China Eastern Backs the Attendant Who Knelt, Saying the Passenger Threatened to Kick Her
Two days after a flight attendant's kneeling apology became China's most-watched video, the airline's first official statement says the passenger threatened to kick her and demanded a hospital escort — and pledges to defend front-line staff's "professional dignity."
China Eastern has given its first official account of the cabin incident that has topped Chinese social media for two days, and the account sides firmly with its crew.
In a statement issued on Wednesday afternoon on the airline's verified Weibo account, the company said that on a September 28 flight from Hefei to Dalian, an attendant pushing a drinks cart announced the beverage service repeatedly before accidentally touching the elbow of a passenger who was asleep. She apologized at once and checked on him — and was met, the statement says, with sustained abusive language, threats to kick her, and a demand that she personally escort him to a hospital after landing. The purser and a security officer stepped in to keep order; medics who boarded after landing found no visible injury, and the passenger refused an escort and left on his own. The attendant, the airline said, had been frightened. She has received psychological support and has returned to normal work.
The episode, as this site covered when the video surfaced, was filmed by a fellow passenger who told reporters the attendant knelt two or three times beside the cart and stayed down a long while. What was missing until now was the airline's version; it arrived with three of Weibo's top ten trending slots on Wednesday morning already belonging to the same incident.
The statement's most consequential line may be a promise: the company will safeguard the "professional dignity" of its employees "in accordance with laws and regulations" (依法依规维护员工职业尊严). In a service economy where a customer's displeasure routinely becomes an employee's problem, that sentence does unusual work, and readers responded in kind: within hours the airline's own post had drawn nearly 59,000 likes, and a news outlet's relay of it nearly 100,000.
Not everyone demanded a ban, but the sentiment ran one way. The car-industry blogger Han Lu called the passenger's conduct textbook 寻衅滋事 — "picking quarrels and provoking trouble," the offence Chinese police invoke for exactly this kind of public menace — and asked why the airline still would not name it as such: "A company can be humble in its service. It cannot let people climb on its head and shit on it" (骑脑袋上拉屎).
The Paper's editorial desk went further, arguing that with the incident still hanging over the hot-search list, "the truth should not be late again": the airline should release the full evidence trail, not a summary — not least because the passenger who filmed the video has already been set upon by rumors himself.
The company says it is "cooperating with relevant parties" on a complete review and evidence preservation. What that review produces, and whether the man who threatened to kick a crew member faces any consequence at all, is what the statement leaves open.
