Lü Dewen on the Taishan Beating Incident

Lü Dewen, “Why an ‘Ordinary’ Case Touched the Nerve of Society as a Whole: A Sociological Approach to Analysis—The Case of the Tangshan Beating Incident”[1]
 
Introduction by David Ownby, Translation by Hannah Wang 
 
Introduction
 
Lü Dewen (b. 1981) is a sociologist at Wuhan University who also writes as a public intellectual.  In the brief text translated here, Lü discusses an incident that occurred on June 10, 2022, late at night in a barbeque restaurant in Tangshan, Hebei, in which a number of young men viciously beat several young women, some of whom were subsequently hospitalized.  Video coverage (see here) suggests that the incident began with sexual harassment, when one young man touched a young woman and/or spoke to her in such a way that provoked a sharp reaction; she appears to have tried to push him away.  He subsequently reacted with what looks to be quite extreme physical and probably verbal violence, after which another woman at the victim’s table intervened, smashing a bottle over the man’s head, and a melee ensued. 
 
The event immediately went viral in China, as one can well imagine (for a good overview, see here).  There were accusations that the police were not taking the event seriously enough, or that they were somehow connected to the “gangs” to which the assailants were believed to belong, as well as many thousands of comments to the effect that the incident symbolized the gender discrimination and gender violence to which Chinese women continue to be subjected, prompting push-back from Chinese men arguing that the women had “asked for it” or otherwise provoked their own victimization.  This is of course a major fault line in Chinese society, as the #MeToo movement has been closely followed there, stoking impatience and anger among women who feel that China’s patriarchy remains basically intact.  See here for a text that speaks to such issues on this site.
 
Lü presumably felt compelled to weigh in on the incident because a good deal of his research over the past few years has dealt with issues of violence and public order at the local level; in 2021 alone, he published three books[2] in 2021 on grassroots governance.  Apparently exasperated by the online discussion of the event (China’s Internet comment sections are no more enlightened than ours), Lü argues that the incident was fairly “ordinary” in the sense that violence is frequent in China, although efforts to combat or marginalize violence have borne fruit and the situation in general is improving (I must confess that my first thought on watching the video is that no one seems all that surprised).  He further suggests that the kind of bullying we see in the incident is often “gender neutral” in that the objects are the “weak” that happen to be present when the event occurs.
 
In short, Lü’s plea is for everyone to engage in a proper analysis of an event before rushing to label it and discuss it ad infinitum in terms of the labels applied.  It is of course hard to argue with this, and Lü’s text appears to have circulated widely on China’s Internet.  But as Hannah Wang, the young Chinese woman who translated the piece, wrote to me in a private message:  “The people who should have talked about the incident did not say very much.”
 
Translation  
  
The Tangshan beating incident is an "ordinary" case of public security. To say that it is "ordinary" is not to say that it is not worth caring about, but that it is not difficult to understand. It is certain that the assailants committed the crime of disorderly behavior and are suspected of intentionally inflicting harm (depending on the extent of the victims’ injuries). For all cases involving violence, public security authorities follow the regular procedures once they are contacted, meaning that they first put an end to the violence and take care of the injured, only after which do they collect evidence and arrest the perpetrators.
 
It seems that the local public security authorities did not expect this "ordinary" case to become a major national sensation. In a sense, this has something to do with the way the public security authorities handled the case in the first place. Even if it was a case of disorderly behavior, because someone had been injured and was hospitalized, a more appropriate way to deal with it might have been to treat it as a criminal case from the outset  and to detain the perpetrators immediately after sending the victims to the hospital.
 
However, in this case, the local public security authorities only identified the criminal suspects after public opinion was all worked up. And the criminals were not arrested until the day following the incident.
 
The way that public security authorities dealt with the event may indeed have followed proper procedures: the case happened late at night, making it hard to take immediate measures. But this was an important reason for the public outcry—after all, the fact that "the entire Internet was waiting for the criminals to be caught" was itself a factor directing the people's attention to the incident.
 
It is understandable that people see those who carried out the violence as an organized gang of thugs. From the skill they displayed in committing the violent acts, their close collaboration, and the social hostility they projected, they probably are indeed a violent gang. A detail worth noting is that, when normal people see people inflicting violence on others, they will usually try to get them to stop.  But in this case, the people on the scene instead egged on the violence. This cannot be explained away by saying they had too much to drink and made a mistake, and we have to see it as a matter of physical instinct.
 
It is inappropriate to label this incident as irrelevant. Many commentaries have interpreted the incident as "gender violence." which seems to deviate from the essence of the incident, in addition to provoking the public. This incident was grounded in sexual harassment, but it does not reflect the sexism of society. What makes this incident so bad is not gender violence in and of itself, but the fact that the abusers were bullying the weak in public—gender differences in this case were just a natural manifestation of "strength and weakness." Perpetrators in similar cases do not specifically target women, but rather "weak" people in general (including men).
 
The real concern is how society can control violence. China is a country with a high sense of public order, and people generally value public order as a public good. As a result, it is difficult for ordinary people to accept any overt social violence. Objectively speaking, the improvement of public order in China over the past few decades is obvious to all concerned.
 
Why the Incident is Worth Analyzing 
 
What makes an event worth analyzing is that it is a social fact. The Tangshan incident is worth analyzing because events like this are largely outside of our individual consciousness; but whether we like it or not, such incidents exist objectively and will surely happen again. Moreover, such incidents can also have a compelling effect on our individual consciousness. For example, the incident has triggered many people's views on public order and women's rights, and such questions will not go away simply because some people do not want to talk about them. 
 
We need to understand the universal nature of events such as these because they are social. The occurrence of similar events is based on certain social mechanisms. For example, the way public security systems work, which mechanisms function to control marginalized groups, etc.  Such factors can systematically shape public security events, because even if each crime is unique, it is based on the universal nature of violent crimes. 
 
The event is examined as an objective "thing." Usually, people care about events because they touch on certain ideas and emotions. If these perceptions are not analyzed, it is easy to confuse perceptions with facts and ignore the scientific and analytical nature of the event. For example, when one witnesses an act of bullying (whether the one being bullied is a child, a woman, or a man), one is always outraged and naturally sees the incident as a projection of the moral notion of protecting the weak. But the real scientific fact to be analyzed is how "violence" as a constituent element of human society is misused and how it is controlled. 
 
How to get to the core of the incident to be analyzed? 
 
We should set our prejudices aside when we analyze any incident.  Most of the gender antagonism created online as a result of this incident was due to prejudices. The reason that many of those who thought themselves to be “neutral and objective” were labeled by others as “macho” is because their underlying assumption was that the victims were to blame, which meant that their "analysis" focused on finding what the women had done wrong. And those who appear to be speaking out for women's rights have a similar underlying assumption, which is that all men are the enemy. Thus their "analysis" is naturally focused on finding "evidence" of what they call systemic and structural gender inequality. In their view, the "gender perspective" is not only naturally just, but also scientific. 
 
A more appropriate approach is to analyze the events in terms of their common external characteristics. For example, the core of the Tangshan incident is that people were beaten; this is a violent incident, a public security case, and whether the victim is male or female is of secondary importance. Consequently, the analysis of this incident should be grounded in the context of similar violent incidents. Indeed, this categorization is appropriate for the Tangshan case. In similar violent incidents, if there are men in the victim group, they are also subject to violence. In short, "violence" is not only the common external characteristic of similar incidents, but also the most objective one.  It does not change according to gender. 
 
Why a "normal phenomenon" touched a nerve throughout society 
 
We should analyze the event as a "normal phenomenon."  By “normal,” I mean presenting a fact as it is.  When I call the Tangshan incident “normal,” I don’t mean that it should not be criticized, but instead that its occurrence is universal and objective, and we should not indulge in personal judgements in our observations and explanations. 
 
Normal social life is, in a way, based on a certain number of mechanisms that push unwanted things to the margins. Our society has been dominated by private violence at various times. In the past, there were situations in which private violence dominated the social order in certain borderline industries and in areas where the social order had collapsed. For example, before the recent “sweeping black 扫黑”[3] campaign, in some remote areas, it was not the police but local Mafia leaders who settled traffic disputes, and it was these people who had the most “face” in local societies, not local “worthies.” Even ordinary people gave these criminals gifts “just in case” so as to avoid trouble. In fact, my fieldwork experience tells me that society was indeed broken in some places prior to “sweeping black,” and the proliferation of private violence affected the social order. When those vicious people are not marginalized by society, but become the heads of the local community, then "normal society" is no longer normal.
 
Today, we can control these violent elements through the use of violence and can marginalize them culturally, which is considered a normal phenomenon in a normal society. The occurrence of violent crimes and violent social events is precisely the product of these mechanisms of social marginalization. At present, the social breakdown I just talked about no longer exists, but there is still social violence. The key is to marginalize it by fighting against it through state authorities and social-cultural condemnation. 
 
Understanding events in the context of social development trends 
 
It is important to distinguish between motive and function in the analysis of events. When government departments solve problems, their motive is always to “change bad things into good things.”  For example, in their management of the Tangshan incident, in addition to handling the case itself, , local authorities might also have seen it as an opportunity to launch a new round of “sweeping black.” In this sense, the existence of a social fact, regardless of whether it is good or bad in subjective terms, generates a corresponding function. These functions, however, do not depend entirely on the fact itself, but also on the perspective from which people view them. 
 
In this sense, we can understand the labeling of particular events. There was a time when the media was keen on "changing society through individual cases," purveying particular events, some of which were unique, as having some sort of universal significance.  My feeling is that it may well be that some people view the Tangshan incident as one of those cases that can “change society.” 
 
To be clear, labeling is a way of dealing with things cognitively, which is methodologically functional, logical, and even valuable. However, it is not a substitute for causal analysis. What we really need to figure out is what is the social mechanism that caused the Tangshan incident. Understanding the logic that facilitates the existence of violent elements and analyzing what produces social violence and how it is controlled is surely more important than screaming that heads should roll. 
 
In analyzing an incident we need to "stick to the facts," and ideally we should locate causes and effects from within the event itself. To correctly categorize the Tangshan event, we have to return to the event itself and its inner dimensions, including the characteristics of the individuals and the group that carried out the violence, the identity of the victims and how they came to be victimized, what "triggered" the violence, what concrete effects the social violence generated, etc. We need to establish a link between these key elements. Any approach that does not go deeper into the event, that jumps to conclusions after a single glance, and that focuses on only one element of the event at the expense of everything else is against the scientific norm of evidence seeking. 
 
Of course, for more complex events, we also need to understand their place in the entire social structure and the relationship between the flow of events and social change. Some events have historical significance, not only because the event possesses a meaning that representative of something larger, but more importantly, because it resonates with certain social development trends. 
 
In terms of my own research and observations, the “sweeping black” campaigns of the past few years have yielded excellent results, and most people feel much safer. However, the survival logic of criminal elements has always existed in a gray, ambiguous space. In the process of combating violence, it is normal that some violent groups get off because of legal technicalities while others slip through the hands of authorities.  More to the point, most violent gangs with a bit of rationality understand politics, and trim their sails when authorities launch campaigns like “sweeping black,” going so far as to shut down their criminal “business” and see to their legitimate affairs. In this sense, crackdowns like “sweeping black” need to be regularized, otherwise, once the pressure is off, the criminals are likely to revert to form. 
 
If the Tangshan incident had happened more than a decade ago, it probably would have not had such a large social impact.  But in the wake of the “sweeping black” campaign, people are all the more attuned to issues of public safety.  When we add to this the popularity of gender issues on the Internet over the past few years, it is easy to understand that the event was widely noticed.
 
Notes

[1]吕德文, “一次“普通”案件，为何触动全社会神经：事件分析的社会学方法准则——以唐山打人事件为例,” published online on Exploration and Free Views/探索与争鸣 on June 12, 2022.

[2]Grassroots China: The Cornerstone of National Governance 基层中国: 国家治理的基石, The Bottom Line of a Great Nation: Grassroots Governance in an Era of Important Change 大国底色：巨变时代的基层治理, and Ruling a Big Country is Like Cooking a Small Fish:  Grassroots Governance and the State of the World  治大国若烹小鲜：基层治理与世道人心. 

[3] Translator's note:  See here for information on the "sweeping black" campaign.