BEIJING (AP) - Two employees of a Wal-Mart store in eastern China were arrested after a woman was beaten outside the store on suspicion of being a shoplifter and died, a state-owned newspaper reported Tuesday. The China Daily said Yu Xiaochun died 500 yards (meters) from the store in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Local police said in a notice posted on their Web site that the 37-year old Yu was going home Aug. 30 when she was surrounded by five Wal-Mart employees - four men and one woman, all in their 20s - who accused her of shoplifting. The police report said one of the men requested a receipt. But after Yu handed it over, she took it back, saying no one was wearing a Wal-Mart uniform and she didn't believe they worked there. The report said they fought and Yu fell to the ground and was taken to a hospital, where she died Sept. 2. A spokeswoman for Wal-Mart in China, Vivi Mou, said in an e-mailed statement to The Associated Press that "an incident occurred" between two security associates and a female visitor on Aug. 30, but the cause of death is still being investigated. The company is cooperating with authorities and extends its condolences to the woman's family, the statement said. Two employees, a man surnamed Liu and a man surnamed Yu, were detained, the police statement said. It did not give details about the other three. The city police headquarters referred questions to the district police station, which referred them to the criminal department, where no one answered the phone. Source, Source
surprised at the title, thought it happened in America or sth. then i aint anymore, it's China.....社會進步成這樣，佩服
not surprised .. saw a video of a teenager getting a beat down(with bricks) by villagers for stealing neighbors egg and the teenager was like ..."oh noess please stop i wont do it again" and an old man was going all out on him not caring if he dies .... crazy people in china
something of the like. an employee was ran over by crowds of people rushing into the store because of black friday i believe. back on topic, that was not the way to go about handling a shoplifter. i feel bad for the woman also... is it just me or do more and more workers seem so disrespectful these days?
I feel bad for the woman who died. Again, this is the type of incident where I think capital punishment should go into affect. These employees were out there to get her and took the law into their own hands by beaten her. The woman is dead and I believe they should be paid with theirs. That's the only fair way to go. Seriously, I hope those who were involved in this case be haunted for the rest of their lives if justice isn't served.
Chinese society has never been able to move away from the lynch mob mentality. That is, the notion that people are entitled to take punishment of wrong doers into their own hands (instead of leaving it to legally sanctioned authorities), is still very strong in China. I bet that the Walmart employees' there in China, felt that they had every right, and were expected to beat up a shop lifter. This is markedly different from that of the US or UK, where most employees would be expected to just hold a culprit and call the police. Not that this doesn't happen in the US or UK, just that the expectations are different. Further, the issue of authority in the PRC is skewed. I suspect that the Chinese Walmart store security personnel really felt as if they have the mantle of civil authority backing their actions. That is, they believed themselves to be real cops, with the right to beat up what they percieve to be wrongdoers, as a part of their "official" functions and duties. This is the sense that I get from private security personnel overall in China (or at least in the places that I've been); that they walk around with a swagger overly disproportionate to their legal authority.
