Chinese police arrested nine people in connection with a brutal assault on several women inside a restaurant in the northern city of Tangshan on Friday after the video of the incident sparked outrage among the public.
Local police authorities issued a statement that announced the news of the arrests on Saturday. The video of the incident showed graphic footage on Friday and triggered national outrage and sparked heated discussions online about women's safety and rights in China.
Brutal Assault on Women
Time-stamped surveillance footage circulated widely online and showed a man walking into a barbeque restaurant at around 2:40 a.m. local time on Friday. He walked past a woman who was sitting down and eating peacefully with her companions. However, the man approached one of the women and placed his hand on her back, causing the female to grab him by the wrist and push him away.
The woman can be heard asking the man what he wanted and follows the moment where the man responds by slapping the woman in the face. The incident triggered a scuffle between the two as the woman tried to get the man away by attempting to hit him with a glass bottle, as per CNN.
Surveillance footage also showed the woman's friends trying to stop the fight and later being beaten by the man as well as a group of other men who rushed into the restaurant. The video showed several women being punched, kicked, and grabbed and dragged by their hair on the ground.
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The incident caused a national outcry over women's safety in the region, causing the Tangshan police to publish a statement on Friday saying that they had identified the suspects and were actively searching for them. Authorities also said that two women had been sent to the hospital after being attacked and were in stable condition while two other women sustained minor injuries.
According to ABC News, photographs were captured of a woman lying on a stretcher, with a swollen and bloodied face. The incident renewed discussions about misogyny and mistreatment of women in China. The attack also comes as earlier this year, a viral video of a woman being chained to a wall in a hut drew public backlash after authorities initially denied that she was a victim of human trafficking.
Misogyny and Violence
One Weibo user who was among the first people to upload the video online said that the incident was "heartbreaking" to watch. He asked, "Does that mean that dining out is so unsafe now, do we have to bring men with us everywhere we go? [These men] are no different from thugs."
When asked, the user declined to reveal the source of the videos, saying that it was "inconvenient" to do so. By Sunday, the video of the brutal attack inside the restaurant had garnered more than 68 million views online while the footage of the assault outside the establishment had been taken down.
On Saturday, a widely shared WeChat post took issue with the initial official framing of the assault as a simple act of violence. "This happened in a society where violence against women is rampant. To ignore and suppress the perspective of gender is to deny the violence that people, as women, suffer," it said, Reuters reported.
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