PATIENTS IN CHINA keep attacking their doctors. On January 27th Hu Shuyun, a physician in the southern province of Jiangxi, died after being assaulted on a ward. A few days earlier three medical workers at a hospital in Hangzhou, an eastern city, were injured when a patient set off a homemade bomb. Every month brings more shocking stories. Chinese even has a word for it: yinao, meaning "medical disturbance". Between 2004 and 2016, the number of such disputes that ended up in court rose from 8,854 to 21,480. But only a fraction of cases get that far. In 2016 the National Health and Family Planning Commission acknowledged that it had mediated more than 60,000 disputes. The problem of yinao has become so acute that, on March 1st, Shanghai became the first city to start a blacklist of people deemed to have engaged in banned behaviour in medical facilities. As well as facing criminal penalties, they can be barred from holding public-sector jobs and denied access to outpatient services under the social-credit system, in which bad behaviour can mean loss of rights and privileges.
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