These three people—a female surnamed Wang, a man called Chen Guangquan and a man called Liu Yanchao—were there when Liu Shufen, the girl that died, was supposedly trying to jump off a bridge. If you’ve been following the news you know that the family of the deceased girl believed that she had been raped and killed by the son of a local official, and confronted the police about it. The girl’s uncle was beaten, which sparked the riots and the partial destruction of a government building. Now, to appease the people, a number of senior officials have been sacked, and the investigation into the girl’s death will be reopened.
The three teenagers gave a press conference in which they basically repeated their version of events: they had told her not to jump, one of them left, she then decided to jump anyway, one of the guys jumped in, could not rescue her, nearly drowned himself, and the other guy jumped in and saved him, but neither of them could ascertain the whereabouts of Liu.
I read another report where they said that during autopsies performed on Liu’s body that there was no sign that sexual intercourse, forced or otherwise, had taken place. Who knows. Of course, no one really knows what happened, and so it becomes more interesting for how it reveals the feelings of the masses
towards their government, especially since there were so many other grievances aside from the death
and the beating—the local gov’t seems to have often used “rough-shod” methods to evict people and do whatever they wanted. A typical Chinese story, the only difference being that it was egregious enough
that the death and beating could incite mass violence.
