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BEIJING: A large protest erupted in the southwestern Chinese city of Jiangyou, videos on social media showed, after the beating of a young girl by three other teenagers sparked public outrage.
Protests are rare in China, where any and all opposition to the ruling Communist Party and anything seen as a threat to the civil order is swiftly quashed.
But bullying in the country’s ultra-competitive education system has touched a public nerve, with a high-profile killing last year sparking national debate over how the law deals with juvenile offenders.
On Monday, police said two teenage girls were being sent to a correctional school for assaulting and verbally abusing a 14-year-old girl surnamed Lai.
The beating, which took place last month and left multiple bruises on Lai’s scalp and knees, was filmed by bystanders who shared it online, police said.
The onlookers and a third girl who participated in the abuse were “criticized and educated,” police said, adding that their guardians had been “ordered to exercise strict discipline.”
The case drew outrage online from some lamenting the teenagers’ punishment did not go further.
And later on Monday, people gathered outside the city hall in Jiangyou, in Sichuan province, with large crowds stretching around the block, footage showed.
Video confirmed by AFP to have been taken outside the city hall showed at least two people forcibly pulled aside by a group of blue-shirted and plainclothes police as well as a woman in a black dress dragged away by her limbs.
“They’re sweeping away citizens everywhere,” a person can be heard saying as the woman is dragged away.
More footage taken after dark showed police wearing black SWAT uniforms subduing at least three people at an intersection with hundreds of bystanders.
On Tuesday, the city of Jiangyou was the second top-trending topic on the X-like Weibo, before it and related hashtags were censored.
“The sentence is too light... that is why they were so arrogant,” one top-liked Weibo comment under the police statement read.
On Tuesday, local authorities said on WeChat that police had punished two people for fabricating information about the school bullying case, warning the public against spreading rumors.
Last year Chinese authorities vowed to crack down on school bullying after a high-profile murder case.
In December, a court sentenced a teenage boy to life in prison for murdering his classmate.
The suspects, all aged under 14 at the time of the murder, were accused of bullying a 13-year-old classmate over a long period before killing him in an abandoned greenhouse.
Another boy was given 12 years in prison, while a third whom the court found did not harm the victim was sentenced to correctional education.

LONDON: Britain said it will begin implementing a deal to return some migrants who arrive on small boats to France within days, a key part of its plans to cut illegal migration, after a treaty on the arrangement is ratified on Tuesday.
Under the new deal, France has agreed to accept the return of undocumented people arriving in Britain by small boats, in exchange for Britain agreeing to accept an equal number of legitimate asylum seekers with British family connections.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron announced the “one in, one out” pilot scheme on migrant returns last month.
More than 25,000 people have come to Britain on small boats so far in 2025, and Starmer has pledged to “smash the gangs” of smugglers to try to reduce the number of arrivals.
Starmer, whose popularity has fallen since winning an election landslide last year, is facing pressure to stop small boats from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which leads national opinion polls.
In recent weeks in England, there have been a number of protests around hotels housing the asylum seekers who have arrived on small boats, attended by both anti-immigration and pro-immigration groups.
French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on X that the new agreement between the countries has a “clear objective” to break up the people-smuggling networks, although British interior minister Yvette Cooper would not say how many people would be returned under the scheme.
“The numbers will start lower and then build up,” she told Sky News on Tuesday, adding that the people returned would be those who had immediately arrived on small boats, rather than people already in Britain.
Government sources previously said the agreement would involve about 50 returns a week, or 2,600 a year, a fraction of the more than 35,000 arrivals reported last year.
Critics of the scheme have said that the scale will not be sufficient to act as a deterrent, but Cooper said that the agreement with France was just one part of the government’s wider plan.
The government has also targeted people smugglers with sanctions, clamped down on social media adverts and is working with delivery firms to tackle the illegal work that is often promised to migrants.
A treaty on the scheme was signed last week but not previously announced ahead of Tuesday’s ratification. Britain said the European Commission and European Union member states had given the green light to the plan.