Wu Guangqiang

    jw368@163.com

    THREE Chinese students studying in the U.S. were given varying prison sentences on Feb. 17 at a court in California for kidnapping and assaulting a fellow student.

    The two principal criminals, Zhai Yunyao and Yang Yuhan, both female and born in 1996, were students at Oxford School, a private middle school for grades 7-12 in Rowland Heights, California.

    They had taken their victim, a fellow female student surnamed Liu, to a park in Los Angeles where they held her against her will and tortured her for over five hours. They stripped the victim naked, kicked her with high-heeled shoes, slapped her, burned her nipples with cigarettes and even made her eat sand and her own hair.

    They were sentenced to 13 and 10 years, respectively, in prison.

    Another 19-year-old man, Zhang Xinlei, was sentenced to six years in prison for his role as an accessory offender in the brutal attack even though he did not directly participate in the beating but fetched a pair of scissors that the others used to cut the victim’s hair.

    The case has attracted widespread attention in China for two main reasons. One is that campus bullying is commonplace across China but no offenders have ever been given punishment as harsh as a prison sentence. The other is that an increasing number of teenage Chinese students are being sent abroad for education but few of them receive adequate education on the importance of obeying laws, and few parents realize the consequences of sending their children abroad alone without sufficient supervision.

    In an article titled “Nip School Bullying in the Bud” published in the Shenzhen Daily on Oct. 30, 2012, I attributed the rampant occurrence of school bullying in China to the lack of intervention and punishment and the absence of relevant legislation in China.

    In the article, I wrote, “Over the years I have seen things in Chinese media that are difficult to forget: A group of teenage girls bully a girl of their own age, slapping, kicking and even stripping the victim, laughing throughout.”

    That’s exactly what happened in the Los Angeles attack! But according to Zhai Yunyao, she was not aware of the severity of her offense until she was brought to justice. In her eyes, she considered the assault at most a prank or a minor mistake. Had she attacked a classmate in a similar fashion in China, she likely would have received a slap on the wrist such as a verbal warning or a major demerit on her school record. The harshest penalty could be school expulsion. A prison sentence would be out of the question.

    As a result, bullies are almost encouraged to be cruel and some Chinese teens are becoming increasingly notorious for their ignorance of legal sense. Not coincidentally, a 17-year-old Chinese student was recently expelled from school and deported only three days after he arrived at a boarding school in the U.S. He wielded a fruit knife at a classmate while arguing with him and acted violently after a school administrator intervened.

    In a sense, these teen offenders are victims of the lenient treatment of offenses in China and their parents’ rash decision to send them abroad without supervision. These “parachute kids” are left alone thousands of miles away with no supervision and too much freedom. That is a formula for disaster.

    “This is a wakeup call for ‘parachute kid syndrome,’” said Yang Yuhan in a statement read to the judge by her attorney.

    In my opinion, this is a wakeup call not only for the parents who have sent their children abroad or are considering doing so, but also for Chinese authorities and Chinese society as a whole. It’s high time that we came to understand the meaning of the proverb “Spare the rod, spoil the child” in a modern context.

    The case should serve as a catalyst to speed up legislation on preventing school bullying in China.

    (The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.)