BEIJING - A Chinese military official has been suspended and placed under
investigation over accusations of a drunken assault on a flight attendant,
state media said Tuesday.
Fang Daguo was suspended from his job with the armed forces department of
the southern city of Guangzhou, the state-run China Daily said, after an air
hostess accused him of assaulting her in a dispute over his hand luggage.
The woman, Zhou Yumeng, had posted pictures on her Sina Weibo - a
microblogging service similar to Twitter - showing injuries she said Fang
inflicted, triggering uproar on China's popular social networking sites.
State-run news agency Xinhua said Fang and his wife "stunk of alcohol" when
they boarded the flight from the eastern city of Hefei to Guangzhou, and that
Fang grabbed Zhou's arm hard enough to bruise it.
"If it wasn't for us, you wouldn't even have food to eat," Fang's wife told
Zhou, according to Xinhua.
Officials in Guangzhou's Yuexiu district, where Fang is employed, said last
week an internal investigation had found him innocent, but changed tack after
Xinhua disputed their account.
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"Have you really conducted a comprehensive and objective investigation? Is
what you found really what you published in the report?" Xinhua wrote in an
unusually outspoken post to one of its Sina Weibo accounts.
Fang and his wife have reportedly apologised to Zhou, and the incident has
given rise to several commentaries in China's state-run media hailing the power
of the Internet to restrain badly behaved officials.
"In the era of new media, public watchdogs are everywhere," said an editorial
in the People's Daily, which closely reflects the opinions of China's ruling
Communist party.
"Conflicts between officials and the public are becoming increasingly
problematic. Public opinion is taking an unprecedentedly stern line on the
restraining of power."
China has the world's largest online population with more than half a billion
users, posing huge challenges to the government's efforts to control the
information its people are able to access.
Calls made to Yuexiu district government by AFP went unanswered Tuesday.
