A Driver Stuck in Wuhan's Halloween Crowd Had His Windows Scrawled and Tires Deflated
A middle-aged driver who steered into Wuhan's Halloween street crowds spent the night while revellers scrawled abuse on his car, dumped rubbish on it and let the air out of the tires — and China's internet is asking how a costume festival became a licence to bully.
The pictures are hard to look at: a white car hemmed in by a dense crowd of costumed revellers on a Wuhan street at night, its rear window covered in white-marker scrawls — including the letters "SB," internet shorthand for an obscene insult — with water bottles and paper bags piled on the roof and trunk. In another frame, the driver sits slumped at the wheel, head resting on his arms, a crowd pressing at the window. The photographs went out on Weibo on Saturday in a post defending the driver that has been liked more than 70,000 times (the post), and they have turned Wuhan's Halloween street party into the country's argument of the weekend.
The driver, described in the posts as a middle-aged man working a ride-hailing or delivery order, drove into the crowds while picking up a fare and got trapped: Halloween foot traffic filled the road, construction barriers hemmed the sides, and the car could move neither forward nor back. The post defending him insists he broke no rules — the road is an ordinary motor-vehicle street, and if the city wanted it closed for the festivities, that was the authorities' job, not his. "Is this how you bully a middle-aged man?" the post asks. "What did he ever do — kill someone, commit arson?" It ends with the line being quoted across the debate: they took their bad manners and made them a trend to follow (把没素质当成跟风的潮流).
Other posts filled in the rest of the night. A widely shared account of the incident says revellers photographed the driver, smashed the car's window glass, scrawled the slogans, threw rubbish, and deflated the tires (one repost of the details); many of the crowd were said to be students from the universities clustered around the district. Even delivery riders who strayed into the area were trapped, one Weibo user wrote — some looked close to tears (their post).
Wuhan has become the country's best-known stage for imported Halloween: a university city whose young people have turned October 31 into an annual costumed street spectacle, quite secular, quite unafraid of the dark. The tradition has grown large enough that managing the crowds is now part of the event. The trending phrase that carried the story even framed it against the driver — "uncle bullied for parking in a motor lane" (大叔疑因车停机动车道被欺负) — but the posts have overwhelmingly rejected that framing: a street anyone may legally drive is not a parking violation, and being slow in a crowd is not a crime.
The sharper threads in the argument are about what the crowd assumed it was entitled to do. "Put yourself in the driver's seat — he probably didn't even know what festival this was," one user wrote (her post), a line that carries the story's sting: an ordinary working man swept into someone else's party and punished for the inconvenience. Others went further, arguing that a festival is not a licence — "some people wave the holiday as a flag while committing a crime in fact; a few of them should be arrested," ran one post carried by a current-affairs account (it is here). As of Saturday night, no police statement on the incident had been reported; this is not the first time this month that Chinese social media has litigated a stranger's manners in public, but rarely with a man this exposed at the center of the frame.
