Account of Police Brutality Gives Rise to a #MeToo Moment in China

BEIJING — One late September afternoon, Sun Shihua, a lawyer, walked into a police station in southern China for a routine visit with a client.

What happened next is now the subject of wide debate in China.

Sun says that a male police officer choked and beat her after getting into an argument over credentials, and then forced her to submit to a strip search. In a social media post that was widely shared this week, she called the episode “the darkest, most terrifying and humiliating day of my life.”

Authorities in Guangzhou, the southern Chinese city where the events are said to have taken place, deny any wrongdoing, saying they have security camera footage that challenges Sun’s claims.

The case has revived concerns in China about police brutality and a lack of transparency in law enforcement, after a series of high-profile cases of abuse at the hands of police officers.

As China undergoes its own #MeToo movement, many people have also held up Sun’s case as evidence of persistent discrimination and violence directed at women in Chinese society.

“She was humiliated,” said Huang Yizhi, 32, a lawyer in Guangzhou. “It resulted in tremendous harm to her.”

Sun’s written account, nearly 4,000 Chinese characters long, reverberated across the internet this week, drawing tens of thousands of comments.

In the post, Sun said that when she visited the police station in Guangzhou on Sept. 20, an officer, whose last name was Chen, refused to discuss a request to bail out a client, insisting it be sent by mail. Sun asked to see the officer’s credentials.

Sun says that the officer grew angry, threw his identification card at her and began to beat her, saying: “How dare you grab my work permit? You attacked the police!”

Sun accused the officer of framing her. She said she was forced to remove her clothes while police searched her body for weapons for nearly 20 minutes.

Guangzhou police, in a statement posted on social media Wednesday, disputed Sun’s account and accused her of “disrupting the order” of the police station.

Police said Sun forcibly grabbed the officer’s credentials, which were hanging from his neck, and added that security footage showed Sun had not been “beaten and humiliated.” Police have not filed any charges.

On the Chinese internet, many people spoke out in support of Sun and accused authorities of covering up misconduct.

“It is not very convincing to decide for yourself if you are right,” one commenter wrote, addressing police in Guangzhou. “Please show the video to the public.”

Others sided with police.

“Having lived in Guangzhou for decades, I believe in the Guangzhou police,” a commenter wrote. “It must be true given how fast they responded.”

Fu Hualing, a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, said the popularity of social media in China has led to a surge in accusations of police brutality in recent years.

A video from last year that showed an officer shoving to the ground a woman as she clutched her infant drew millions of views and drew widespread condemnation. And in 2016, the death of an environmentalist while in police detention was widely denounced.

“The image of the police has been very politicized in the past two years,” Fu said. “The old rhetoric of the police as a tool of dictatorship and of the party has gained some momentum.”

Sun was unavailable for comment Friday. Her husband, Sui Muqing, said she had chosen to speak out to prevent future attacks on women.

“What she does is not only meaningful to herself but also to society,” he said. “She is trying to protect more female victims.”

Sun, in her account, wrote about the difficulties facing lawyers in China. “As a female lawyer,” she said, “I’m the most helpless of the helpless.”

Under President Xi Jinping, the government has imprisoned and harassed hundreds of human rights lawyers in recent years. While Sun, who started her career in 2000, has focused on civil and commercial law, the client she was visiting in September had a grievance against the government.

In her post, Sun compared herself to a fish about to be cooked at the hands of police.

“They are the knife and the chopping board,” she wrote. “I am the fish. I have to swallow my sadness and live with the insult!