Photo: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
In China, most protests are quickly censored, so when an act of collective dissent breaches the “Great Firewall,” it opens a rare window to examine tensions between state and society. On August 4, 2025, thousands of residents in a small Chinese city took to the streets to demand accountability in a school bullying case. The incident sheds light on the Chinese government’s continued preference for suppressing dissent, rather than meaningfully addressing the grievances driving that dissent.
On August 2, videos from the southwestern city of Jiangyou, in Sichuan Province, started circulating on Chinese social media. The footage showed three teenagers brutally beating another girl in an empty housing block.
On August 4, the Jiangyou police released a statement claiming the 14-year-old victim “had a conflict” with one of the girls beating her in the video, who enlisted two other girls to join the attack that allegedly happened on July 22. The statement said the victim suffered “minor injuries” to her scalp and knees. The statement claimed that as a consequence, two of the perpetrators were sent to a correctional school, while the third attacker and the bystanders were admonished.
Feeling the punishment was too light, a large crowd joined the victim’s parents to demand accountability in front of the city hall. The victim’s deaf mother was so overcome by emotion that she later fainted. Some residents also stormed the building, after which local officials invited the protestors to a conference room and heard their complaints about the government’s handling of the bullying case. It is not clear what the officials said during the meeting, but people were clearly unconvinced. At one point, they started shouting “resign, resign.” Some of them later rushed the stage and came close to beating one of the officials, footage shows.
Later that day, thousands of residents gathered near the city hall. Several buses of SWAT teams, or Special Police, arrived on the scene shortly afterward, and police set up barricades and roadblocks in front of the city hall. The SWAT unit, dressed in all-black uniforms and armed with batons, is the primary riot control unit for suppressing protests in China. The police arrested several protestors in the afternoon, videos show.
Despite that, even bigger crowds formed in the evening. People started singing the Chinese national anthem and chanting: “No to bullying, give our democracy back!” Around midnight, videos show a SWAT team charging into the crowd and violently beating protesters with batons. They also used pepper spray and arrested more protestors that night. By 3 am, the police had largely cleared the area.
The “Jiangyou Incident,” as Chinese netizens dubbed it, went briefly viral on the Chinese internet. On August 5, a documentary chronicling the events was uploaded to YouTube, drawing over two million views in one week. The protests also received global attention. But Chinese censors quickly scrubbed the footage and mentions of the protests from major social media platforms like Weibo. Only state-affiliated accounts’ comments remained.
School bullying is relatively common in China, so why did this particular episode lead to a highly contentious standoff between residents and local authorities? Several factors may have fueled the public discontent in Jiangyou:
The incident also exposed the weaknesses of Chinese laws in prosecuting youth violence and protecting underage victims, but there are signs that the government is attempting to address these gaps.
Last year, the Chinese supreme court released a guidance document that underscored the need for strict intervention and legal enforcement against school bullying. In June, the Chinese national legislature amended a public security administration law, which lowered the age limits for detaining minors who commit serious crimes for the first time or repeatedly commit less serious crimes. A senior government advisor said the changes stemmed from the fact that some juveniles had abused their status as a minor to commit crimes, a loophole that led to strong public criticism.
However, when it comes to administrative laws in China, enforcement is often arbitrary. Local officials frequently interfere with court cases to advance personal interests, which feeds into a public perception that the legal system preys on the most marginalized in society but spares the most privileged.
The central government has sought to address this problem as well. In 2015, relevant national authorities issued several documents prohibiting officials in local governments and the judiciary from interfering with court cases, which came to be known as the “Three Stipulations.”
Earlier this year, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued a set of guidelines on the country’s judicial work, urging local officials to support the courts in “exercising judicial power independently and impartially in accordance with the law.” However, there is still significant distrust among Chinese citizens about judicial interference in China.
The crackdown on Jiangyou protestors highlights a major point of tension in China’s governance system: there is no effective channel through which people can seek redress when local governments fail to uphold public interests. This means public dissent may be the only way to do so, even as such criticism is heavily censored and punished. If local officials are unwilling to address public grievances, it is most likely because of a high political capital or is simply beyond their purview, and they swiftly deploy coercive measures to stamp down public airing of grievances.
In doing so, local governments are following the law. Beijing requires them to strictly “maintain stability” and prevent or terminate mass protests, and China's narrow definition of a “legal protest” allows law enforcement to legally use less-than-lethal force against almost any protest, especially if they are near or on government premises.
In Jiangyou, the authorities also had a strong reason to quickly deploy riot police and suppress the protests. The August 4 protests took place just a few days before the August 7 inauguration of the 12th World Games in Chengdu, the provincial capital 100 miles away from Jiangyou. If such a visible display of public discontent was allowed to continue, local officials would have incurred high political costs.
Incidents like the one in Jiangyou will likely become a growing challenge for the Chinese state. As China experiences a protracted economic downturn, ordinary people’s living standards have broadly declined over the past few years. Social tensions created by high unemployment, an unprecedented property crisis, and mounting household debt have sparked more protests.
The China Dissent Monitor project at the D.C.-based Freedom House has tracked more than 11,000 cases of public dissent in China since May 2022. Of those, nearly 3,000 cases were recorded between January and July 2025 alone. In fact, the first half of 2025 saw a 75 percent increase in these cases compared to the first half of 2024.
It is also important to note that social media has been central to large-scale decentralized, spontaneous protests in China, such as the White Paper Movement in November 2022, the Pucheng Vocational Technical School protest in January 2025, and the latest incident in Jiangyou.
Chinese authorities have continued to censor and punish dissent, fortifying online censorship, requiring user verification for social media accounts, and developing mechanisms to better coerce and demobilize protestors—all in a bid to boost the state’s capacity to preemptively quash dissent before it escalates.
However, absent meaningful channels for public feedback, these measures risk eroding the state’s ability to accurately assess the public sentiment in China and respond to governance issues by discouraging its people from voluntarily sharing information that would help the state achieve its own goals.
In this context, we can expect the Chinese government to continue relying on invasive and coercive tools to maintain stability. As a result, the government may make more unforced errors, leading to a more disgruntled public and the continued emergence of dissent. Subsequent crackdowns may then divert government resources toward “stability maintenance” and away from remedying the underlying social issues.
Under the “Jiangyou Incident” documentary on YouTube, a top comment reads: “I am shocked that in an age in which people only mind their own business, so many stood up and gave voice to a stranger.” So long as substantive legal and police reforms do not follow, this likely will not be the last time Chinese people find themselves gathering in solidarity with victims and their families.
The authors would like to thank Anita Lin for research assistance.
