Chinese passenger suffers public shaming for ‘crime’ of taking someone else’s seat on a half-empty train
Student bombarded with abuse and has his private details shared by online lynch mob after getting involved in a row with a fellow traveller
A Chinese man who got into a row with a fellow rail passenger about a seat has been subjected to a high-profile shaming after an online vigilante mob started exposing all aspects of his life to public scrutiny.
Footage of the incident shows the cause of the row was trivial enough. The man, a PhD student surnamed Sun, started arguing with a woman who claimed he had taken the seat she had booked on a high-speed train between Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, and Beijing on Tuesday.
Sun had taken a seat at random on a half-empty train and fallen asleep. He started arguing with the woman when she woke him up and asked him to move.
When the woman asked whether he could walk, he replied: “Get a wheelchair. What else can I do?”.
His bolshie attitude – and the perception that he had been pretending to be disabled – was the spark for an online frenzy.
Sun soon found himself facing a storm of criticism from internet users, who started sharing his ID card and full name online and bombarding him with hostile phone calls and social media messages.
Such online frenzies have been reported in China and other countries before, with net users raking over every aspect of their targets’ lives.
Other members of the public who happened to share the man’s name were also exposed to the fury of the online mob.