MCLC: Tensions over 'dancing grannies'

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Tensions over ‘dancing grannies’
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (3/11/16)
One of China’s ‘Dancing Grannies’ Is Shot as Tensions Boil Over
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
BEIJING — With the din they make, they are often mocked and berated and worse. Hounds have been loosed on them. Rocks flung, water sprayed. They have been pelted with excrement, more than once. And yet they shimmy on.
China’s “dancing grannies” are a tough bunch.
They are the middle-aged and elderly outdoor dance enthusiasts who crowd sidewalks, parks and squares. They include quite a few men, despite their popular name, and have become a colorful fixture in towns and cities, swirling, skipping and swaying in happy rows, during the mornings and often late into the night.
Too much of a fixture for some neighbors who can somehow grow tired of hours of throbbing disco music, electro-folk tunes and Bollywood-influenced dance numbers blasted over tinny loudspeakers.
In the southern region of Guangxi, friction between amateur dance crews and residents grew serious this month, when a man took out a small air rifle and shot a woman, wounding her in the leg, according to news reports on Friday.
The man “said he was upset by the noisy group of women dancing near his house, who mocked him when they turned down his request to quiet down,” Xinhua, the state news agency, reported. The reports gave only his surname, Mo.
Bloodshed was unintended, Mr. Mo told the police in Yangshuo, the scenic town where the fracas broke out on March 3.
“He was aiming at the stereo speaker, but accidentally shot a woman who was operating the machine in the leg,” said Xinhua, describing what he told the police.
A report from a news website in Guangxi said that Mr. Mo was also angry because the group refused to help lift his car when it became stuck near the square where they danced.
Mr. Mo fled to neighboring Guangdong Province, but the police caught him on Wednesday, breaking China’s latest case of serious violence involving dancing retirees.
But after years of confrontations with the amateur outdoor troupes, the file of incidents is growing thick.
In 2013, a man in Beijing tried to disperse dancers near his home by firing a shotgun into the air and unleashing three Tibetan mastiffs. In the city of Wuhan, in central China, neighbors dumped excrement from a building onto a gathering of dancing ladies.
Mr. Mo has been detained “for endangering public safety,” Xinhua reported, and it seems likely that he will spend time in the relative quiet of a prison.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on March 12, 2016
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