An Eight-Year-Old Girl Was Beaten With a Ruler for 20 Minutes for Forgetting a Textbook
A teacher in Renhuai, Guizhou, beat an eight-year-old girl with a ruler for nearly twenty minutes for forgetting her Chinese textbook; the girl's hand was fractured and the teacher has been suspended.
An eight-year-old girl in Renhuai, in the south-western province of Guizhou, forgot her Chinese textbook. The punishment was a beating with a ruler — nearly forty centimetres long, applied by her teacher for close to twenty minutes in the morning reading class, until the girl collapsed to the floor convulsing. The teacher then told her not to tell her family; her aunt, who found her the next day covered in bruises, took her to hospital, where an X-ray showed a fracture in the girl's right hand.
The case has escalated in a way that shows how the Chinese system responds when a teacher crosses the line. The girl's aunt, surnamed Du, took her complaint to the media on Tuesday. By Wednesday, the local education bureau had confirmed the corporal punishment and suspended the teacher; police had opened an investigation; and the case had climbed to the top of Baidu's search board, with a Zhihu question about the incident becoming one of the day's most-read discussions.
The detail that has made the case travel is the girl's own account, quoted in the Zhihu question: "The teacher first hit me in the corridor, then hit me in the office, then hit me until I fell to the ground convulsing." The child is a "left-behind" child — a child whose parents have migrated to the cities for work, leaving her in the care of relatives — a detail that many readers noted, because the children left behind in the countryside are the ones with the least protection against the adults in charge of them.
The legal question is the one commentators are arguing about: what the school's rules allow. China's Ministry of Education issued a "Rules on Discipline and Punishment" in 2021, which allow teachers to discipline students but explicitly forbid physical punishment. A lawyer quoted by the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald said that the rules forbid "corporal punishment by striking," and that the teacher's behaviour constitutes a criminal offence rather than a disciplinary matter.
The case has become a test of the discipline rules, because the girl's injuries were not the result of a single blow but of a sustained beating, and the teacher's attempt to conceal it — telling the child not to tell her family — is the part of the story that has made it a national one. The education bureau's response, with the teacher suspended and the police involved, is the standard escalation path, and the case is now the country's test of whether the rules written in 2021 are enforced.