Comment on this story
Comment
Hundreds of rural bank customers in central China’s Henan province were attacked, beaten and kidnapped by a group of unidentified men on Sunday as they protested local government corruption amid a months-long freeze on their deposits.
Since mid-April, depositors have been pressuring Henan authorities to help restore savings from at least four small “rural” banks that have suspended withdrawals. The campaign gained national attention last month after a planned demonstration in Henan’s capital, Zhengzhou, was thwarted by digital health codes that mysteriously turned red. After a national outcry over the abuse of the system to fight the coronavirus, the central government stepped in by punishing five local officials.
Over the weekend, depositors tried again, this time with valid “green” codes. At dawn on Sunday, according to videos of the incident shared on Chinese social media, hundreds of protesters unfurled banners alleging corruption on the steps of a local branch of the People’s Bank of China, including one in English that proclaimed “No Deposits. No human rights.”
How a huge Chinese ‘Ponzi scheme’ lured investors
“The Chinese dreams of 400,000 depositors in Henan have been shattered,” read another banner, referring to President Xi Jinping’s slogan promising a better life for those who work hard and remain loyal to the Chinese Communist Party. Many waved Chinese national flags.
They also accused the government of working with the “mafia” to violently quell the protests. It is not clear exactly why the banks froze withdrawals, but police are currently investigating Henan New Fortune Group, a shareholder of four banks, on suspicion of illegal fundraising, according to local media reports.
It is common practice for police in China to attend sensitive events without uniforms, often wearing prearranged insignia instead. During past trials of Chinese human rights lawyers, foreign journalists and diplomats who gather outside the courthouse have occasionally been jostled by unidentified individuals wearing identical yellow badges with smiley faces.
The unusually bold demonstrations were met by dozens of uniformed police, as well as a team of burly men wearing mostly white tops who all arrived together. Videos of the incidents, widely circulated on Chinese social media before censorship intervened, showed blue-shirted officers standing by as burly men in white shirts began attacking the crowd. The protesters were dragged down the steps before being carried away. Some were loaded onto buses, often bruised from the collisions.
“I was in shock from yesterday until today,” one protester said in an interview, requesting anonymity for fear of official repercussions for speaking to foreign media. He repeatedly described the men as “unidentified” but added “I never imagined that it could happen that officials could use this kind of violent beating against unarmed and defenseless ordinary people.”
“If I hadn’t experienced it myself, I really wouldn’t have believed it. When foreign media reported such incidents in the past, I always thought it was slander,” he said.
A Chinese university is the scene of a rare protest against a coronavirus lockdown
In response to videos from the scene, Tsinghua University law professor Lao Dongyang called on Weibo to prosecute those behind the beatings.
Lao added that an “immune system” of media and law should have prevented depositors’ quest to recover their savings from devolving into such brutal scenes. “This is a specific manifestation of an immune system problem: all the normal avenues for seeking relief are blocked. The scary thing is that this could be just the beginning,” she said.
Lost savings are a relatively common cause of protests in China, despite widespread efforts by the stability-obsessed Chinese Communist Party to prevent public unrest. In recent years, a crackdown on poorly regulated financial products and peer-to-peer lending has repeatedly drawn investors to the capital to pressure authorities to offset losses.
China’s rural banks are currently the focal point of a government campaign to rein in debt. These institutions account for about 29 percent of all high-risk financial entities in the country as of mid-2021, according to the People’s Bank of China.
Faced with increased competition from larger institutions, many small banks in recent years have tried to attract depositors by using higher interest rates and also by signing up customers from around the country for online services. Bank regulations are not designed for Internet finance, He Ping, a professor at Renmin University’s School of Finance, told Sanlian Lifeweek magazine.
The Henan Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said on Sunday it would speed up the verification process for customers of the four rural banks under investigation and announce a solution to the problem soon.
Still, depositors continued to look for ways to pressure the Henan government not to ignore the case, including comments under the official Weibo account of the United States Embassy in China. “Quickly report to Zhengzhou. Save us,” one user wrote on Sunday.
Vic Chiang in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.
Add Comment