Hmmm.........Having already made up your mind, silverboy, it's a good thing you're not actually asked to judge the situation.

Personally, I just can't imagine two Brits misbehaving in Beijing........yeah, right.

Well, actually, the whole thing is schizophrenic: We often, on one hand, deplore the obvious disdain shown for the rule of law in China, while on the other hand we find it hard to accept when said rule of law is exercised on foreigners - even those we don't know.

In your case, though, silverboy, you have such all sweeping disdain for China, it would be hard imagining you not siding with a foreigner. I suppose there's some comfort in seeing things so clearly as either black or white. I just can't get there.

I think everybody is quite happy to see the rule of law being exercised, once there was undeniable proof coming to surface of him behaving like a dick, what people are really pissed off with is the whole anti-foreigner PR campaign. As we tend to see it being practiced daily on this website, we do possibly have the experience to make a good judgement.

As for 'targeting the father'... Debatable. I doubt that their visa cases were really treated at the law courts as a combined offence, they were most likely processed as individual visa overstay cases that were coincidentally discovered as a result of standard procedures;the police may have paid a visit to an apartment which they were renting together, for example, regardless of how the propaganda machine (sorry, I mean media!) treated the cases/case (Evil father and son tag team runs over innocent Chinese pensioner who fought against the Soviets in the war with her bare hands). That is unless, China now has dependent visas for the over 30s that I didn't know about!

The fact is that in the past, other foreigners have been convicted of far worse in China, especially in other parts of China (therefore, probably less likely to be faked like the infamous Beijing 'sexual assault' case of 2012), yet not such a song and dance was made in the media, especially when the said crimes were much worse than accidentally bumping into an old codger whilst riding a shitty scooter. Things such as drug-dealing, murder, smuggling etc.