Maybe you’ve already seen this because it was published two years ago, but I found it just now and can’t resist publishing, because there’s some high-definition goodness happening here.

“I couldn’t fall asleep so at 3 a.m I took my camera and tripod to the drinking hub to see what a friday would bring,” says the video description from Jordan Leahy. It begins with an eye-level shot of malatang, the soft smoke from the boiling broth lingering in the cool autumn air. There are scenes of foreigners and toddlers alike, couples talking to one another in front of TV screens, balloon merchants under the pale yellow light of what will soon be another in Sanlitun’s long string of forgotten nights. The slow pan of vendors. The arrays of street food. The accretions of light. A purpling interlude between twilight and dawn…

It’s all prelude for what happens beginning at the 1:50 mark. Feel to fast-forward.

Ahhh, Sanlitun.

The case bears strong similarities to a series of racially tinged assaults alleged to have recently occurred in several foreign-centric districts, including Sanlitun, Houhai and Wudaokou, in which foreign witnesses reported being attacked without provocation by local men carrying weapons and traveling in a vehicle. The incidents were widely reported on WeChat and discussed on local forums, such as Reddit, where many expressed concern about possible hate crimes.

Michael (left) takes an image of his injuries shortly after the attack

An Australian student, who asked to be referred to just by his first name, Michael – for fear of possible retaliation – was returning to his BLCU quarters at “around 2am” on 21 December with his Korean girlfriend, Christine, when he says the pair noticed a grey BMW parked ahead.

“We were about 200 meters away [from the university] when [the men inside] yelled out something… they came around in their car and stopped us at the gate,” Michael recalled. Aware of the rumors that a group of men were targeting foreigners with Chinese females, he confronted the gang in an attempt to defuse the situation, explaining: “My girlfriend’s Korean, not Chinese…”

Three men  then attacked him with bats and rods. “Once they started hitting me, I grabbed one of the bats and hit one of the Chinese guys back in the head” – an act he was to later regret –  “and then approached the other two guys… yelling at them to leave and they backed off. I smashed the bat in half,” explained the former rugby winger.

Before he could check the third man, Michael said, he got up and, as the trio approached again, both students decided to run for help but “As we almost got in the dorm, my girlfriend fell down,” and the men renewed their assault. Michael claimed he remembers little of what happened next but CCTV footage shows him being battered on the head, then disarming another of his metal rod.

Inside, a large amount of students (including “a lot of Russian guys”) assisted the pair while others called the police. “One of the attackers who I’d hit tried to come in… the Chinese had gone to their car again and tried to escape” but fortunately a quick-thinking Russian had removed the keys, according to witnesses. At this point, police arrived. A member of the gang accused the Russian of attacking them, and all four were detained.

One of the alleged assailants at the police station is said to have been a US citizen with Chinese parents (his face has been obscured as he has not been charged)

In a similar December incident, detailed over at the World of Chinese, a foreign student who requested anonymity told a reporter he was approached by a group of six or seven men in a “wagon” and carrying “metal sticks,” who questioned his companion’s ethnicity. “They started asking if my friend was Chinese,” he told the magazine. After being assaulted several times, the man handed over a small amount of money and made his escape.

The magazine spoke also to an eyewitness to “a separate incident in Wudaokou, who said that he saw ‘four Chinese holding bats chasing a black guy, shouting at him,’ along Zhanchunyuan West Road, at around 3 am the same morning.” The location of the latter incident is close (1-2km) to where the attack on Michael and his partner took place. Although extreme violence is rare, attacks on foreigners do occur in the nightspots of Beijing for a variety of reasons – examples from Sanlitun being not infrequent, and not necessarily involving Chinese.

Back at the police station, a bloodied Michael says he was threatened by one of the men (to wit: “I know where you guys live, I’m gonna come get you and stab you”) and endured racial slurs, and both he and his friends were accused of instigating the fight. The Russian was detained and later released the next day, while Michael received five stitches; his passport is now with police as the case continues.

“All three are now in jail,” said Michael. “However, if we can get more witnesses, they’ll serve a longer time in jail.” In legal terms, the men have been detained pending investigation. They can be held for up to 28 days without charge and should police decide to press charges, a case will be sent to the “procurator” for consideration. If the case is accepted, a trial will be set and the assailants can look forward to tackling China’s 99.1% conviction rate, instead of unarmed foreigners.

An image taken at the hospital shows Michael’s head wound, which required five stitches

Michael praised both university authorities and Wudaokou police, who he described as “helpful [and] good” but added that the embassy was “useless.” The investigation is ongoing and “slow.” One potential difficulty might be “the injury suffered to the other man, he was in hospital for a while and looks like he is permanently a bit deformed.” The man is alleged to be an American citizen, though both his parents are Chinese.

Readers who have any information about the case, know of any other incidents, or were themselves victims of one of a similar spate of attacks involving a grey BMW in the last two months are urged to contact Wudaokou police, or email us at the usual address (and we’ll pass your details on). Said Michael: “All I want is this not to happen again.”

You can follow the author of this piece @MrRFH on Twitter

“Unexplained disturbances” caused a glass door to shatter on Line 1 of the subway system in Shenyang, Liaoning province this morning, though the likely cause, per chatter on microblogs, is a fight that occurred inside the train.

The official Shenyang Subway microblog confirmed this suspicion. Drops of blood could be seen around the station platform. Line 2 was unaffected.

We’re disappointed there’s been no video posted of the skirmish, which — if it resulted in a broken glass door — might have topped either this glorious Shanghai subway fight or these two biters from Guangzhou. Oh well. There’s time yet.

Here are a couple of pictures:

Till death do they part!

Via The Nanfang:

Amid all the screaming, the bride can be made out saying: “You didn’t have an abortion while you could and now you come here with your big stomach, how do I know whose kid it is? Are you trying to coerce us into buying you a house? Can we afford it?”

I wouldn’t want to be the groom. Or the bride. Or the mistress. Actually, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that wedding. Although this is why these things typically have open bars, or copious amounts of baijiu.

What’s most impressive about this fight, by far, is that it manages to draw the attention of the other gamers at this Internet bar. These guys are fazed by nothing. Nothing? How about a NIPPLE? Did someone say NIPPLE?

SFW, mostly.

Youku user chenkai0104 uploaded this video of two men in a flat-out melee on Line 2 of the Shanghai Metro on Tuesday. These chaps show some real form! Check out the passengers laughing from the sideline, delighted to have front-row tickets for this bout. The two men pause for a rest at the 34-second mark as a referee steps in. And then, for all our benefit, the sparring resumes.

Claw and scratch all you want, girls, but watch out for the innocent old lady who just wants to cross the stre–

Oh, never mind. You’ve already knocked her down.

Lingling district of Yongzhou, Hunan province.

This video is such a wonderfully awful capsule of urban life in a lower-tier Chinese city. (Specifically Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, in this case.)

There are some thick accents at play here, so I’m not sure exactly what’s happening, but the best guess is there’s a territorial dispute. There are a lot of threats of hitting, but it doesn’t really happen until a quick flurry that starts at the 2:45 mark: the handicapped man swings his shoe; his ally, a standing woman, kicks, then strikes with a crutch.

Perhaps more interesting is how many spectators stand around and watch, blocking traffic.

At the 3:05 mark, a cop finally shows up. He points at the man and tells him to stop. The seated woman finally manages to get a clean shot in, a slap across the man’s ear. There are no winners.

At the start of this video, the man behind the camera says, “Just like Chinese people, to fight over pictures.”

But just over pictures? Or is this an expression of a deeper discontent, a deformity of neither behavior nor genetics but something more fundamental and universal?

This was recorded at Stone Forest Geological Park in Kunming, Yunnan province during the now-concluded Golden Week.

Stone Forest is among the most popular domestic travel destinations in the country, which means of course scuffles would break out. It’s tough enough dealing with millions of people on a daily basis; when it happens during travel season, a time of ostensible leisure, perhaps people are reminded of their irredeemable smallness, or the head-splitting pressures imposed by a world that stops turning only when you’re dead. Upon this epiphany, who wouldn’t lash out at his fellow man?

According to the Youku description, the party secretary of a Hubei town recently siced hired thugs from his hometown onto a construction site in Shiyan due to a contractual dispute. The brawl recorded here happened on September 27 around 9 am.

Xinhua reports that 11 Foxconn employees in a plant in Yantai, Shandong province were injured after a drunken brawl on Friday Thursday as part of Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations. More than 300 people reportedly gathered to watch the fight.

Police stopped the fracas in a “timely” manner.

An initial investigation showed two young female Foxconn workers began arguing while surfing the Internet outside the plant and the dispute escalated, leading to the brawl.

Xinhua also made a point to deny earlier reports that combatants had been killed:

The injured received medical treatment where necessary, but no people were killed or severely injured, said Foxconn on Sina Weibo on Monday.

The video above was posted to Youku 11 hours ago and claims that the instigators were from Guizhou. Why there are so many shirtless young men in jeans is, like so much of urban factory campus life, a mystery to us.

UPDATE, 3:43 pm: The incident happened at 10:30 pm on Thursday, according to Foxconn’s Weibo. There are pictures as well, via Shenzhen Media and Tencent.

The video sure seems like it was taken during the day, but perhaps someone was filming on a highly sensitive light setting. Perhaps tempers had not died down the morning after. Perhaps Foxconn’s Yantai factory rests under a Teflon dome, and there’s artificial lighting. Not sure. Pictures:

What always unsettles me about these beatdowns is the moment the person with the upper hand sticks out a finger as if it’s the long appendage of Death and holds it above the face of the fallen. How humiliating. How unbefitting a street champion. As if the slaps didn’t already acutely communicate all that was necessary.

Body language, people: a lesson in, this is.

According to the video description, as brought to us by chinaSMACK, urban management officers in Qingdao, Shandong province attempted to demolish the guard room of a “military compound” on the afternoon of September 4. They were met with resistance, as guards and — reportedly, though this is disputed — actual soldiers came out looking for — and getting; this part is not disputed — a fight.

Of course, facts in this case are unverified; we can’t be sure that the building being razed actually belongs to the military. Maybe paramilitary? Maybe an equivalent of the highway patrol, or coast guard? Not sure. But as one netizen deadpanned: “Chengguan are stronger than the military.” That’s not technically true, but considering the power these chengguan wield — and the numbers in which they roll — it sure sometimes seems like it.

There’s no info on this video except that this happened outside a Sina office and the combatants are chauffeurs, but it’s a fight and we like it. There are some real sloppy overhead rights thrown by the man in the darker shirt though. What is he even thinking?

Have you tried driving through Zhongguancun? Your temper would flare, too.

We’re not sure exactly what caused these two men to step out of their vehicles and fight, but in that traffic jam, we don’t blame either of them.

This happened last Tuesday at Zhongguancun, Beijing’s electronics district.