Chinese restaurant looted amid riots across France
Aline Li was beaten unconscious at La Barrique during cost-of-living protests that damaged thousands of French businesses.
A TikTok posted by the Indonesian channel ntvnews.id under the handle @ntvnews.id frames, in its own Indonesian caption, a Chinese-owned restaurant as a target of looting and wrecking during riots across France. The channel’s description says mass cost-of-living protests spilled into street anarchy, glass doors were smashed, the interior was stripped and wrecked, the owner took heavy material losses, the clip spread fast online and local police were sent to lock the area down.
That framing landed inside a wider burst of posts tying the October unrest to attacks on Chinese businesses. AFP fact-checker Sammy Heung, writing from Hong Kong on October 23, reported that a separate clip circulating in Chinese, English and other languages on TikTok, Douyin, Threads, Facebook, X and YouTube—overlaid with text about riots and looted Chinese shops—was not from 2026 at all. Reverse image searches on its keyframes matched a January 26, 2017 Deutsche Welle YouTube report on gang violence against Asian immigrants in France. In that older street interview, a man said, “The Chinese have become too rich in France. I think it’s not fair. They’re now in the category of people with nice clothes and big cars.”
Visegrád 24 had posted two clips about 90 minutes apart on October 20, one carrying the wealth-resentment interview and another alleging a Chinese shopkeeper in Paris had been assaulted and looted, a pairing Next News Network said traveled widely among English-language accounts. AFP stated flatly that the interview was filmed in 2017 and is unrelated to the recent demonstrations. The fact-check placed the soundbite at the one-minute mark of the Deutsche Welle piece, after a voiceover on local prejudice, and noted the 2016 killing of tailor Zhang Chaolin as an earlier catalyst for protests against anti-Asian attacks in the Paris suburbs.
Reporting on the ground did document a real assault on a Chinese-owned business during the new riots. Aline Li, 50, from Zhejiang province, ran La Barrique, a café, restaurant and tobacco shop near Place de la République in Paris’s 10th arrondissement. Vision Times, drawing on the South China Morning Post and The Times, reported that rioters forced the metal shutters, stormed the premises, beat Li unconscious, robbed the shop and set it on fire. Li told The Times she was struck with what she believed was a metal bar, blacked out and needed stitches. Looters took cigarettes, alcohol, lottery scratch cards and electronic devices before the fire, the same accounts said.
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Gelombang kerusuhan hebat yang menerjang sejumlah wilayah di Prancis kian tidak terkendali hingga memicu aksi anarki di jalanan. Situasi memanas ini dipicu oleh gelombang protes massa yang berujung pada pengerusakan fasilitas umum serta toko-toko di kawasan bisnis. Dalam insiden mencekam tersebut, sebuah restoran milik warga keturunan Cina apes menjadi salah satu target sasaran amukan massa. Pintu kaca hancur berantakan, sementara interior restoran ludes dijarah dan dirusak oleh oknum tidak bertanggung jawab hingga pemilik usaha mengalami kerugian materiil yang amat besar. Rekaman video detik-detik pengerusakan mencekam itu langsung beredar luas dan mendadak viral di media sosial. Pihak kepolisian setempat pun diterjunkan ke lokasi untuk memperketat pengamanan demi mencegah aksi pengerusakan susulan serta memulihkan ketertiban di kawasan tersebut. —- ulf dff