“Just read a story in Wang Dingjun’s memoir: A landlord’s daughter married an officer in the KMT military. The officer got reassigned to a different base far away, so he sold his fiancee to the brothel. The landlord sold his land to try to ransom his daughter back, but the sale took too long, and by the time he got the money together, his daughter had already been forced to start selling herself. The landlord decided she wasn’t worth ransoming back then, and decided to move back to his hometown. But he couldn’t actually leave because the war was going on, and overinflation made his money worthless, so he ended up having to live off of the money his daughter made selling her body.”
Comments say, “Wow, imagine what the comment section would look like under this if it got popular. I can already predict: 1. People who say all landlords need to die. 2. People who say she should’ve never married the KMT. 3. People saying he couldn’t save her even if he ransomed her back. But all three types are basically the same type of people. That’s just the kind of politics and military bloggers we have these days.”
“Society really ate girls up to the last shred.”
China National Radio comments on the Datong underage bullying incident I covered yesterday [where two primary school boys raped and sexually abused another primary school boy], “Datong City’s Combined Taskforce has issued a statement regarding the controversial Datong Dacheng Bilingual School Underage Bullying Incident: they will sternly rebuke the bullies and order their families to educate them and manage their behaviour, and issue a series of punishments to the school management and teachers. And yet, most internet commenters think this series of punishments is “far too light”.
The reason this incident has drawn to many attention in society is because of the severity and cruelty of the violence inflicted was almost beyond imagination. The nature and extent of the bullying here has updated people’s understanding of how low schoolyard bullying can get. Many people can’t help but ask, “How could a couple of nine-year-old boys be so evil? What has caused this?”
Obviously, there’s something wrong with their school and home education. The school has ignored and neglected the children’s emotional health. And the family has spoiled and indulged the bullies. This is the fundamental reason why this hid in the corners of the school and did not get resolved right away, and eventually resulted in such a shocking ending. In this case, the victim was bullied for more than a year. If the school and family cared even a little bit and acted in time, things wouldn’t have gotten this bad.
And after the incident happened, did the school go about trying to fix the problem right away and help the victim? Or did they try to sweep it under the rug? Did the school managers and teachers stand up to bullying? The bullies’ parents did nothing about their bullying behaviour for the longest time—is that knowingly? Or did they really have no idea? This bullying behaviour clearly has been influenced by the degeneracy of adult society. How did the underage minors in this case even obtain this information?
From this point of view, the severity of the case is clearly not equal to the seriousness of the punishment. Had the bullies been adults, this would be a criminal case. But due to their age, there’s nothing the law can do about their bullying. But even if they can’t be subject to criminal punishments, there are other ways to punish them for their behaviour. For example, if the bullies really are cruel by nature and emotionally underdeveloped, and may be a danger to other children, could they be put into special education schools instead? Or, for example, their bullying has caused enormous pain to the victim and his family. It doesn’t seem fair that the bullies and their family only has to “sincerely apologise” to the victims. And there needs to be further follow up to the problematic behaviour of school management displayed in this case too.
“Gentleness” will never deter bullies. If we cannot use every tool available to us by law to punish them harshly, teach them a lesson, show them what it feels like on the other end, then how can we guarantee it doesn’t happen again? Schools, families, and society needs to be more alert about protecting the environment that children grow up in, that’s obvious. But more specifically to this case, a lot more details still need to be address. This is a perfectly reasonable demand.”
Comments say, “So who’s actually being protected by Underage Minors Protection Law?” [The law that makes it impossible to prosecute crimes perpetrated by minors.]
“If a child’s being problematic, why not just punish their parents?”
“This isn’t bullying. It’s rape.”
“I make 8K a month—should I keep working or go to university? I’m really torn. My work right now is 30 minutes from home by car, but it’s 8K base pay. If my commission is good, I could make five figures a month. It’s super easy, and if I do well, I can become a store owner and run my own store. It’s my third year in community college, doing an internship. I’d always planned to transfer to a proper uni next year. But now that I found this job, I feel like I’ll never find such a high-paying and chill job again. Now I don’t even know if I want to go to uni.”
Comments say, “I mean, it’s not like it’s easy to find a chill and high-paying job with a uni degree, and isn’t the purpose to getting a uni degree finding a job to begin with?”
“8K is a lot. It really depends on what major you want to do if you’re gonna go to uni.”
“You could go to uni part-time if you have a job. Oh my god, I’m so goddamn envious of your job, do you even understand.”
“Over-exaggerating how much women sacrifice in marriages means that men stop wanting to get married at all. Radical feminism is actually just a bunch of profit grabs. They gain a profit by putting men down, and try to use money worship and selfishness to promote being single and childfree. They indiscriminate attack all Chinese men while blindly worshipping western men.”
Comments say, “But doesn’t that work both ways?”
“Girls now are all living ancestors. No one dares to marry them anymore.”
“I mean, isn’t this problem really easy to solve? Just don’t get married. If you don’t like it, then just stay single. Let the feminists see how it feels when no one wants them.”
A compilation of the various reasons people have gotten customer complaints while working at a bank:
“I put my hand on my hips while talking to a customer.”
“Was just talking normally with a customer. I forget what they said, but I looked surprised and asked them to repeat themselves. It got pulled up on security cameras later and my manager said I was making fun of the customer.”
“I’ve gotten a complaint from an anonymous customer which read something like, “She’s much colder than she looks. She was smiling at me, but there was no smile in her eyes.” If it wasn’t for this Mister Anonymous, I never knew I’d unlocked the perfect ability to play a asshole CEO boyfriend in a romance drama.”
“I touched the office plant for a second, and got 4 points deducted.”
“I asked a customer if their peach was sweet and where they bought it, since I’ve been wanting peaches lately. The customer eagerly gave me a peach. I for written up for accepting bribes in the form of fruit.”
“Talking to my coworkers and laughing: 200 RMB fine. Putting my hands on my hips and standing inelegantly: 200 RMB fine. Not standing up when greeting a customer, 200 RMB fine. Looking at my phone, 500 RMB fine.”
“I remember being fined 200 for having a black hair tie around my wrist, because we weren’t allowed to wear anything other than watches on our wrists.”
A news story has been gaining controversy—a Shandong woman diagnosed with breast cancer got divorced by her husband. Many people are mad that the courts will allow a divorce in this case, but not in the case of domestic abuse. A blogger writes, “This incident is actually precisely an example of a case where divorce isn’t legally allowed. You are actually explicitly banned by law from divorcing your sick spouse. The reason the judged ruled in favour of divorce wasn’t by looking at our current, modern-day laws, but instead following ancient custom—because your wife being very sick was one of the seven reasons you were allowed to ask for divorce in Dynastic China.
Of course, there’s still a ton of double standards here too. I’ve never heard of a case of a man getting divorced because he got sick, even if he was abusing drugs.
There’s actually a case that a man hid his mental health history and got married, and the wife wanted a divorce. And the court ruled that she didn’t have any evidence she wasn’t aware of his mental problems when she married him, and wouldn’t grant the divorce. Because I guess the judge thinks she knowingly married an insane dude? Partly, the reason is because the guy needed a caretaker, so she wasn’t allowed to divorce him.
Comments say, “There’s an episode about this in Draw the Line [police drama], where a man was deeply in debt and vanished for 7 years, leaving his wife to raise their adopted daughter alone. The wife found out she had cancer, and wanted a divorce so she could leave her house to her daughter in whole. The guy’s parents tried to draw out time to take a share of the house, which is her pre-marital property anyways. It took a medical miracle for the wife to survive until court opened to leave her house to her children, and she still had to pay the guy 200K to end their marriage.”
“It depends on the situation. If being together is emotionally damaging enough that it’s not helpful to recovery, then the judge might grant the divorce. He’ll just order more of a favourable split of the marital assets to the wife.”
“It’s because judges are worried men will take revenge. But they’re not worried women will try to take revenge.”
In reference to the $8k a month post...do you know if community colleges similar to those in the west? Just curious about the education system / institutions. Thanks as always!