For residents of the Chinese city of Tangshan, the emergence of a gruesome video of violence against a local woman this week was another devastating blow.
CCTV vision captured a man running down his partner with his car on August 2 after what police called a "dispute" between the couple outside a Tangshan swimming pool.
The woman was killed. The man, who fled the scene, was arrested later that day.
While the video swiftly went viral online, it was soon buried by the growing nationalistic outrage about US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.
But for Alice, the vision was a reminder for another shocking incident in the same city just two months earlier.
Like many women in China, Alice was once convinced by assurances from Beijing officials that the streets she grew up on were far safer than those in the West.
Authorities have long warned young Chinese people that they should keep their guard up while travelling abroad, especially in the United States.
"Don't assume America is as safe as China, where you can go out late at night for street snacks without worrying about your personal safety," said the Chinese Communist Youth League on Weibo in 2017.
But when a video of four young women being brutally assaulted in a restaurant emerged in June, Alice — as well as thousands of other Chinese women — started to question those assurances.
That video shows four young women doing exactly what Beijing officials claimed was safe: They were having a late-night barbecue snack in a restaurant in Tangshan.
Surveillance footage of the incident shows that a man approached and deliberately touched one of the women on the back.
When she pushed him away, the man dragged her out of her chair and beat her. Her friends tried to save her, and were then surrounded and attacked by the man's friends.
"I feel horrified and insecure after watching the video," said Alice, 33, who is now living in Anhui province, in China's south-east.
Alice is not her real name. She asked the ABC to keep her identity secret due to safety concerns.
"I'm also a woman and I sometimes go out at night. I don't understand why such a vicious assault against women could happen right on the street," she said.
But for Alice and many Chinese women, it was the response from authorities that gave them a stark reminder that when their safety was threatened — whether it was in a restaurant or at home — there was little support available for them.
A shifting police timeline sparks accusations of a cover-up
On June 12, two days after the video attracted more than 68 million views on the Chinese internet, local police announced the arrest of nine people on suspicion of assaulting the women.
The local police branch, which was less than 2 kilometres away from the restaurant, also told local media they arrived at the scene five minutes after receiving a report of the attack.
However, in the second statement released by a higher level of the police department on June 21, it admitted the local officers only arrived on the scene 28 minutes after receiving the first emergency call.
This was long after the suspects fled, and after an ambulance had arrived and taken the injured women to hospital.
The statement did not explain why the police account of the night had changed.
But it did state that an investigation was underway into whether there was a slow and inappropriate police response.
A senior police director of the local branch was also sacked.
But the discrepancies sparked suspicions of a cover-up.
"If the police arrived on the scene five minutes after the incident took place, the men wouldn't have fled, and the women wouldn't have suffered from such serious injuries," one Weibo user wrote on June 21.
Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the Global Times also called for Tangshan police to give a "comprehensive response" about the changes to their account.
On July 25, a senior official from the Ministry of Public Security said Beijing had sent several officers to Tangshan to investigate the case, promising to reveal more details to the public.
But the Ministry did not answer the very question that concerned the public most: What happened to the women?
Many Chinese social media users have pointed out there had been no update on their condition in weeks.
Authorities only made two public updates on the victims.
The last statement on the women was back in June when officials said two of them were still recovering in hospital.
Many then turned to local media with the hope of finding updates on the victims or interviews with their families, yet were surprised to find nothing.
Altman Peng, an assistant professor of feminism and communications at the University of Warwick, said the government had pressured local media to maintain its silence.
"The local media are unable to cover the issue, because they are directly controlled by the local government," he said.
"That's the media system in China."
One journalist from outside Tangshan has made attempts to cover the incident, only to claim he was harassed and detained by the local authorities.
But just as Chinese netizens got frustrated about the lack of transparency by police over the Tangshan attack, a new video appeared online.
Chinese police fail to understand domestic violence
Late in the evening of July 11, another shocking video went viral.
Captured by a surveillance camera inside a residential building, it showed a woman and her daughter being violently dragged into her house by a man in raincoat.
The next day, police from Laiyang in China's north confirmed the video was related to a local domestic violence case in which a woman was sexually assaulted by her ex-husband.
Police also said the suspect was arrested.
The video further fuelled the ongoing debate about violence against Chinese women.
In July, China announced the execution of a man who set fire to his ex-wife Lamu, a famous Tibetan vlogger, during a live stream in 2020.
In March 2016, China launched its first anti-domestic violence legislation, allowing victims to apply for protection orders for domestic violence.
But the bill's impact has been questioned even by state media, which rarely criticises government legislation.
Xinhua reported that after the bill was implemented, at least 920 women died in domestic violence incidents in less than four years.
That means three women die from domestic violence every five days in China.
China's Supreme People's Court has released further instructions and details on how to apply for domestic violence orders, which came into effect this month.
It also said 10,917 protection orders were issued from 2016 to 2021.
Professor Ivan Sun, a criminologist at University of Delaware, surveyed 934 Chinese police officers with experience in dealing with domestic violence in 2019.
His team found Chinese officers not only had little knowledge about the domestic violence bill, but tend to tolerate intimate partner abuse, and are less willing to take action against offenders.
"Lots of [Chinese] officials will say that's a family matter," said Professor Sun.
He said high-profile cases had pushed Chinese police to respond faster to reports of violence against women, as they feared public outcry on social media would damage their reputation.
Professor Sun said non-profit organisations were shouldering the responsibility of protecting victims of domestic violence, such as running women's shelters.
However, all of this is unfolding as President Xi Jinping cracks down on China's civil society, pushing for a more traditional socialist culture.
As a result, many women-focused NGOs that offered legal aid and support for domestic violence victims have shut down, said women studies professor Sharon Wesoky from Allegheny College.
She also said that even in the heyday of support services in the early 2000s, little change could be made as there were too many women in need of help.
"The scale of that problem is so big that there was never close to the amount of support from NGOs that would have been needed," said Professor Wesoky.
The ABC has contacted All-China Women's Federation, the party-affiliated organisation for women's rights and welfare.
Women reject helping Beijing to boost the population
From a mother found chained in a backyard shed in January to the Tangshan attack in June, violence against women has been a huge talking point online in China this year.
Professor Wesoky said she had noticed that authorities studiously avoid any references to gender-based violence, even though the victims were all women.
For Professor Emerita Wang Zheng, veteran scholar in Chinese feminism and gender studies at University of Michigan, gendered violence has been an ongoing issue.
She said all levels of Chinese government "did not put efforts in to eradicate these crimes".
"Or rather, they tried to silence, tried to erase the public uproar," Professor Zheng said.
Some China watchers have suggested this year could be a turning point for the nation's MeToo movement.
But Professor Zheng dismissed the argument, noting that young activists had been detained by police for speaking up for the chained mother in Xuzhou.
"That's the reality in China, where to turn? You turn to the prison," she said.
"The outside world has to understand this political reality, that it's not just those misogynistic men in the society and carrying out violence against women, it's not just that."
But as China pushes its three-child policy to boost population for its economic growth, Professor Wang said many Chinese women were now seeing their reproductive choices as the final form of protest.
Alice, who had been following the chained mother case and the Tangshan attack, told ABC News she had decided she would "neither get married nor have a child".
Alice was not alone.
During the Shanghai lockdown in May, the slogan "we are the last generation" went viral as a way for young people to voice their opposition to the harsh COVID-zero measures.
China reportedly limited abortion access last September.
Yet in January, the country still recorded the lowest birth rate in the past five years.
"To force women to have children is much, much more difficult than forced abortion, even though the logic is the same," said Professor Zheng.
She said China would face challenges in encouraging women to have more children in the current environment.
"[For the young generation of women], many really even didn't want to have one child, let alone three," she said.
"I don't think a draconian policy by the state can resolve this tension, it only increases the strong resentment and resistance among young women."
