly reveals is the paradox of “mass-line” governance under Xi Jinping: The state calls for public participation, but only within bounds defined by the party. Selective transparency, propaganda reframing and performative discipline are used to contain the crisis, while deeper questions of accountability remain untouched.  

Dao as moral awakening

The turning point came when images spread of the girl’s disabled parents kneeling before officials, begging for justice while criminals walked free under police protection.

Something ruptured in the national psyche. For millions of Chinese, that image represented more than one family’s tragedy. It evoked Dao – the belief in a moral order in which the strong protect the weak and the state exists to serve the people.

Outraged by the callous police notice – which cast doubt on the victim and asked the public for “understanding” toward the perpetrators – Jiangyou city’s residents protested. Their peaceful advocacy was met with brutal suppression. Protesters were shoved into livestock trucks and hauled away. The government deployed military-grade signal jammers to block uploads and prevent the world from seeing the crackdown unfold.

In trying to silence advocacy, the state deepened the moral wound: Dao itself was under assault.

The people of Jiangyou, joined by millions of outraged netizens, are not merely reacting to a single girl’s suffering. They are acting out of conscience – demanding rights that have long been disregarded by the party-state: recognition of dignity, security and the right to live without the fear of unchecked violence.

Such demands are consistently denied, especially at the local level. Here, police are poorly trained, politically insulated and often antagonistic toward the very communities they’re meant to protect. In China’s counties and townships, the rule of law is virtually powerless when those who enforce it face no real accountability.

In trying to crush justice, the state ignited something deeper: an uprising not just against corrupt officers, but against a system that protects them, mocks victims and treats moral clarity as a threat to political control. The advocacy for Dao became an uprising against a regime that had long betrayed it.

Advocacy with boundaries

Netizens may advocate for rights that are tolerated until they demand accountability that challenges the system.

The Jiangyou case illuminates such a paradox: Xi has repeatedly emphasized the need to “advocate for public interests under the party’s guidance,” a formulation that appears to offer space for civic engagement – but in practice only within Party-defined limits and with “Chinese characteristics,” redirected into propaganda and absorbed into the Party’s governance toolkit and ultimately serving state power.

This top-down paternalism tailors public expression only within the limits of party-sanctioned narratives, often co-opting real grievances into propaganda or deflecting them entirely – especially when faced with spontaneous, bottom-up outrage over such a school bullying case. The system responded not with accountability, but with silence, suppression, and staged media.

Bullying incidents spark moral debate about justice and leadership in democracies, too, which can be equally politicized, but the space for public discourse is broader. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump personally commented on the case of a US student who claimed to have been bullied for wearing a pro-Trump shirt.

Albeit in a partisan way, that incident reflected a system in which political leaders must answer to public sentiment, and in which competing narratives can openly clash. While the case was more symbolic than violent, Trump’s intervention – however politically charged – illustrated that when national leaders acknowledge the grievances of individuals, it can affirm the public’s faith that even small voices matter.

The contrast is revealing: both societies grapple with injustice, but the difference is in how their leaders choose to respond —one treats public outcry as a threat to be neutralized, while the other frames public outrage as a test of legitimacy.

In this sense, the Jianyou case becomes more than a tragedy – it is a mirror reflecting a deeper crisis in China’s model of governance. The Chinese government’s total silence in the Jiangyou case – combined with censorship, detention and official gaslighting – sent a chillingly different message: Truth is dangerous, victims are disposable, and the system will go to great lengths to protect itself over its people.

Irony, resistance and the digital mirror of society

Unable to protest freely, netizens turned to satire and irony. Livestreams hosted by police across China – from Xinjiang to Guangdong – were flooded with sarcastic questions: “Will you kneel with the disabled parents too?” and “Is this serving the people?”

What might appear as trolling was in fact mass civic grief and moral indignation, transformed into digital resistance. In a society where formal dissent is criminalized, irony has become a tool for survival. It exploded across the digital landscape.

The hit film “Nanjing Photograph Studio” (Dead to Rights, 2025), which originally depicts quiet resistance and personal dignity under invasion and oppression, became another vehicle for protest. Netizens drew parallels and renamed it “Jiangyou Photography Studio” – a bitter metaphor for citizens crushed under domestic repression with state complicity and injustice.

The case fits a broader pattern: from Tangshan to Jiangsu to Jiangyou, every scandal deepens public cynicism that privilege means impunity and that the system will always shield the well-connected. The meme became a digital mirror of society – exposing a state that demands loyalty but offers no justice in return.

Price of impunity isn’t just moral – it’s political

Corruption in China’s law enforcement is not merely about bribes or favoritism – it’s about impunity. When those in uniform and power face no accountability, even basic rights collapse: The right not to be assaulted, the right to seek help, and the right to be heard are hollowed out.

Under Xi, outrage itself has been domesticated: the party permits advocacy only “under party guidance” on its terms, channeling and suppressing it until silence is enforced, truth punished, public anger is redirected into reinforcing Party legitimacy, ordinary people are left to fight for justice with their bare hands and systemic reform is continually deferred.

The cost is not just moral but political. Over time, people stop believing in the law and justice. Finally, they stop believing in the state itself. The result is widespread atomization, moral cynicism, and a collapse of civic trust. In such a vacuum, even sincere reforms will fail – because the public no longer believes the hand that offers them. The paradox of Xi’s governance is collapsing: Outrage was too raw, grief too visceral, and suppression too heavy-handed.

Rights‑based reform

If Beijing truly seeks “national rejuvenation,” it must rebuild trust – through justice, not slogans:

• independent investigations into police misconduct;
• legal protections for whistleblowers and journalists;
• accessible redress mechanisms for the powerless;
• transparent consequences for abusing power;
• governance based on legal responsibility, not political loyalty.

In Jiangyou and countless other towns citizens are no longer willing to accept injustice in the name of stability. Without trust, there is no legitimacy; and without legitimacy, no “Party‑guided advocacy” can sustain social cohesion.