Copyright chinadigitaltimes
Police and media silence after a car plowed into a large crowd of students and parents near an elementary school in the city of Shiyan, Hubei province, has angered many Chinese netizens. Video shared online showed a white sedan running a red light, accelerating, and driving straight into a crowd of students and parents waiting on a traffic island near Chongqing Road Elementary School. Photos from the aftermath showed injured adults and children lying on the ground, and scattered books and shoes. The incident occurred on October 22 at 5:29 p.m. local time, just as parents were picking up their children from school. Eyewitnesses said that many students and parents were injured, and multiple victims were given CPR at the scene. Local residents later reported that as many as 22 people were being treated in local hospitals. An official police statement did not appear until three days after the incident, with no explanation for the delay. Issued by Shiyan City Public Security Bureau’s Maojian District Substation, the statement described the incident as a vehicular accident resulting in one fatality, four serious injuries, and several minor injuries. It said that the driver, a 48-year-old man surnamed Chen, had been detained on suspicion of “endangering public safety through dangerous means,” a serious criminal offense, although it did not specify whether Chen had been intoxicated or otherwise impaired, or whether he had intentionally driven into the crowd. In the days between the incident and the official statement, local media outlets were bombarded with requests for more information and reporting. This prompted one local outlet, the Shiyan Evening News, to pin a helpless-sounding plea to its official account on Douyin (TikTok’s counterpart in the Chinese market), and at least one reader to post an outraged response: Pinned post on the Shiyan Evening News official Douyin account: “Our hands are tied, too. 🙏” Anonymous commenter: "’Our hands are tied, too.’ Oh, isn’t that nice ! ! ! Then what’s the point of you? ?” [Chinese] Shiyan Evening News’ mea non culpa calls to mind an incident in 2012, when the Beijing News—after publishing an op-ed accusing the U.S. of “scheming” to help protect blind human-rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng—posted on its official Weibo account a black-and-white photo of a mournful clown taking a drag on a cigarette, with the caption: “In the still of the deep night, removing that mask of insincerity, we say to our true selves, ‘I am sorry.’ Goodnight.” Given a spate of indiscriminate “revenge on society” (or “Xianzhong”) attacks that raised public concern in 2024, many observers wondered whether the Shiyan incident might have been a deliberate attack. There were some rumors that the driver might have been seeking revenge on society after falling victim to a Ponzi or pyramid scheme—the Yongbeida pyramid scheme, which targeted people in Shiyan, was mentioned. Some on social media noted similarities between the Shiyan incident and the November 2024 vehicular attack in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, that killed 35 people and injured 43 outside a sports stadium. The Zhuhai attack, too, was characterized by a delayed police announcement, a dearth of investigative reporting, and intense social media censorship. (CDT chose the victims of such indiscriminate attacks as 2024’s People of the Year.) CDT Chinese editors have archived three articles, one censored, on the deadly collision in Shiyan. The first, from WeChat blogger Song Qingren, is an angry broadside against those who behave “like beasts.” Song mentions the driver in the Shiyan attack and a separate incident in which a couple severed elevator cables in a residential building in Inner Mongolia, and quotes Lu Xun and Sigmund Freud and other writers on what might possibly motivate those who seek to inflict such harm on others. The second, from WeChat account Eggbot, notes that 48 hours after the Shiyan car-ramming incident, the public was still waiting for information and the police had yet to issue a statement. The author also mentions the many local residents and parents who, seeking more information on the crash, made calls to traffic police and other local authorities but were turned away with various excuses. Lastly, a now-deleted in-depth article from WeChat account Aquarius Era includes eyewitness accounts, numerous photos, and a diagram of the scene of the collision. One of the parents interviewed describes seeing six or seven children lying on the ground, and security guards performing CPR on some of the injured, who appeared unresponsive. When she passed the scene later, she saw traffic police vehicles and at least nine ambulances. The article also documents numerous examples of online and offline censorship: police shooing people away from the scene of the accident; families of hospitalized victims being assigned local cadres as “minders” and having their cellphones confiscated; muting of parent-teacher group chats; search censorship for “Shiyan” and other related terms on at least four social media platforms; and content about the incident being deleted from WeChat, Douyin, QQ, and RedNote. One person reported that, after posting a video of the accident on Douyin, they received a warning call from local police.
