Chinese authorities on Sunday violently crushed a protest by over 1,000 depositors whose savings have been frozen for months by the incompetence of the country’s banking system, CNN reports. The protestors had assembled early at the Zhengzhou branch of the ChiCom central bank, the People’s Bank of China, waving national flags to obscure their dissent, protesting the Henan provincial government’s fuckup which has frozen the accounts of hundreds of thousands of customers of four banks. The protest lasted for several hours before cops moved in.

“I did not expect them to be so violent and shameless this time. There was no communication, no warning before they brutally dispersed us,” said one protestor. The depositors were rounded up and thrown on buses to detention camps, with most being released later in the day. Others were taken to area hospitals after getting their asses kicked. The bank freeze has been going on since April, the result of some bizarre and nonsensical investigation into criminal fraud by executives at the banks which does nothing to explain why the lives of ordinary people have been disrupted.

The United States figured out how to prevent this sort of thing from happening about 80 fucking years ago with the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and from there a vast patchwork of other regulations and mechanisms, both public and private, to ensure banking customers’ access to their funds is rarely and very briefly if ever interrupted. The lynchpin of the ChiCom political system is the void of accountability from the public for bullshit like this and in that respect it has way more in common with the GOP vision for America than fanboys want to admit.