“All this can happen to me”
The brazen attack has been widely discussed on Chinese social media, occupying the top six most talked about topics on Weibo. “All of this could happen to me, it could happen to any of us,” one commenter said in a post that was liked more than 100,000 times. The state-run news agency The Paper said the incident reflected a toxic culture. “Under the protection of the patriarchal cultural system, it is difficult for the perpetrator to repent of gender-based violence, and it may even give the perpetrator a ‘male’ sense of self-satisfaction,” he said in an opinion article. China Women’s News, published by the Pan-Chinese Women’s Federation, said in a commentary on Saturday that “only there can and must be zero tolerance for such violent cases of serious violations of women’s rights and interests.”
