On Thursday, 21 June, a 19-year-old girl sat on the edge of the roof of an eight-floor mall in Qingyang, Gansu Province, and listened peacefully to the jeering of onlookers for her to go ahead and commit suicide. The fascinated crowd gathered at 1pm, when the girl, surnamed Li, first appeared at the building’s edge. They would need to wait 5 hours to get what they came to see.
In a video that has gone viral on social media, a bystander is recorded calling Li “a coward”, with others yelling, “Hurry the **** up! I’ve been sun bathing for hours now, all because of you! Are you going to jump or not?” Another shouted, “Just get it over with! I still have to go pick up my kid!”
A trending post on Insight’s WeChat official account claims that Li’s death is not suicide, but murder, committed by “snowflakes who do not believe themselves responsible for the avalanche”. The jeering onlookers had drawn up seats on the street below in order to sit back and watch events unfold.
But neither the malice of the bystanders nor their moral turpitude are new. As long as 100 years ago, Lu Xun, the guru of Chinese modern literature, held the cruel indifference of bystanders accountable as a form cannibalism in his novel, “A Madman’s Diary”. Over the span of the century, countless similar stories have emerged from small towns and large cities, alike, across China.
The behaviour of the onlookers aside, the background to Li’s suicide is also heart-breaking. In a hand-written letter, posted by Toutiao News, Li accused her teacher, Wu Yonghou, of attempted rape, not long after she enrolled at Qingyang No.6 Middle School, in 2016. Li reported the incident to the teacher she found the most trustworthy, who told her to “drop the charge” because there is nothing she can do. Li then turned to the teaching director, who scoffed at her for “making a fuss over an attempt”.
When fairness could not prevail, Li’s resort to the justice system ended up being the last straw. Police refused to bring charges against Wu, who claimed to be doing “a physical examination” on Li, in case she had “a fever”. Despite medical records and other evidence, the People’s Administration of Prosecution of Qingyang stated that there was no direct link between the alleged assault and the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from which Li was said to be suffering.
Li’s suicide has aroused condemnation of the jeering from netizens nationwide, while expressing their sympathy. Before Li left the world, amongst the cold-blooded cheering, she looked around and thanked the young fireman who had remained nearby throughout her ordeal.
