She Was Beaten in a Public Toilet for 20 Minutes. He Was Sentenced to 2 Years, 11 Months.

In 2022, a 19-year-old man named Yu did some planning. He scouted a supermarket, bought a skirt and a wig, and then followed a 20-year-old woman into a public toilet in Yongkang, Zhejiang. What happened next lasted more than twenty minutes. The victim, surnamed Xu, says he struck her face and head with a brick, dug at her eyes and into her nostrils, bit her nose, and pulled her tongue forward to hit it with the same brick. Her teeth were knocked out, and one slid into her lung; she survived because someone outside heard her shouting.

The sentence has been the flashpoint ever since: two years and eleven months for intentional injury. Chinese law grades bodily harm as minor, light, or serious — 轻微伤, 轻伤, 重伤. Xu's injuries sat at the top end of the light band. Losing four teeth counts as light-grade one; losing seven crosses into serious. She had damage to seven teeth, but only three were knocked out completely while four were saved with braces, so the case stayed below the serious threshold. And because the toilet had no camera, the police did not pursue a rape charge. Xu is now publicly disputing that call: she says Yu tore her clothes and tried to pull them off, but investigators worried about convicting him without footage.

Three years later, in a statement that has climbed to the top of Weibo's trending list, Xu is filling in what the court record could not. She and Yu were strangers — no grudge, no prior contact — and she says the rumor that she dressed provocatively, and the claim that Yu had a mental illness, are both false. In her telling, he is simply a man who planned an attack and carried it out, and who has since been released.

Then there is the leukemia. Xu developed the disease after the assault and attributes it to the cascade that followed: repeated infections from her injuries, chronic depression and anxiety, and the pile of CT scans her treatment required. She is careful to say there is no direct medical proof. What angers her is the suggestion that she should be grateful to her attacker, because the medical checks after the beating happened to catch the cancer early. She has written that she does not accept those "thank him" arguments, in a line that has been screenshot across the platform.

The case acts less like a single crime than a live experiment in how Chinese injury categories handle violence against women. A sentence that was, under the court's own framework, the ceiling still looks to the public like less than three years for an attack that left a woman without teeth and with a body that would not quietly heal. The missing rape charge, in a room with no camera, is its own lesson about what a victim has to prove before anyone believes her. Xu's post is an attempt to make people hold both facts at once: the law did what the law allows, and what the law allows may not have been enough.