Bullying is a recurring subject in East Asian film and television — Better Days, The Glory, Confessions, The World of Us… In the environment I grew up in, bullying wasn't common. Everyone came from more or less the same background, teachers stepped in often, and within the range of schools I could see, it just wasn't something that happened much. What crushed us instead was the pressure of exams. Maybe because we were all being bullied by the entrance-exam system, and because the teacher's authority was so absolute, there simply wasn't room for it. I assumed this was the norm. But perhaps not happening was the exception.

I wanted to know what things look like in China now, and found that the Chinese data is fragmented. There's nothing like the annual national figures from Japan's MEXT or Korea's Ministry of Education — it all rests on sampling by research centers and individual scholars. 2016 is the starting point. That was the year "campus bullying" suddenly became a public issue, and the General Office of the State Council issued its first dedicated document on it. The China Youth & Children Research Center surveyed 5,864 primary and secondary students across 10 provinces and municipalities: 32.5% said they were occasionally bullied, 6.1% said they were frequently bullied by older students. The same year, the Ministry of Education commissioned Yao Jianlong's team to run a much larger study, covering over a hundred thousand students in 29 counties, which put the rate at 33.36%. Also that year, a study from China Women's University found that 48.9% of middle schoolers who'd been bullied never sought help, and the number one reason, at 52.6%, was "afraid of losing face, of not being able to hold my head up among classmates." By 2020–2022, again from the China Youth & Children Research Center, 3,108 middle schoolers, and the figure had become 53.5%. But the most interesting thing in that report isn't the total, it's the breakdown by type: mocked 52.8%, teased 37.2%, excluded 33.7%, and then the fourth item — "treated improperly by teachers," 28.3% — ranking above being threatened, hit, or extorted.

The two post-pandemic surveys are both academic. Sichuan surveyed over eighty thousand people from late 2022 into early 2023: traditional bullying victimization 23.2%, cyberbullying 17.7%, and children who had experienced all three types had a depression risk more than 11 times that of children who'd never been bullied. Gansu surveyed rural fourth-graders across 13 counties in 2023: a victimization rate of 62%, higher among boarders than day students, with a mother working away from home, single-parent households, poverty, and oversized classes all showing up as risk factors — this is the portrait of the left-behind child, and it's the same background as the three kids in the Handan case. Going from 32.5% to 62% shouldn't be read as things doubling over a decade. What changed was the question. Ask vaguely, "have you ever been bullied," and you get thirty percent; list nine specific behaviors one by one, and you get sixty. An urban middle school and a rural Gansu primary school aren't the same world either. But three things hold steady across every survey: words and exclusion far outnumber fists; rural, boarding, left-behind, and migrant children score higher; and about half never tell anyone, because it's shameful.

Japan's data, by contrast, is the longest-running, most complete, and most honest of the three.

Start with where the term "recognized cases" (認知件数) comes from. Before 2006, MEXT counted "occurred cases" (発生件数) — how many incidents happened. In 2006 it switched to "recognized cases" — how many incidents the schools became aware of. The meaning of the rename is blunt: adults were never going to know everything, so we'll only count what we see. At the same time, the definition was changed from a three-part test — one-sided, sustained, causing serious suffering — to simply whatever the victimized student feels. In October 2011, a second-year middle school boy in Otsu jumped to his death. He'd been made to "practice suicide," been strangled, had his lunch hidden, and the school and the board of education buried the questionnaire results. When it came out in 2012, the country erupted, MEXT ran an emergency survey, and within half a year recognized cases jumped from 70,000 to 144,000. In 2013, the Act for the Promotion of Measures to Prevent Bullying was passed, establishing the category of "serious incidents" (重大事態) and a system of third-party committees. So every jump on Japan's curve corresponds either to a dead child or to a change in definition. The official line from the National Institute for Educational Policy Research is that a high count means schools are actively finding cases, which is good; what you should look at is the resolution rate. The counterargument from outside is that bullying has neither surged nor collapsed — all that's changed is whether schools admit it.

Of the 769,022 cases in the most recent year, 58.5% were "taunting, teasing, and insults," and 22.4% were "light shoving, kicks and hits disguised as play" — together, over eighty percent. Ostracism and collective silent treatment came to 11.6%; online defamation only 3.6%. The dominant form of bullying in Japan is the "joke." It's the same gray zone as the Korean Ministry of Education's explanation for rising victimization alongside falling perpetration — "jokes getting out of hand" — and the same as the "just kidding around" in that Caijing piece about Deyang. At the other end are the 1,405 serious incidents. Of those, 34.9% were cases the school had never previously recognized as bullying at all. A third of serious incidents, before they became serious incidents, weren't considered bullying by the school. And at the far end: 527 elementary, middle, and high school students died by suicide in 2024, the highest on record.

From 2010 to 2012, the National Institute for Educational Policy Research ran a tracking study in the suburbs of a major city, following every fourth-grader in every primary and middle school for three years, surveying them twice a year. They asked only about the three mildest behaviors: ostracism, silent treatment, and talking behind someone's back. Over three years, only 13.2% of children had never been on the receiving end, and only 14.3% had never been on the giving end. Nearly ninety percent had been on both sides. "Chronic victims" who reported being targeted in all six rounds made up only 0.4%; those who reported doing it in all six rounds, only 0.1%. Their conclusion: bullying isn't a fixed structure of a gang of bad kids and one pitiable kid; it's a group phenomenon in which roles keep shifting. This is the same thing the Chinese center's 53.5% and Gansu's 62% are saying — the more specific the question, the closer you get to "everyone is in it." And it's an answer to the road all three places are walking down: keeping records, tying it to school admissions, lowering the age of criminal responsibility, hunting down the perpetrator. The problem is: if ninety percent of children have been perpetrators, who exactly do we hunt down? This looks like a social phenomenon, not a particular situation involving particular people — something that happens wherever there are people at all.

Here's the English. One thing I changed: the paragraph about the appointment says "the twins' father," but the volleyball twins and the prosecutor are unrelated — the father in that case is Jung Soon-sin (정순신), so I've restored his name there.

Of the three, Korea has taken bullying furthest down the road of legalization, and every step along that road can be matched to a child's name.

Start with the word. Wangtta (왕따) is wang (왕, "super," a mid-1990s teenage slang intensifier) plus ttadollim (따돌림, "shunning"). A 1996 case of group bullying at a Seoul high school pushed it out of student slang and into mainstream speech; academics had been using jipdan ttadollim (집단따돌림, "collective isolation"), and by around 2001 wangtta had become the common term. A whole family of derivatives grew out of it: eun-tta (은따, covert shunning), jeon-tta (전따, shunning by the entire class), ppang-syeotteul (빵셔틀, the kid made to run out and buy bread), ka-tta (카따, shunning inside a KakaoTalk group chat). Iljin (일진, the school gang leader) is believed to come from the "Iljinhoe," a gang name in a Japanese manga; in the 1997 Iljinhoe case, the perpetrators themselves said they had been imitating the comic. Korea's bullying vocabulary grew up almost in parallel with Japan's, and under considerable Japanese cultural influence.

Korea passed its School Violence Prevention and Countermeasures Act in 2004, the first dedicated bullying law in East Asia, nine years ahead of Japan. But the real turning point came in December 2011 in Daegu, when a second-year middle schooler, Kwon Seung-min, jumped from his apartment building, leaving a note describing being water-tortured, beaten, and extorted by classmates. The two perpetrators were sentenced to two and three years. In February 2012 the law was amended and the "Comprehensive Measures to Eradicate School Violence" were rolled out: a census-style survey of every student, bullying sanctions entered into the permanent student record, and police officers assigned to schools. The 2.9% published this year is the fourteenth year of that same line. All three countries hit their turning point in almost the same year, 2011; Ōtsu and Daegu were two months apart.

Then came the "school violence MeToo" of February 2021. The volleyball twins Lee Jae-yeong and Lee Da-yeong were exposed by anonymous online posts for bullying in middle school, and within weeks the accusations spread to the men's league, singers, actors, and then downward to ordinary people: teachers, lawyers, flight attendants, taekwondo instructors, journalists. The athletes were banned indefinitely; entertainment agencies made background checks on trainees' school-violence histories standard practice. Kyunghyang Shinmun's analysis had three layers: a deferred reckoning by victims who only dared to speak years later, an institutional gap left by schools that had failed to catch it at the time, and a public memory with no statute of limitations. This layer is uniquely Korean. Of the three countries, only Korea has turned bullying into a moral debt that can still be called in after adulthood.

On February 24, 2023, Jung Soon-sin, a former prosecutor, was appointed head of the National Office of Investigation; the same day, the press broke the story of his son. Between 2017 and 2018, at an autonomous private high school in Gangwon Province, the son had subjected a classmate to sustained verbal abuse, mocking the boy's Jeju origins and his family's political background; a witness said the incidents were "too many to be worth counting." The victim was diagnosed as at risk of suicide in December 2017, attempted suicide in March 2018, and then filed a formal complaint. The school violence committee deliberated for more than seven hours and ordered a forced transfer. The father then set the entire machinery in motion: the regional review committee overturned the ruling, then reinstated it; district court, Seoul High Court, Supreme Court, all the way to April 2019. During those thirteen months of litigation the perpetrator stayed at his original school, while the victim attended only two normal days of class over two years, was later diagnosed with PTSD, severe depression, and panic disorder, and saw his grades collapse to academic probation. The son transferred in February 2019, entered Seoul National University through the regular admissions exam in 2020, and the record was deleted from his student file upon graduation. Jung resigned one day after his appointment. What Koreans read in this case was not bullying but class: a prosecutor for a father, and a son at SNU. So in April 2023 the government issued new measures, and from the 2026 academic year, disciplinary records for school violence must be reflected in every university admissions track.

The three East Asian film cultures look at bullying in very different ways: Korea and Japan film revenge; China tends to film powerlessness under a system.

Korea films revenge. The Glory is the most explicit example, but it is not an isolated one. Before it there was Bedevilled (2010); alongside it Juvenile Justice, Weak Hero Class 1, The King of Pigs; and further down the ladder, genre pieces like The 8th Night. The structure is always the same: the victim survives, grows up, and comes back. The camera stands beside the victim, but not in the moment of victimization; it stands years later. Korean cinema hardly believes that "at the time" can resolve anything. In these films the school, the teachers, the police are either absent or belong to the perpetrator's family. In The Glory the perpetrators are a chaebol's daughter and a pilot's son, the victim is a poor family's daughter, the homeroom teacher takes money, the mother takes money, and the entire adult world is a sealed wall. So justice can only come from the victim turning herself into someone else and spending well over a decade designing it. This overlaps with reality: the school-violence MeToo was The Glory at the scale of a whole society, victims settling accounts twenty years later through anonymous online posts, and what the public read in the Jung Soon-sin affair was not bullying but class. The revenge narrative in Korean film is not a screenwriter's preference; it is a society's answer, after its institutions have failed, to the question of where justice comes from: from time and memory, from the victim's refusal to forget. It exacts the same price, too. In a revenge drama the perpetrator must be pure evil, because only then will the audience permit the heroine to burn someone alive. That is the exact opposite worldview from the NIER longitudinal study's finding that nine out of ten children have been on both sides. Korea has its exceptions. Bleak Night (파수꾼, 2010) and The World of Us (우리들, 2016) are closer to the Japanese way of looking: the first films the silence and guilt among three boys, the second films how friendship between elementary-school girls turns, inch by inch, into exclusion. No villain, no revenge. But both are art-house films, and they never enter the mainstream line. Japanese cinema follows a broadly similar path; bullying always seems to be there as ordinary background, continually happening.

On the Chinese side, Better Days (2019) was the mainland's first bullying film to reach the mainstream: Chen Nian is bullied, reports it to the police, the police say there is nothing they can do, she can only rely on a street kid to protect her, and in the end the two of them kill the perpetrator together. Then comes a long stretch in which the police reappear, the law takes back control, and title cards tell you which policies the state has since issued. That ending is not merely a censorship requirement; it is the film's true structure: for the first two-thirds of the story the system is absent, and in the final third the system is the only way out. Bullying itself recedes into the background, and what fills the foreground is how the state amends its own statutes. This is isomorphic with reality: China has no bullying statistics, it has the Supreme People's Procuratorate's white paper; it has no third-party committees, it has "special campaigns" and a lowered age of criminal responsibility. The Chinese camera stands beside the person being crushed and looks upward, and what it sees is a system that is not there, or that arrives only at the very end.

I'm curious, how does bullying happen in the first place? 😓