What China's Talking About Today: The Lawless Children of Bureaucrats

Refusing the advances of a local Hefei official's son landed Zhou Yun in the hospital, without legal recourse.

Burn victim Zhou Yun sustained burns on 30 percent of her body after rejecting the son of high-ranking local officials / Youku

China's popular micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo, is one of the best windows we have into urban Chinese society. The Twitter-like service has 250 million registered users and adds 10 million a month. Because it often moves faster than censors can keep up, Weibo users can discuss stories and ideas that would otherwise be too sensitive for public consumption. It's a remarkable gauge of what China is thinking and talking about, which is why we're launching a regular feature at TheAtlantic.com, reporting on some of the stories dominating Weibo and what they mean.

Trending on Weibo today is the story of the lovesick son of two high-level local officials from China's eastern industrial city of Hefei. He's charged with burning and disfiguring a young girl who refused his romantic advances.

Unable to seek lawful retribution for their daughter's injuries, the victim's family has taken their cause to the Internet -- specifically, to Sina Weibo, where discussion of the assault has spanned nearly five million messages in a little over a day.

Some 9,000 of those micro-blogs shared the following news broadcast from a local Hefei station [Please note, the video includes graphic images of the victim's wounds]:

Nearly four million viewers had seen the video as of 3:00AM on February 28th, Beijing time.

According to Weibo, the assailant, 17-year-old Tao Rukun, broke into the home of his victim, Zhou Yan, in September 2011, doused her in lighter fluid, and set her alight. Burns covered 30 percent of Zhou's body.

Zhou's parents said the assailant's relatives halted compensation for their daughter's hospitalization after Zhou's father refused to sign a document that would facilitate Tao's bail process.

Unable to pay medical fees, Zhou was taken out of the hospital, and she has been suffering from her wounds for roughly six months since the attack.

Zhou's mother, Ms. Li, can be contacted at 86-15156877191 (China mobile number) for donations.

Court proceedings for the assailant have been halted, as the family is stuck in a legal stalemate with one of China's infamous "官二代,"(Pronounced: Guan Er Dai) the popular term for the powerful children of high-ranking officials.

This story has particular resonance with Chinese Netizens, resentful of the spoiled children of officials and business tycoons, who are seen as reckless and above-the-law.

User Leigh_J wrote, "The Guan Er Dai are a lawless bunch... This is like a throwback to the feudal era."

Another user, edo殿, scoffed at the term. "Daddy is a little official, so the son all of a sudden becomes a Guan Er Dai? Where's the distinction in being a Guan Er Dai?"

A similar incident that popularized discussion of China's Guan Er Dai took place in Hebei, the northern Chinese province surrounding Beijing, in October 2010. When apprehended for hit and run, Li Qiming, the 22-year-old son of Li Gang, deputy director of a local police department, uttered five words that went viral on Weibo, as symbol of the public sector's insufferable privilege and lawlessness: "My father is Li Gang!"

About the Author

Massoud Hayoun is a digital-news producer for Al Jazeera America.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”