Protests broke out in China’s northern province of Shaanxi on Thursday, a week after a teenage boy fell to his death from a school dormitory.
The protest was unusually large and fierce for subjects of the authoritarian Chinese Communist regime. Security forces responded with vicious beatings, while government censors frantically deleted videos of the scuffles posted to social media.
The victim of the January 2 dormitory accident, a 17-year-old identified only by his surname “Deng” (as is common in Chinese media), was a third-year student at the Pucheng Vocational Education Center.
According to local officials, Deng was awakened on the night of his death by other students talking loudly in the dormitory. He launched into a “verbal and physical altercation” with another student, which was broken up by a school official.
What happened next is uncertain. Deng’s body was discovered by another student outside the dormitory building later that evening. The sliding window of a bathroom overhead was open, and a wooden stool was reportedly discovered under the window.
The police conducted a hasty autopsy and decided his death was not a “criminal case.” The school issued a statement describing his death as an “accident where a student fell from a height.”
Deng’s family rejected this account of the young man’s death, insisting that he was “bullied on campus” and his body displayed injuries that were inconsistent with death from a fall. The family said police hustled them away from viewing the body before they could perform a thorough examination.
The family also said the school told them its surveillance system was mysteriously “damaged” so there was no security footage from the night of Deng’s death to review. When his relatives took possession of his cell phone, they found some of his photos had been deleted without explanation.
Hellbound and Down 