How to deal with the fact that some villagers beat NPU students because they thought they had "destroyed their livelihood"?

This incident should be judged on two levels at the same time. At the first level, the violence is plainly wrong. Students are not a lawful substitute target for anger about compensation, redevelopment, business loss, or any other local grievance. Once people start beating unrelated individuals, the issue stops being merely a social dispute and becomes a matter of public order and legal responsibility. That line needs to be stated very clearly.

At the second level, however, it would be too shallow to say only “the villagers were irrational” and stop there. In many town-gown conflicts, the immediate violence is the final expression of a longer failure in governance: opaque land arrangements, badly explained policy changes, weak compensation mechanisms, or the feeling among local residents that decisions were made over their heads. None of that excuses assault, but it does help explain why anger becomes combustible. If authorities punish the violence without addressing the underlying grievance structure, they reduce symptoms but not risk.

The serious position, then, is not sentimental neutrality between “both sides.” It is that physical assault must be handled as assault, while the institutional causes of the grievance must be examined separately and soberly. Universities, local governments, and police all have responsibilities here: to protect students, to prevent rumor-driven escalation, and to create lawful channels through which community conflict can be handled before it turns into mob action.

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