Yesterday, when I was boarding my flight back to Shanghai, I browsed my Google Reader on my mobile phone, and heard the news that the young man killing 6 policemen was already executed. What a shock news. I feel deep sorrow for him, and feel even more hopeless about the justice of the country.
My friends outside China felt strange to know that I pay sympathy to a man who killed many policemen. It is even more wired that many of my friends feel the same. What’s wrong?
It reminded me of a case described in The Tipping Point. The story was about a man riding subway were approached by some bad guys, and he immediately shoot all of them to death. In a normal situation, what is right and what is wrong is obvious, but in New York at that time, when crime rate is so high, that people got robbed, killed, stolen in the subway, they feel so hopeless, and the man became a hero in many people’s heart, just as a Robinhood. If sense of justice and security was reinforced, the society becomes “normal”.
It is the same case in China. When the young man was mistreated by policemen, and he tried everything to seek for justice, and the current society doesn’t give any justice. Feeling hopeless and angry, Yang takes a step that people don’t take in most normal society – using violence to solve the problem. From what I read, and some people I talked with, there is a Yang in themselves, and the only difference is, they are not angry enough or “brave” enough to take their knives yet. That is why the whole story is so sad.
I am not saying Yang should not be punished, but punish without restore of justice encourages more cases like this. There was a golden opportunity to restore the justice Yang was seeking for before he dies, but the situation turned out to be, we are much far away from justice by even more violently protecting the bad guys. Now, Yang is dead. Even though there is no bad guys as Yang claimed, there is no chance for the rest of us to know, and that is a pity in the history of this nation.
I believe this case will remain in history for a long time, when people look back and study the abnormal society we ever lived in. We cannot really understand what an event means only after few years. I believe this is such an important event. It happens yesterday.
I’m sad too.
No Citizens,just dusts in this country.
I can’t agree more. Yang was buried with the justice in this nation.
“We cannot really understand what an event means only after few years”,
I agree with this sentence,having nothing to do with this case .
Time will tell us the truth & justice.
is there any “hidden” facts about this events beyond what we learned from the news? if not, then it’s barely possible to justify Yang’s “brave” action. if yes, please specifiy. Yang may have been mistreated by the Police. if so, has he exhausted all the possible means to get the justice, such as fire a law suit, make some demostration outside of the Security Bureau? or just write some posts on tianya.cn? it’s interesting to see so many different conclusions can be drawn based on the same set of facts.
This Yang incident should be one of the stories in The Tipping Point. It should be a must read book for government leaders involved in the decision-making process of the country.