Can the police strip search a woman for unruly behaviour at a bus stop?
Police in Shenzhen, southeastern China, are alleged to have done that to a 29-year-old who tried to get a man to stop smoking at a bus stop. Since 2017, Shenzhen has the strictest anti-smoking rules in this country of smokers; and bus stops are no-smoking zones — something which the cops claimed not to have known.
The incident took place around two weeks ago. The woman twice requested the smoker to stop, but he rudely told her that the ban didn’t apply to bus stops. She then threw her fruit juice on his cigarette which spilled on his trousers. He flung the cup back at her, after which she called the police. She later alleged in a social media post that the police made her remove her clothes in the police station, forced her to pull her underwear down, took off her glasses, leaving her blind (she has a Minus 12 numbered lens), and didn’t allow her to close the door while using the toilet. The stress caused her to wet herself, she wrote, adding that everyone in the police station was laughing at her.
All this because, according to them, she’d committed the offence of "harassment", which could lead to five days of detention. The alternative was to sign a settlement statement, which she finally did, after the police made the man apologise.
After her social media account of this experience went viral, the police made her take it down.
Second-hand smoke exposure is recognised as a major hazard in China, and the country has been making serious efforts to ban smoking in public. However, the Chinese are the world’s greatest smokers, and the habit refuses to die, especially among older men. To add to that, policemen, many of whom smoke, seem not to be aware of the rules. A woman wrote on social media that when she complained to a policeman about a man smoking on a railway platform in Shenzhen, he told her it was allowed on high speed railway stations (it is not).
The woman at the bus stop was told that she should have called the anti-smoking helpline instead of throwing juice at the smoker. One man conscientiously did so. When the stairwell outside his office became an unofficial smokers’ zone, with the smoke wafting into the office all day, he first tried complaining to the office management. When that didn’t work, he called the helpline a several times. It was of no use. The inspection team would either give notice and come, allowing the office to prepare for their visit; or, they would come on a weekend, when hardly anyone was around. The outcome was more 'no-smoking' posters put up all over the office. Some defiant ones then started smoking in the men’s washrooms, deliberately leaving their half-smoked cigarettes on the floor.
Some Chinese have now started beseeching foreigners on social media to take up this issue in the hope that they would have more clout with the authorities. But do they? A foreigner wrote on a travel website about how, despite no-smoking signs all over a mid-range Shenzhen hotel, the smell of tobacco would waft into his room. When he complained, the hotel staff told him that they had a lot of Chinese guests who couldn’t be asked to stop smoking; the staff suggested that they could change his room. He declined, knowing that would be futile.
While fines for public smoking range from 50 to 500 yuan, a foolproof solution has been adopted by a city mall. It has installed 'smart' opaque glass doors in toilet cubicles which turn transparent the moment they sense cigarette smoke.