Brawling bullies shamefully pick on weakest

High-kicking kung fu caused mid-air mayhem earlier this month, as a brawl between two Chinese passengers forced a plane carrying over 200 people from Zurich to Beijing to return after six hours in flight.　

According to Swiss media, the duo, aged 27 and 57, hit and shoved with each other onto the cabin floor, causing one to bleed. The older person even grabbed the stewardess who came to mediate around the throat.

The scandal follows an outburst of reported in-flight fistfights kicked off by Chinese passengers over matters as trivial as reclining seats, spilled dinners, or undelivered drinks.

On August 29, a senior official from South China's Guangdong Province made headlines when he was accused of pinching the arm of a flight attendant, ripping her uniform, and hurling bags and insulting at her, all after she reminded him to put his luggage in the proper place.

Passengers' lives are being held hostage to on-board fisticuffs.

As a frequent traveler, I do feel flying in China is a sometimes hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing exercise thanks to hours of excruciating waiting, simpering crew members, greasy airline meals, and collective groans from stranded passengers rippling through terminals.

Some customers advocate radical means to boycott abysmal service. One group once rushed onto the runway to stop the plane from taking off.

Unlike ebullient, effervescent Westerners, Chinese people were once restrained and unruffled. So where are these verbally abusive and physically aggressive drama queens springing up from?

There is a simmering dissatisfaction rising out of nearly every pore of Chinese life. Each citizen is likely to be dragged into the maw of opaque rules, murky regulations, non-performing policymakers and tangled interpersonal struggles.

Amid the overpowering stench, sufferers run wild in a jungle-like social setting, hounding each other amid the rule of the fist.

But do not extol them as crusaders against maltreatment since in many cases, it is not bosses or officials but ordinary serving staff that become to the punching bags of these bullies.

Not long ago, a lanky young fellow didn't offer his seat to a woman on the bus. He was slapped really hard five times across the face by the woman's burly husband.

It was also reported that there was a female college teacher who forced a waitress to kneel down simply for not sending a packet of tissues quickly.

And unfortunately as a chronic patient, I am no stranger to hospital scenes of middle-aged men striking karate style poses toward 20-something nurses.

Cowards are cruel. Bravado is the G-string that barely hides their impotence.

Instinctively, they are spineless and shrewd, calculating who they dare to raise their fists against.

An invisible caste system still holds sway in China, where those doing "demeaning" jobs at lower socioeconomic strata seem to deserve to be bullied.

The famous writer Lu Xun of the early 20th century, a heavyweight heckler of morally compromised Chinese, noted "some countrymen cannot pass for human beings, as they readily morph into lambs, meek and mild in front of fierce monsters, and vice versa." His judgments still retain their bite.

Small wonder that back in the days of the nation's closed economy, ordinary people crawled to service personnel such as drivers, cooks and shop assistants, because they were then the privileged few who could supply jobs.

Nowadays elements of the "customer is king" philosophy have crept in on Chinese soil, and some thuggish behavior is also being emboldened by mercenary employers ruling that any customers' complaint leads to either instant wage deductions or even firings.

Therefore employees turn the other cheek to unreasonable clients, responding to their curses and violence with passivity and servility.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, but that doesn't empower him to ride roughshod over service providers.

But so far the only penalty has been moral revulsion from the public, with an utter lack of proper law enforcement or harsher penalties to deter perpetrators.