The choking, assault and attempted kidnapping of a Chinese woman at a Beijing hotel in full view of security cameras and multiple passersby has sparked a social media firestorm, with more than 2 billion views.
It is the latest in a series of flashpoint incidents in China where witnesses have stood by doing nothing, sparking debate about whether the country is turning into a society of bystanders.
A woman using the screen name "Wanwan" on Tuesday posted a video of surveillance footage showing her being assaulted by a man in the hallway of a Yitel hotel, part of a chain.
Her assailant choked her, pulled her hair and tried to abduct her while she shouted, "I don't know you, let go of me!", she said.
A hotel staff member who assumed that they were a couple having a fight observed them at close proximity for several minutes and asked them to take their dispute elsewhere, but did not intervene, she added.
"The whole incident lasted five to six minutes, in a place entirely covered with surveillance cameras, yet not a single security or hotel management staff member came out to help me," Wanwan lamented.After a failed attempt to flee via the lifts, she was eventually rescued by a female passerby who came to her aid, the footage showed.
The most popular of numerous hashtags referring to the incident had accumulated over 2 billion viewings by yesterday afternoon on China's
Twitter-like Weibo - about 50 per cent more than the number of people in the world's most populous country.
It had over 2 million comments.
"When a man hits a woman, no matter whether they know each other or not and no matter what the reason or what the circumstances, you should always mediate and pull them apart if possible," said one.
Witnesses are often afraid to come to the aid of strangers in China, where there have been numerous high-profile attempts by injured parties to try to extort money from those who have helped them.
In one well-known 2009 case, a driver who assisted an elderly woman was ordered by a court to pay her 100,000 yuan ($22,630), on the grounds that he would not have helped if he was not responsible for hitting her.
In another oft-cited 2011 incident, a toddler named Yue Yue in Guangdong province was run over by two separate vehicles and later died after being ignored by more than a dozen passersby.
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