Around 8:00 p.m. on December 24, 1946, a group of American marines including 23-year old Corporal William Pierson and Private William Pritchard snatched Beijing University student Shen Chong off the streets near Dongdan in Beijing, dragged her to the adjacent Polo Grounds (what is today the Dongdan basketball courts) and raped her. A group of workers heard her cries for help but –intimidated by the American soldiers — they didn’t intervene and instead ran to report the crime to the joint Sino-American Police Force tasked with keeping order in the city. Pierson was arrested later that night.
The crime electrified the Beijing intelligentsia. The fact that the two soldiers were tried in an American military court with limited Chinese involvement recalled memories of colonial extraterrioriality. Moreover, the assault raised the question of why American troops were continuing to occupy key Chinese cities a year after the Japanese surrender. Many students, academics, and intellectuals, already predisposed to sympathize with the CCP and leftist groups at the expense of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, used the case of Shen Chong’s rape to call for immediate US withdrawal from China, accusing the Americans of being in league with Chiang and possibly planning to return China to colonial