Seoul’s deadly stampede hits the headlines in China

From our correspondent in Beijing,

Almost half of the foreigners in South Korea are Chinese and they will not soon forget this Halloween Saturday night in Itaewon, this district of bars housed on a hill in Seoul, where young revelers were decimated as in a horror film, a real nightmare from which it is difficult to emerge unscathed.

45 meters long, 3.2 meters wide

Two days after Seoul’s murderous stampede, social networks, the Chinese press disseminate many testimonies of traumatized survivors, or rather survivors; because young women are the majority among the victims. “Just thinking about the scene, my hands are shaking”confides a Chinese student in a video broadcast by the site Pangpai. “Thinking back to what happened, I still have trouble breathing”says another in the Beijing News. Her name is Xu Qing. His story fed the conversations in the canteen of the “Danwei”, the work units this afternoon in China. Xu Qing is 1.75m tall. It was her size that saved her, she says, before describing her journey in the alley of horror: 45 meters long and 3.2 meters wide where she did not expect to find herself at the start.

Arrived by metro with a friend around 9:30 p.m., she remembers having had time to buy two ice creams, then to walk for about fifteen minutes, when the atmosphere changed. The world around suddenly became more compact. The human tide like a wall pushes away anything that gets in its way. Xu Qing then wants to go home. But the crowd drags them and drags them to a steep street, then everything stops in the middle.

We were no longer advancing. I then saw the first people fall one row lower, then others two rows lower. They all fell (…) We were stuck, I didn’t touch the ground or the walls, I was compressed by people

At 1.75m tall, Xu Qing could still breathe. The girl next to her was not so lucky. She measures 1.50 m and soon she is no longer breathing: “I saw him gasping and choking in 5 minutes. I was helpless, I couldn’t even move my neck. To my right, a strange boy was vomiting his blood on me. The only thing I can say is that I survived”.

The Chinese media return on Monday to these minutes which turned tragic. At 10 p.m., the first revelers stumble. At 10:10 p.m., the fire brigade received a first emergency call. The terraces of the overhanging bars then watch the men fall, without understanding. There’s music, alcohol, maybe narcotics. Only 200 police were mobilized that evening, according to South Korean media, most of them officers in charge of the fight against drug trafficking and sexual harassment. This lack of law enforcement to channel the flows has often been noted in comments in China. From the day after the tragedy, certain Chinese patriots on the keyboard, who care neither for the period of mourning nor for the decency and respect due to the families of the victims, have, moreover, from the day after the disaster, put a layer on the supposed mastery of the masses by the communist regime.

Why that apparent lack of law enforcement, while all the youth of Seoul rush to Yongsan Hill disguised as ghosts and other scary characters? This is also the question that Liu Tong asks himself. “The street is very narrow and sloping, people were coming from all directions and there was no security to guide us », explains a student from the Chinese province of Hubei in the pages of a local newspaper. An hour to do less than 40 meters and Liu Tong has trouble breathing. He was finally able to leave the premises before 10 p.m., but he can imagine what happened next: “There are those who wanted to get out of the alley and those who wanted to enter, and everyone started pushing”.

According to the South Korean police, the deadly stampede occurred on a stretch of less than 6 meters long. “There were more than 300 people in a space of about 18 square meters, underline the Beijing News, witnesses heard people asking to push and push back and forth, then people fell layer by layer down the slope, like dominoes, leading to tragedy. »

Pressure on bodies and minds

“When three people die next to you, you have had their face on your face, you know what despair is. I really almost closed my eyes, I just wanted to live”, says Xu Qing. The 1.75 m young woman cannot get out of her head this street that has become a trap that has swallowed up so many young people who have come to party. Like many survivors, she feels guilty: “ I had planned to walk for an hour, from 9:30 to 10:30 p.m. and then return home, I didn’t expect what was supposed to be a one hour walk to turn into a nightmare that I won’t forget never. I regret that I couldn’t do anything, I was just able to survive. » Xu Qing is an assumed name. The newspaper only photographed his legs and calves covered with bruises, signs of the intense pressure exerted on bodies and minds that evening.

Zhang Tong was there too. This young Chinese woman was dressed as a nun for Halloween. She was able to get out of the street before the deadly stampede, but she felt things might go wrong: “People were very excited. They were shouting ‘Get down, get down’ and in fact he meant ‘to go faster’, because the street is on a slope, but no one could really move “. The noise, the music, the alcohol, the foreign accents, Zhang Tong is disoriented, but the young woman thinks back to her survival lessons: “In China, we learned about crowd movements and we knew that we had to stay close to the wall to be able to continue moving, knowing that the shops had closed their doors, after some of the walkers took refuge. on the inside “. On its Weibo account, the Chinese police released a 3D film on Monday giving advice on trying to survive when crushed by a large crowd: “ Make sure to form a triangle with your arms to protect your chest “.