江油抗议Jiangyou Protest
Background and overview: Jiangyou is a county-level city in northern Sichuan, administered by Mianyang, a little over a hundred kilometres from the provincial capital, Chengdu. On August 4, 2025, it saw the most closely watched street gathering in China that summer: residents came in succession to the front of the city government building to demand an accounting for a 14-year-old girl beaten by other teenagers, to call for the attackers to be severely punished, and to ask why the local police had handled the case so lightly and so slowly. The protest ran from daytime into the night, and ended after midnight with special police charging into the crowd and clearing the streets with batons and pepper spray. This entry records how that protest began, unfolded and ended. It started with a case of bullying by minors, was ignited by a police statement widely seen as evasive, and kept growing because of what happened at the scene and the deletions, refutations and arrests that followed. The method here is simple: what the police statement says is recorded as the police statement, what the videos show is recorded as video evidence, and what circulated online without a traceable source is gathered at the end of this entry and marked unverified, never mixed into the factual account.
The case itself: Start with the case itself. In the wording of the Jiangyou Municipal Public Security Bureau's statement of August 4, 2025: on July 22, 2025, a 15-year-old girl, because she had had a conflict with the victim, a girl of 14, enlisted two other girls, aged 13 and 14, and took the victim into an abandoned building in Jiangyou, where she was verbally abused, threatened and beaten, suffering contusions to her scalp, both knees and other places, while companions stood by, watched and filmed. This site, to protect minors, does not publish the names, schools or addresses of the victim or the attackers, and retains only ages and numbers from the anonymised police account. The circulated video and media reconstructions are more detailed than the statement: they show the victim forced to stand against a wall, slapped and kicked, dragged by the hair, forced to kneel, and at one point ordered to remove clothing. Those details come from the footage itself and from media retelling; they are not in the text of the police statement. Readers should keep the two kinds of source distinct: one is an official document assigning a legal character to the case, the other is a visual record of the scene.
The words in the video: What stung the public, besides the images, was what the attackers said. In the video the victim, crying, says her father will call the police. One attacker answers: do you think we are scared of you? It is not as if we have never been inside before. Another adds: we have been in more than ten times, and we are out in under twenty minutes. Those two sentences became the most widely quoted lines of the whole affair; they were turned into hashtags and written into the slogans shouted at the protest. They provoked such a reaction because, to many listeners, they did not sound like ignorant boasting by children, but like a public mockery of the scale of law enforcement: if you can go in more than ten times and walk out quickly each time, what is a beaten child supposed to rely on? Two qualifications belong in the record. The exchange comes from the circulated video and was never confirmed word for word by the police; and Jiangyou police, as relayed later by local media, said the ten-times claim was a deliberate exaggeration meant to frighten the victim out of reporting them, adding that the 15-year-old had once been through mediation at a police station over a dispute. The two accounts are recorded side by side; this site is in no position to rule for either side.
A disputed timeline: Thirteen days separate the attack from the public statement, and those thirteen days are a second point of dispute. That the victim's parents reported the case to police on the evening of July 22 itself is denied by no one, in either media reporting or the police's later responses. What happened in between is where accounts diverge. Overseas archives such as China Digital Times say the people involved were not brought in for questioning until August 2. Fujiang Observer, a Mianyang official-media outlet, on August 6 quoted police as saying that two of the attackers came to a police station for investigation early on July 23, that police filed the matter that same day as a public-order case of picking quarrels, and that from July 24 to August 3 officers were gathering evidence, issuing summonses and commissioning a medical injury assessment. The two timelines do not meet at the key points, and this site records them in parallel rather than smoothing them over for the reader. Separately, a person identifying herself online as the victim's cousin, and relatives speaking in interviews, both said this was not the first time: the girl had repeatedly been bullied and isolated by the same group, her phone had been taken and sold, and the family had repeatedly gone to the school to seek redress. Relatives confirmed the long-term bullying to a Jiangxi broadcasting programme and demanded fair handling and an apology from the attackers' families. Those are statements from the family's side. The police statement does not confirm either the long-term bullying or the selling of the phone; police later confirmed to reporters only that the phone had been taken and had been handed back to the police station for examination.
The video erupts, and the statement: Video of the bullying began circulating on social platforms from August 2, 2025, and by August 3 and 4 it had moved to the centre of national attention. The images, the two lines about having been inside before, and the circumstances of the victim's family together turned a local public-order case into a nationwide topic. On the morning of August 4, the Jiangyou Municipal Public Security Bureau issued its police statement. The text is short, and its core wording has three layers. First, the cause is described as the two sides having had a conflict. Second, the injuries are described as contusions to the scalp, both knees and other places, assessed as minor injuries. Third, on handling, it says only in general terms that two of the attackers had received public-order punishments, and that officers had promptly comforted the victim and her family and provided psychological counselling. It closes by urging people, to avoid causing the victim and her family secondary harm, not to spread the video. The statement did not calm opinion; it became the immediate trigger of the protest. Many people set the words minor injuries against the prolonged beating visible in the video and concluded that the text had made the matter smaller than it was; they set had a conflict against a one-sided group beating and concluded that the phrasing diluted responsibility.
The penalties in detail: The specific penalties the statement left out were disclosed by police to media later that day. According to Qilu Evening News on August 4, police said the 15-year-old attacker was given thirteen days of administrative detention and a fine of 1,000 yuan, and the 14-year-old ten days and a fine of 800 yuan, and that both would also be sent, through the prescribed procedure, to a specialized school for correctional education; the 13-year-old and the other onlookers were subjected to criticism and education, and their guardians were ordered to discipline them strictly. Police also explained the legal characterisation to The Paper: the taking of the phone could be understood in the nature of robbery, and attackers over 14 did in principle carry corresponding criminal responsibility, but the case had been characterised as picking quarrels, and all those involved were under 16, so it was handled not as a criminal case but only as a public-order case, and, police said, at the heavier end of the available range. The layers matter. Transfer to a specialized school for correctional education is a measure stated expressly in the statement and the police responses; the exact days of detention and amounts of the fines come from oral disclosure by police to reporters and are not in the text of the August 4 statement itself. This site attributes the two separately so that readers know which sentence can be found in the original statement and which was obtained by a journalist asking.
Where the anger focused: Public anger was not aimed only at the three girls who did the beating. The first layer was distrust of the injury wording: a person beaten like that on camera, and a statement containing only contusions and minor injuries, are hard for an ordinary reader to reconcile. The second was long-standing resentment at the idea of the Law on the Protection of Minors functioning as a get-out-of-jail card. After a series of serious cases involving very young offenders in recent years, age as a protective charm had already become a ready-made phrase online; the line in the Jiangyou video about being out in under twenty minutes amounted to the attackers saying it themselves, out loud. The third layer was dissatisfaction with the local pace: a report filed the same evening, a public statement thirteen days later, and that statement only after the video had spread across the country. A Jimu News commentary summed up the pattern as: nothing is done until it blows up, and what never gets online gets cold treatment. The fourth layer was sympathy for the victim's family circumstances: a mother who cannot speak and a father working away from home, set against attackers' families suspected of having connections. Once that contrast between weak and strong had formed, the case was no longer only an off-campus beating; it had become a test of whether ordinary people can obtain justice at all.
Rumours and the official refutation: The contrast between weak and strong quickly produced speculation about connections. Online claims variously made the attackers' parents a deputy director of the Jiangyou Public Security Bureau, a lawyer, a first-class police supervisor, or a deputy secretary of the municipal Party committee and political commissar. The versions contradicted one another and none produced evidence. On August 5, the Mianyang Municipal Public Security Bureau, through its Mianyang Internet Police account, issued a refutation giving its verification results item by item: among the six parents of the three offenders, two were unemployed, two were working outside the province, one was a local shop salesperson and one was a local delivery worker, and the circulated information about the parents' occupational identities was a rumour. The same notice said two internet users who had fabricated and spread related rumours had been given administrative punishments by public security organs in accordance with the law, that their conduct had seriously disrupted social order and caused a bad social impact, and it urged people not to make or spread rumours. The same day, a video captioned as showing the bullies' parents being arrested circulated online; the Mianyang bureau told The Paper this was untrue, and that the people taken away in the footage were individuals at the scene who had blocked traffic and refused to heed police persuasion. As for the circulating claim that the two sides had settled the matter for money, this site found no source for it in public reporting or in official statements, and no official response addressing it; it is treated at the end of this entry as unverified and is not written into the facts. Which part of the speculation the refutation settled, and how far the public accepted it, are separate questions; this site's responsibility is only to record clearly who said what.
The victim's family: what can be verified: Very little about the victim's family can be verified, and this site writes only what is supported by two sources or confirmed by relatives in public interviews. That the victim's mother is deaf is confirmed by relatives to media, and later analyses by China Digital Times, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and others all use the same fact. Reporting describes a mother who, because she cannot speak, was especially helpless when seeking redress, and at the protest residents were heard shouting that she could not speak and that they would speak for her. The father's occupation is described in multiple reports as a migrant worker working away from home; China Digital Times phrases it the same way. Readers should not confuse this with the Mianyang police refutation, in which some of the attackers' parents were also said to be working outside the province: the first statement concerns the victim's family, the second the attackers' families. Beyond that, finer claims — whether the father has a disability, whether he can read and write, what the family earns — appear only in individual self-media accounts and overseas commentary, with no second reliable source. This site does not credit them or reproduce their specifics, and lists them at the end as unverified. The victim's own recovery, psychological state and return to school have likewise had no continuing coverage in public channels. This site does not guess and does not go asking: that is both a verification principle and protection owed to a 14-year-old child.
A day at the city government building: The protest of August 4 began at the city government building. After the statement was issued, the victim's parents came to the Jiangyou Municipal People's Government and knelt and kowtowed before an official holding a megaphone, begging him to uphold justice for their daughter, while onlookers gathered in growing numbers. According to scene video and later reconstructions by multiple outlets, the mother broke down at the scene and fainted more than once, and residents around her shouted on the family's behalf, demanding that officials answer questions directly instead of reading from a script. At midday the city government arranged a public dialogue, and several hundred residents entered a meeting space in the government building to voice their dissatisfaction to officials. Their questions concentrated on why the legal characterisation was so light, why it had taken thirteen days, and why the words in the statement did not match what had actually happened. An analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes that at one point people in the room chanted for officials to step down, and some rushed toward the platform, in a tense scene. What exactly officials promised at that meeting cannot be checked: no public record of it was released afterward. What can be checked is the outcome. The crowd that walked out of the meeting space did not disperse; by the afternoon, there were more people, not fewer, in front of the city government and at the main intersections around it.
The gathering after dark: The size of the crowd is the hardest figure in this protest to write accurately, and estimates from different sources never aligned. This site records them separately, by source. Agence France-Presse, the BBC and similar reporting used a figure of more than a thousand. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, Bloomberg and others used thousands. In the earlier part of that afternoon, multiple reports spoke of several hundred people inside and in front of the city government. There is no official total, and this site takes no midpoint and merges nothing; the total is marked unverified at the end of this entry. What can be confirmed is that the gathering grew markedly after dark. The road in front of the city government was blocked, contingents of special police in black uniforms arrived and set up barricades, and the crowd faced the police across them. In scene video, people sing the national anthem together and chant: severely punish the attackers, give the child back the truth, handle the case according to law, being a minor is not a shield for beating people, and serve the people. In video verified by The New York Times, the cry give us back democracy is also heard. Singing the anthem and chanting serve the people deserve to be recorded on their own: they show a crowd using the authorities' own language and rituals, whose starting demand was that the system handle a case by the rules it has written for itself, rather than a crowd that had placed itself opposite the system from the outset.
The midnight clearance: The standoff lasted deep into the night. On a timing on which multiple outlets agree, at about 11:30 p.m. on August 4 police began a forcible clearance that continued until about 3 a.m. on August 5. Video archived by China Digital Times and the reconstruction by the Center for Strategic and International Studies record the same set of images: special police charging into the crowd, striking protesters with batons, using pepper spray, people pinned to the ground and dragged away, and some carried onto red trucks and taken from the scene — trucks that onlookers said are ordinarily used to transport livestock. Video verified by Agence France-Presse shows at least two protesters being pulled apart by groups of officers, and a woman in black being dragged away by her limbs. The Guardian, citing a witness, reported at least eight people arrested; that is the most specific arrest figure in public reporting, but it is a witness figure, not a total. Tear gas and electric prods appear in individual reports and circulated clips, but this site found no independent verification of the same standard as for batons and pepper spray, and marks them unverified at the end of this entry. During the day on August 5, large numbers of police were still patrolling and stopping people on Jiangyou's streets; Kyodo photographed officers questioning passers-by in the street. China Digital Times also recorded that in the early hours military vehicles equipped with mobile-phone signal jammers appeared on the streets; that detail comes from internet users' video and is recorded here as a single-source item, with its origin stated.
Official follow-up: Once the protest had subsided, official follow-up ran mainly along two lines. One was refutation and punishment of rumour-makers, namely the Mianyang public security notice of August 5 described above. The other was an attempt to repair the handling of the bullying case itself. On August 6, Fujiang Observer, the Mianyang official-media outlet, reported that the attackers and their parents had apologised to the victim, and that relatives, in interview, appealed to internet users to stop forwarding the bullying video so as not to cause the child further harm. In the same round of reporting, the police explanation of the pace was that the case had been accepted on the evening of July 22, but because many people were involved and an injury assessment was required, no disposition was made until August 4; a local lawyer was quoted as saying the punishments were already at the heaviest end of the range. The Jiangyou education and sports bureau told Jimu News that it would afterwards pay greater attention to preventing school bullying and would make that work a priority for every school at the start of term. By August 6, Jiangyou had largely returned to calm, the road in front of the city government had reopened, though police cars still patrolled the streets. What deserves note is the absent part. On how many protesters were taken away between the night of August 4 and the early hours of August 5, how they were dealt with, and whether anyone was injured, the authorities never issued any corresponding statement at all. In official text, this protest's presence is far smaller than its scale in the scene video.
The censorship record: Running in parallel with the clearance was an online clean-up. The Chinese editors of China Digital Times compiled a dedicated Sensitive Words record, describing the intensity of censorship this time as unusual: videos, photographs, hashtags, articles and comments relating to the bullying case and the protests were deleted or restricted in batches. The measures on record are finely differentiated. Hashtags such as Jiangyou bullying, Jiangyou police beat people and Jiangyou campus bullying were banned outright. Hashtags such as two bullies who beat a 14-year-old girl sent to correctional school reached Weibo's trending list and then quickly vanished. Hashtags such as the beaten minor's mother is deaf were search-restricted, displaying only a handful of results from verified accounts. Another set of officially framed hashtags showed very high read counts but abnormally few comments, judged by the editors to have had comments restricted. On August 5, the Jiangyou topic rose to second place on Weibo's trending chart and then dropped off the list within a short time that morning, a movement recorded by several Taiwan media outlets. Where deletion was incomplete, internet users switched to homophones, writing Jiangyou as the characters for soy sauce to keep discussing it. A China Media Project investigation of August 15 further found that censorship had extended to domestic artificial-intelligence chatbots: products from DeepSeek, Baidu's Ernie Bot, Zhipu and Kimi, among others, produced no information about the Jiangyou protests. On August 7, when Xinhua and other official media livestreamed the opening ceremony of the World Games in Chengdu, large numbers of internet users flooded the comment areas and bullet screens to speak up for Jiangyou; the streams then restricted comments and were at one point interrupted, details recorded by Radio Taiwan International and other outlets.
Fact-checking the videos: The protest produced a great deal of video, and the genuine and the false are mixed together; that point has to be stated on its own. On August 15, 2025, the Taiwan FactCheck Center published its findings: Jiangyou had indeed seen protest clashes, but five circulated clips had appropriated footage of New Year events elsewhere in China and passed it off as the Jiangyou scene, and two further clips featuring slogans such as down with the Communist Party carried audio dubbed in afterwards. Taiwan's Public Television Service, in its reporting, likewise stated expressly that the video shouting for Xi Jinping and the Communist Party to step down had not been verified. The implication cuts both ways. Cries such as give us back democracy were genuinely heard at the scene, in video verified by The New York Times; but the most widely shared clips of political slogans are precisely the least reliable part of the record. This site's rule for such material becomes concrete here: a clip forwarded a hundred thousand times on social platforms has not thereby been verified once. Any footage that has not passed a wire service's checking, carries no original filming information, and happens to be the most emotionally inflammatory of all is treated as doubtful by default. The Jiangyou protest does not need dubbed slogans to prove that it happened; batons, pepper spray and a gathering of more than a thousand people are documented in records that have been verified.
International response: International reporting began on August 5. Agence France-Presse, the BBC and The Guardian set out the basic outline of the scene in the first two or three days: more than a thousand people gathered, police used pepper spray and batons, people were dragged away. The BBC was told by Jiangyou police that questions from foreign media were restricted, and a shop worker near the city government told The Guardian she could not talk because police had already given them a verbal warning. NBC News verified a scene video in which someone shouts across the barricades: what if your own child were bullied by the child of someone of higher rank — what would you do then? The New York Times, telephoning shops near the city government on August 7, reached a woman who said she knew nothing about any protest and hung up. Bloomberg's long report of August 12 placed Jiangyou in a wider frame: protests arising from property and labour disputes are not uncommon in China, but the anger in Jiangyou pointed at social inequality, which made it especially notable. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, in its August 14 analysis, pointed to the sensitivity of the timing: the protest came a few days before the opening of the World Games in Chengdu, and local officials who let the situation spread would have paid a high political price, which helps explain the speed and force of the clearance. Data from Freedom House's China Dissent Monitor, cited in multiple analyses, records at least 128 protests related to campus safety across China since September 2022; Jiangyou was among the larger of them, and one whose images happened to break through censorship. Radio France Internationale reported the attackers' apology on August 6 and continued to follow the censorship and the direction of opinion.
The institutional background: Set back inside the system, Jiangyou turns on three pieces of background. The first is the tiering of the age of criminal responsibility. Under the current Criminal Law, a person of 16 or over is responsible for all offences; those aged 14 to 16 are responsible only for eight categories of serious offence, including intentional homicide, intentional injury causing grave harm or death, rape and robbery; and those aged 12 to 14 are responsible only for intentional homicide or intentional injury causing death, or grave injury by especially cruel means resulting in severe disability, where the circumstances are egregious and the Supreme People's Procuratorate has approved prosecution. The oldest Jiangyou attacker was 15, and the conduct was characterised as a public-order case of picking quarrels, so the case fell naturally into the channel of public-order punishment rather than criminal prosecution. The second background is the system of specialized correctional education. The Law on the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency, revised in 2020 and in force from 2021, provides that a minor with serious delinquent behaviour may, with the assessment and agreement of a specialized-education steering committee, be sent to a specialized school for specialized education; and that a minor who has committed an act defined in the Criminal Law but is exempt from criminal punishment for reasons of age may be given specialized correctional education, in a dedicated facility set apart within a specialized school under closed-loop management, with public security and judicial administration organs responsible for correction and education departments responsible for schooling. The transfer of the two Jiangyou attackers to a specialized school used exactly this system; but its operational details in this case — which school, for how long, and how a return to an ordinary school would be assessed — were never made public. The third background is a detention rule in the process of changing. On June 27, 2025, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress adopted a revised Law on Penalties for Administration of Public Security, effective in 2026, which breaks the convention that minors who break public-order rules are not detained: first-time offenders aged 14 to 18 whose conduct is serious and has a malign impact, among other specified cases, may now be detained, and provisions on handling student bullying were written in. When the Jiangyou case occurred, the new law was not yet in force, and what police had in hand was precisely the old scale that the public most resented. In the 2024 Handan case in Hebei, in which three middle-school students killed a classmate, two defendants received life imprisonment and a twelve-year sentence respectively and a third received no criminal punishment — a judgment that provoked the same argument about age and punishment. Jiangyou is not an isolated case; it is the latest stop on that line of argument.
Latest verifiable status: As of this site's last check in October 2026, the public sequel to the Jiangyou case stops at around August 6, 2025; no new authoritative information has entered public channels since. Item by item: whether the two attackers were in fact transferred to a specialized school, how long they stayed, and when they might return to an ordinary school — no public record. The official phrasing, that work on transferring them through the prescribed procedure was being carried out, is a statement that a process had been started, not a report of its result. The victim's recovery from her injuries, her psychological rehabilitation and her schooling — no public record; after the family's August 6, 2025 appeal to stop forwarding the video, the family gave no further public interviews. How many protesters were taken away on the night of August 4, what happened to each of them, and whether anyone faced heavier liability — no public record; the official account of how people at the scene were handled is reduced to the general wording in the Mianyang police notice of August 5 about blocking traffic and refusing persuasion, and to the administrative punishments given to two rumour-makers. Whether any local official was held accountable, and whether the schools involved published any rectification results — likewise no public record. Writing this section as a string of no public records is not laziness; it is the way this affair actually ended. A protest that brought more than a thousand people onto the streets closes, in official information, with an apology and a refutation, after which the whereabouts and fates of every specific person withdraw from the range the public can verify. What an archive can do here is mark the blank, not fill it with guesses.
Sources for this entry: The materials behind this entry, arranged by reliability, are as follows. First, official texts: the original Jiangyou Municipal Public Security Bureau police statement of August 4, 2025, preserved in Wikisource, which governs the statement's wording here; Jiangyou police responses the same day to Qilu Evening News and The Paper; the Mianyang Municipal Public Security Bureau (Mianyang Internet Police) refutation notice of August 5, 2025; Fujiang Observer, the Mianyang official-media outlet, on August 6, 2025; and the Jiangyou education and sports bureau's response to Jimu News. Second, censorship archives: the Jiangyou Sensitive Words record compiled by the Chinese editors of China Digital Times, together with its archived video compilations, which document the specific lists of banned hashtags, search restrictions and comment restrictions. Third, verified reporting by wire services and international media: video verified by Agence France-Presse; BBC reporting of August 5, 2025; The Guardian, August 8, 2025; video verified by NBC News; The New York Times, August 7, 2025; Bloomberg, August 12, 2025; and follow-up reporting by Radio France Internationale. Fourth, analysis and background: the Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 14, 2025; Freedom House China Dissent Monitor data; the China Media Project investigation of August 15, 2025 into the silence of artificial-intelligence chatbots; and the Taiwan FactCheck Center's video verification of August 15, 2025. Fifth, legal texts: Article 17 of the Criminal Law, the Law on the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency as revised in 2020, and the Law on Penalties for Administration of Public Security as revised in 2025. One point of method: after repeated searching, this site found no independent bylined Reuters report on the Jiangyou protests, and therefore does not cite Reuters in this entry, to avoid crediting one wire service with another's reporting.
Verification notes: The following circulating claims are gathered here and marked unverified; none is used as fact. One, the total size of the protest: sources range from more than a thousand to several thousand, with no official figure — unverified. Two, the total number of protesters arrested: the only concrete figure is The Guardian's witness account of at least eight; the total is unverified, as is the number of injured. Three, the use of tear gas and electric prods: these appear in individual reports and circulated clips and have not been independently verified — unverified. Four, the claim that the bullying lasted about four hours: used by multiple outlets, but the police statement confirms no duration — unverified. Five, claims that the attackers' parents were officials, a lawyer or similar: expressly refuted by the Mianyang police notice of August 5 and recorded here as rumour, not fact; the claim that the sides settled for money has no source and no official response — unverified. Six, details such as the victim's father having a disability or being unable to read and write: found only in individual self-media and commentary — unverified; that the father is a migrant worker and the mother is deaf, by contrast, is supported by family interviews and multiple reports, and is recorded with its sources stated. Seven, the clips in which down with the Communist Party and down with Xi Jinping are shouted at the scene: found by the Taiwan FactCheck Center to carry dubbed audio, and described by Taiwan's Public Television Service as unverified — unverified; the cry of give us back democracy, by contrast, rests on video verified by The New York Times, and the two must not be conflated. Eight, claims that Jiangyou's Party secretary was dismissed, that the centre sent a special team into the city, or that the affair enraged the top leadership: found only in overseas self-media and commentary programmes, with no reliable source — unverified, and not used in the main text. Nine, the claim that the attackers were seen playing pool while supposedly under punishment: a relayed account from local residents, with no footage and no official response to support it — unverified. Any popular claim about this affair that does not appear in the main text of this entry is absent because it could not pass this test, not because this site never saw it.