Fun fact: three of the stories we’ve posted in the past two days have been from Shenzhen. It’s where Alicia and I happened to be this weekend (for Ultimate Frisbee), and on Sunday we attempted to fly back.
Attempted and succeeded — but barely. A separate Shenzhen-to-Beijing airline ended up being delayed until 2 am, while our flight was only set back two hours, to 11 pm. (To the best of my knowledge, it wasn’t because of bomb threats.)
It’s 8:40 pm on a Friday. We’re lined up at the China Eastern Airlines counter a full ninety minutes before takeoff, and I have everything I need for a great, just-quit-work weekend: passport, check; cleats, check; Frisbee, check; baijiu-Fanta mix, check. But just then, China decides to remind me where I am. Ahead of us in line, an argument begins to stew, froth, and bubble. The verbal combatants are an elderly couple, possibly from the countryside, and two overdressed, overly made-up, and apparently overconfident young women.
The initial dispute is over whether a luggage cart bumped into an ankle, but it gets ugly fast: one of the girls taunts the old man's ability to speak standard Mandarin Chinese. Airline employees break up the verbal sparring as quickly as they can, but the tone for the evening has been set. At the counter, a friendly but frazzled attendant tells me my flight doesn't yet have a gate, and I already have an idea of what I'm in for.
Guijie, the prominent dining street on Dongzhimen Inner Street in Beijing, was the scene of a terrifying brawl on Sunday around 5:30 pm, according to the description on the above video, recently uploaded by Ai Weiwei. There are scant details, but the description also says the fight was between Han Chinese and Tibetan street peddlers/stall-keepers. There are lots of projectiles.
Here is 3 minutes, 17 seconds of two men getting the shit kicked out of them. Right here, the epitome of the expression "beaten within an inch of one's life." It's brutal and vicious -- and then the concrete blocks come out.
The two men lying prone on the ground were apparently thieves, but quoting the top commenter on the Youku video -- "Even beatings have a limit, it's not worth beating them to death."
We're gonna go ahead and slap a viewer discretion advisory on this one. Screenshots for those who would rather not click play:
On Friday, street enforcement officers of Huangshi, Hubei province entered a convenience store and began confiscating goods -- it's what chengguan do -- but before they could finish, local townsfolk decided they'd seen enough. In the ensuing scuffle, chengguan were subject to verbal abuse, followed by phsyical contact. It wasn't pretty for anyone, as you can see.
Three separate incidents involving underaged fighters drew a collective 93,000 views on Youku this week. Check out the last video, in which rocks are introduced by a third party and the combatants, as if in Hunger Games, momentarily ponder whether they want this escalation.
A woman was stripped and beaten in public on Sunday morning in Lanzhou, Gansu province, just outside her residential compound, with her four-year-old daughter present. She was jumped by five women who were reportedly out to teach her a lesson for committing adultery. Hug China has the story:
No information available on this one, and none necessary, really. A woman on a scooter trying to run a red light gets clipped by another scooter, and then a fight breaks out. He tries to kick her in the head a la CM Punk, while she goes for the small package, i.e. inside cradle. More mixed gender tussling ensues, like we're back in the Attitude Era. Good times.
“Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.”
--Richard Price, The Wanderers
