Chinese Vlogger Beaten During London Livestream Says Police Dismissed His Case as Minor

A Chinese vlogger was livestreaming from London's Piccadilly Circus on Friday when, by his own account, a group of young men harassed him with racial slurs, tried to snatch the watch off his wrist, and then knocked him to the ground and beat him. The alleged assault itself was not the story that swept Chinese social media over the weekend — it was what happened after: the blogger says London police logged the incident as common assault, declined to dispatch officers, and told him to contact his insurer and hospital on his own.

The vlogger, who posts under the name Nangui Guyi, described the episode in a video post after returning from hospital, where he says doctors confirmed a fracture. Two of the men first bumped into him, gestured obscenities and shouted abuse at a Chinese national, he says — abuse that, in his telling, served as cover while an accomplice tried to grab his watch. When the snatch failed, three of them pinned him to the ground and beat him, leaving him with a lacerated hand, a suspected back fracture and numbness across his body. The watch was not taken. Because he was streaming at the time, the genre that brought him to the square in the first place also preserved the evidence: the incident and its aftermath circulated widely in clips and screenshots over the weekend.

At the police station, he says, officers took down his information but treated the case as an ordinary minor assault, with no one dispatched to pursue it. That account set off the reaction now playing out under trending topics. The commentary account Matan Talk tagged the British embassy in Beijing to ask: "Is this how your country's police treat Chinese visitors?" Another widely shared post pressed the classification question squarely: racial slurs, a group beating and an attempted robbery, it argued, cannot be an ordinary assault — "then what counts as a hate crime?"

The anger has several layers, and not only at London. One is the case's suitability to a familiar grievance frame: Chinese tourists and students abroad who feel that reporting a crime gets them a form, not an investigation. Another is the racial element, which commenters read through a rise in reported hostility toward people of East Asian appearance in Western cities in recent years. And a third is the fact that the attack happened on camera, mid-broadcast — a reminder of how much of what now counts as witnessing happens because someone happened to be streaming.

London is one of the most visited European destinations for Chinese travelers, and Chinese-speaking vloggers livestreaming its landmarks to audiences back home have become a fixture of its tourist squares. The Metropolitan Police has not publicly responded to the specific account, and no arrest has been reported. The blogger says he is still following the case from a hospital bed — with a fracture confirmed, and a dispute underway over whether what happened to him was an ordinary scuffle or something the law should name differently.