Station Attendants Beat a Woman and Child I feel sad that I have to write this after writing about my nice journeys. BMW saw me off and we were taken onto the platform by a scalper who no doubt paid a ‘fee’ to take travellers onto the platform ahead of the official queue. I paid for the privilege and BMW was allowed to come to see me off. It is summer holidays and millions of students and their family members are travelling.
When BMW came to the exit gate the scalper had gone and she wondered if she would be asked for a ticket. A terrible incident happened which was fortunate for her in that she just walked through. This is what was happening. A poor woman and her child had come to the gate and showed their ticket. The guards were trying to make the woman pay the price of a ticket for the child. BMW said the child was obviously in early primary school. I just checked BMW’s account that a child in early Primary school is allowed onto a train free. Two sites I checked say in Hong Kong the criterion is height – 1.4 metres, and in other places in China it is by age – under ten. By either criteria this child did not have to have a ticket. To BMW’s horror she saw a guard begin to hit the woman and other guards left their posts to join in. One started hitting the child across the head! There was nothing BMW could do without being beaten herself so, this time, she kept going as fast as possible. This happened at Wuchang Station in Wuhan soon after the four o’clock train left on Friday, July 6th. If anyone who reads this blog has any power to move the authorities please try to have the guards who were on duty investigated. The poor are the base that Chinese society is built on and it is completely against any Chinese law that they should be treated this way. These guards would never have done this to a well-dressed Chinese person or a foreigner. They are heartless bastards in uniform who are abusing their position. Please excuse the language I use to represent my strong feelings about this.