Month: March 2017

On the afternoon of April 14, 2016, Yu Huan, 22, and his mother were working at their brake disc company in eastern China’s Shandong Province, when 11 men arrived and blocked the company’s entrance, set up a grill and started drinking alcohol and barbecuing outside. It was the second day in a row that they’d been harassing the family.

Awhile later, the men cornered Yu, his mother and an employee in an office. One of the intruders exposed himself in front of Yu’s mother, Su Yinxia, in an attempt to humiliate her in front of her son, an eyewitness told the Southern Weekend newspaper.

Then things got worse.

“One guy grabbed me by the neck and tried to drag me to the reception room,” Yu told police, according to a court verdict posted online. “I resisted and they started to beat me.”

The men were debt collectors, coming to demand payment from the family. In 2014 and 2015, Su Yinxia had borrowed nearly $196,000 from a real estate agent, at a monthly interest rate of 10 percent. She’d paid back most of it but still owed $25,000.

Yu’s aunt, Yu Xiurong, managed to call police, according to the Southern Weekend, but the creditors kicked her to the ground and smashed her phone.

The police arrived. “You can try to collect your debt,” they reportedly told the debt collectors, “but you can’t beat people.” Then they left.

Things escalated.

“I picked up a knife from a table, pointed it at [the debt collectors] and told them not to come at me,” Yu later told police. “They continued to beat me, and I thrust the knife at the bellies of the men surrounding me.”

Later, one of the men whom Yu had stabbed died of blood loss. Yu was charged with inflicting intentional injury. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on Feb. 17, avoiding the death penalty due his good behavior in cooperating with law enforcement authorities.

The court’s verdict found fault with both Yu’s actions and those of the debt collectors, all of whom have been arrested on suspicion to ties with organized crime.

The case has triggered a heated debate on social media in China about citizens’ right to self-defense, as well as the plight of small entrepreneurs under China’s economic policy amid a prolonged downturn in China’s economy.

The debate has been particularly sharp among China’s legal scholars.

“China’s law does not really encourage people to defend themselves, because that would be encouraging them to rise up and resist [authority],” Anhui Province-based lawyer Wang Liang Qi commented online. “That is not something that the nation’s rulers hope to see.”

Self-defense is in fact permitted by Chinese law. Several lawyers, however, argued that while Yu was right to defend himself, the threat level did not justify taking a life, even if doing so was not his intention.

“The police might even have turned a blind eye to the commission of a crime, so the person defending himself had no other option but to fight for his life and his freedom,” Beijing-based lawyer Yu Wenxin wrote on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, in response to people’s questions.

But, he added: “Under Chinese law, the protection of human dignity is a lower priority than the protection of the right to human life.”

Beijing-based lawyer Zhang Qingfang, meanwhile, points out that the debt collectors had been harassing Yu and his mother for two days. He argues that Yu snapped and committed a crime of passion, something for which Chinese law does not have clear provisions.

Zhang also links reaction to the case to government censorship.

“It is precisely because of official controls on expression that some cases touch a raw nerve of the entire nation, and the government allows it to become an outlet for people’s opinion,” he told NPR in a phone interview.

Commentators and experts have also focused on economic aspects of the case.

The court noted that the $196,000 loan to Su Yinxia was illegal, as the monthly interest rate of 10 percent, totaling 120 percent annually, far exceeded the legal annual limit of 36 percent.

The state-run Global Times newspaper quotes Feng Liguo, an expert with the China Enterprise Confederation, a quasi-official business association, saying that Chinese banks loan most of their money to large, state-owned enterprises, and largely ignore small, private ones.

China’s economy grew by 6.7 percent in 2016, its slowest pace in a quarter-century. Many cash-strapped small enterprises have been forced in recent years to turn to private lenders and loan sharks.

Zhang Qingfang, the lawyer, notes that local officials are often involved in loan sharking, fueling popular anger.

Last August, police arrested Wu Xuezhan, the real estate merchant who made the loan to Yu’s mother, for suspected involvement in organized crime. He is facing trial. But Yu’s sister Jiale and his mother were also arrested in December, on suspicion of illegal fundraising. Authorization is required from China’s central bank to raise funds legally, something Yu’s mother did not have when she tried to raise funds to save her business.

Yu Huan’s case follows two others in China that attracted similarly intense public debate last year. One was the posthumous exoneration of Nie Shubin, more than two decades after he was wrongly executed for a murder to which another man later confessed.

The other was the case of a young environmentalist, Lei Yang, who died in police custody, spurring an outcry from middle class college graduates who felt threatened by the arbitrary and unaccountable exercise of Chinese police powers.

Apparently spurred to action by the public outcry over Yu’s case, the central government sent top prosecutors to Shandong Province to re-investigate the case. A higher provincial court has accepted Yu Huan’s appeal, and his family members say they intend to clear his name.

“If my nephew’s sentence is not overturned, I’ll keep on appealing,” Yu Xiurong, Yu Huan’s aunt, told NPR in a phone interview. “I’ll appeal all the way to President Xi Jinping, if I have to.”

It’s a little after 8 a.m. at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., and Michelle Harris’ AP Environmental Science class is getting right to it.

“All right, you guys got your brackets out?” Harris asks.

The class of mostly juniors and seniors ruffle through folders and pull out pieces of paper with brackets — 64 slots, four quadrants, and one central box to predict the championship. But there’s something a little different about these brackets …

“We’re going to jump down to the fourth-seeded spider monkey against the twelfth-seeded antelope squirrel,” Harris says.

“Spider monkey better win!” one student shouts from the back of the class.

This is March Mammal Madness: round two. It’s a competition that’s been playing out online and in hundreds of classrooms over the past month. Real animals wage fictional battles, while students use science — a lot of it — to try to predict the winner.

March Mammal Madness was created five years ago by Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University, though now, she says, the competition depends on a whole team of volunteer scientists and conservationists: biologists, animal behaviorists, paleoanthropologists, marine biologists.

Hinde’s team meets every year for a Selection Sunday of their own. They pick the animals that will compete and even decide who will win, though they keep it a secret. That’s because a whole lot of research has to be done.

Each scientist is assigned a specific battle, then studies up and writes a battle story based on facts.

“Then the battles are live-tweeted as a dynamic, play-by-play story, much like someone would watch a basketball game,” Hinde says.

Those tweets link to scientific articles, videos, photos, fossil records — whatever the team can use to drop knowledge into the story. Which is why so many teachers, including Michelle Harris, have begun using the brackets in class.

As in basketball, there are plenty of upsets and broken hearts: Like the time a snow leopard and a flying squirrel faced off in the rain forest. The snow leopard overheated and lost. Or the time tourists used their human junk food to lure an adorable quokka off the playing field.

“Sometimes animals can displace one another. Sometimes animals can hide, animals can run away. Sometimes they get eaten. Sometimes they actually engage in contact aggression,” Hinde says.

It’s a little ridiculous, but she says the point is to have fun while also creating a learning opportunity.

“We really try to showcase animals that people might never have heard of,” she says. “Like dhole and bandicoot and binturong and babirusa.”

At Wakefield High, Michelle Harris is going over the tweets from one of the previous night’s battles: the number six seed tiger versus the number three seed leopard seal.

“And apparently we need to bundle up,” she tells the class, “because we’re headed to the vast coastal ice flows of Antarctica!”

Near the back of the class, senior Jordan Simpson giggles with Tiara Jones, both looking at a computer screen. They’ve Googled the bilby, a tiny Australian marsupial with big, rabbit-like ears. Simpson says she picked it to go all the way.

“I thought it was cute,” she says with a laugh. “I knew it had no chance, but I thought I’d give it a shot.”

Jones bursts out laughing. The bilby was ousted in the first round by a Tibetan sand fox.

Harris says those fits of giggles are a big reason she uses the bracket in class.

“This time of year can be a little stressful as we’re leading up to AP exams, so it’s nice to have a little bit of fun along the way,” she says.

That’s Hinde’s ultimate goal too — to make science fun.

“I think it’s a chance to return to that time when science was all about the imagination and the wonder at the natural world,” she says. “Science is narrative, and that is incredibly salient to the human mind.”