What’s the color of August? In China, I can guarantee you, it’s red. Because historically, Japan announced its surrender in mid-August during WWII, ending its invasion and colonization of China. Also, the army of the Chinese Communist Party, called the People’s Liberation Army, usually celebrates its anniversary on August 1st. It’s a month of force and victory.
Coincidentally, we did see several interesting fights during this month in Mainland China, starting from August 5th. A case of school bullying in Jiangyou, a city in Sichuan province, triggered mass protests in the streets, ending in a curfew enforced by both the police and the Liberation Army. This is a rare scene to see in China. The last time you could imagine such a view was in 1989, at Tiananmen Square.
You may wonder why this school bullying incident made such a difference. The answer lies in an image — a short video showing the victim’s parents kneeling at the feet of the police chief, begging him to give justice to their daughter. The highlight is that the mother is mute and the father is disabled. Such a family combination is viewed as one of the weakest groups in Chinese society. So, in the eyes of the Chinese people, the whole family was being bullied by a privileged authoritarian system.
The gesture of kneeling before power is the ultimate sign of submission — they were begging, defenseless — but the police and the government showed no mercy, only the usual indifference that most Chinese people are used to seeing in common cases. This crossed the line — the moral bottom line of the Chinese people. Or, to put it another way, it was how blatantly they showed in public that they didn’t care — as symbolized by the image of the parents kneeling at the feet of the police chief. Ordinary Chinese citizens saw in this image the reality of privilege and injustice, which made them surround government buildings and protest in downtown streets.
What intensified this protest was that, coincidentally, in the neighboring city — Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province — China was hosting the World Games 2025. You know China — such disgrace was a slap in the face. So the government wanted to crack it down fast. They did — overnight, they beat everyone in the streets, arrested several people, and sent them away in trucks used for transporting pigs. You heard it right — the protesters were standing in the trucks usually used for shipping pigs. If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, you would understand how sarcastic this scene was.
In the second week of August, a Chinese girl in Australia shifted public attention. Yang Lanlan, a 23-year-old woman, crashed her Rolls-Royce into Kyle Sandilands, severely injuring his chauffeur in Sydney. It actually happened in July, but Chinese social media picked it up at the end of the Jiangyou protest when someone exposed Yang Lanlan’s background. Why? Because people noticed that this young woman was extremely rich and privileged. One piece of evidence was that her bodyguard was found to have served in the Liberation Army and was a martial arts champion. Everything remained unverified, but rumors about her elite family background were soon deleted from Chinese social media — a sign that the government acknowledged the sensitivity of the case.
Again, why was it so unique? You can only understand its impact if you know the famous poisoning case of Zhu Ling from Tsinghua University, who passed away last year. The suspect who poisoned her was her roommate, a girl named Sun Wei, whose grandfather controlled China’s mining industry and was a high-ranking Communist Party member. Coincidentally, Sun Wei also lived in Australia. It’s a nationwide-known case dating back more than 20 years. For ordinary Chinese, it seems that privileged families have a special preference for Australia — just like the natural resources of that country, if you dig deep enough, you’ll find a lot of valuable dirt.
On the last day of August, a slogan was projected onto a building near universities in Chongqing:
“Those who refuse to be slaves, arise. Resist to reclaim your rights. Overthrow red fascism. Topple the Communist Party’s tyranny.”
Risking his life, Qihong planned this act before China’s grand parade next month. I later listened to his interview and learned about his background. He is an ordinary Chinese man who simply couldn’t stand the propaganda anymore and was worried about his daughter’s education under this regime. So he decided to leave for the UK and expressed his dissatisfaction on his way out of the country.
As a Chinese, I can guarantee you that the number of people he represents is three or four times greater than people like me. They’re not well-educated, they lack information, they always struggle in life — but they’re willing to think. I don’t know what it’s like in your country, but in China, overly educated people usually have no guts. They wouldn’t dare to do something like what Qihong did. So many Chinese sent their admiration to this middle-aged man, who successfully carried out his individual protest with clever techniques.
In detail, he engraved the characters himself using a machine he learned to operate, and controlled it remotely. He rented a hotel room and projected the message onto the opposite building for over an hour before the police finally found it and shut it down. By then, he was already on a plane to the UK. A perfect escape — a small victory for a Chinese rebel.
https://www.chosun.com/english/world-en/2025/09/03/JARSTHKY3ZHFDIRHGW42F34XIA/
Biased Chinese 
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