Font size: 
Thousands of armed police from Sishou and nearby Wuhan city were sent to disperse the crowd early Sunday. Some 200 people were injured in the clash. The police arrested around 70 people and eventually managed to take away the body. Officials said an autopsy would be conducted to discover the cause of death.
The body of the 24-year-old chef, Tu Yuangao, was found outside the Yonglong Hotel Wednesday night. The police judged his death a suicide, but the victim’s family questioned why there was no blood on the ground where the body was found, while dried blood was apparent on the body.
The family carried the body into the hotel lobby, where Tu’s father guarded it and refused to hand it over to the police for cremation, claiming that would amount to the destruction of evidence. Tu’s parents believe their son was murdered.
Local residents began to gather around the family in the lobby to prevent the police from claiming the body, spilling into the street and eventually numbering in the thousands. They proclaimed a vigil for the dead man, setting up barricades and hurling stones, bottles and bricks at police who tried to enter the hotel.
The hotel is a popular gathering place for local officials. According to Internet sources the owner is a relative of the city mayor, while other officials or their relatives in the judicial and public security departments are shareholders. It is also a suspected center of drug trafficking.
One version of the story surrounding the man’s death is that he had approached his boss at the hotel to demand unpaid wages, and threatened to reveal information about the drug trade when his demand was not met.
Local residents told foreign media that this was not the first such suspicious death. The body of a girl was found outside the hotel two years ago, under similar circumstances, and the hotel paid the girl’s family to keep quiet, they said. Other unnatural deaths have taken place in the past 10 years, they added.
Tu’s father was reportedly also offered 30,000 yuan (US$4,400) in “hush money,” but he refused.
Local residents contacted by foreign media said that Internet services in the city were down since Saturday, in an attempt to prevent them from spreading word of the riots. The official media version of events said that “gangsters” had incited the crowd to attack police, as the bystanders “did not understand the truth” of the situation.
On Sunday morning the city government’s website was hacked; it carried a single sentence reading, “There is only one truth.”
This is yet another incident in which Chinese citizens have expressed their pent-up frustrations with the authorities and turned against them to defend a fellow citizen whom they see as an innocent victim of corrupt officials.
An earlier recent case involved a young woman who stabbed and killed an official with a fruit knife as he attempted to rape her. Her arrest and trial aroused huge indignation among the population, who saw this as a clear case of self-defense. She was found guilty, but released after being judged to have a “mental illness.” The court did not acknowledge the official’s guilt in assaulting her, however.
The incident in Sishou has prompted China’s online community to coin a new appellation for the People’s Liberation Army – calling them “body snatchers.” It is only the latest in a series of such phrases coined to refer to official misdeeds on the Internet, part of a new language of discontent that simmers just below the surface of China’s officially “harmonious society.”
