This never would have happened in the past. People have always gotten drunk, had arguments, and gotten into fights, but this is something new.

I have been living in Beijing for four years, but I come from a village about three hours outside of Beijing. The rest of my family is still in the village, my parents, my sister, my brother and his wife. There are maybe 3000 people there, living close to each other in little brick houses separated by high walls. Most people do at least some farming in the area. Everyone knows everyone else. I feel like our village is a quiet and peaceful place.

On the day they found the body my brother had gotten up early for his job at a water heating company and there was nobody around. He saw the smoke, but he didn't really pay attention to it. Outside fires in a village are just a part of normal life.

Later on, the person who owned the recycling mill, on the edge of town, woke up. A person who recycles plastic is not like a farmer, they don't often have fires burning. He went to go see what was the matter. It was a body!

There's often fighting in the village, but never something like this, never murder. Fighting is totally normal. People have nothing to do. They go out to have fun, they get drunk. Maybe someone says something someone else doesn't like. You know a little about him, he knows a little about you. In the end you just can't take each other. People start fighting.

One time my friends and I were in a little restaurant. Back home we have a custom for drinking - it's not really a custom, more of a bad habit, a sickness - if someone comes over and toasts you, you have to toast him, too. You have to drink your whole glass.

We weren't in our own village, but in a neighboring one, and some hooligans from that village came over to our table toasting us. In the beginning we drank with them, but you could tell they were making fun of us. There were fifteen or so of them and each one decided he had to come over and make us drink. After a little while we decided we didn't want to pay attention to them and said we weren't drinking anymore. We've had too much to drink, we said: "No more. If we drink anymore, things might get bad, there might be a fight."

They followed us after we left. How can you bully people like this, we asked? And so we fought. The fighting wasn't really bad, both sides pulled knives, but nobody got stabbed.

The next day it happened again, but this time it was worse. After the fight on the first day, my friends and I went looking for them and ended up running into one of them at the entrance to our village. He had brought a few guys and they were milling around, waiting for us. We fought. Nobody pulled knives, but somebody hit their leader over the head with a brick.

I was in middle school then, maybe 16-years-old.

The fighting, that's okay, but some places are getting out of control. There are criminal organizations in the cities and some people will pay money to get someone else taken care of.

There was never stuff like that before. In the cities it's a little bit better. People are more open and they learn to brush off problems and differences. People back in the village won't let little things go. They'll keep thinking about the same problems over and over until it becomes something that consumes them.

I knew the guy who was killed. He was in his 40s and traveled a lot for business. Lots of people in the village are involved in business, but he was better at it than most.

People say he was killed over an affair. He was sleeping with the wife of another man in the village. The two men were involved in just about the same kind of business. Both were away a lot.

There is a lot of rumour. Some people say the victim had let the woman's husband know that they were together and the victim and the woman started to argue a lot. They say it was probably the woman who killed that man, that her husband didn't know anything about it.

Months later, people in our village are still talking about this. This is a new thing. Maybe this is one of the things that come with development, one of the things that we just didn't predict.

The countryside tends to remember these kinds of things, times when things got out of hand. People in the country are still peaceful people, they're still very conservative, but this generation is different. In the past everyone was sealed off. Not much came in from outside. Now, people go wherever they want. There's very little money to be made in the village, so lots of people are living away from their homes. They come back from the cities bringing all kinds of new ideas, things, and habits. Some of these things are good, some are bad.

People had bad thoughts like this before. Men looked at another man's wife but they didn't do anything. Maybe people are more brazen now, their way of thinking is more open. They no longer think: 'No, that's impossible'. People begin to think: 'This is how everyone else does it, I could act like that too'.

A person living in a village or a small town is just like a butterfly still in its cocoon. When the cocoon falls away, the butterfly sees new things. He used to be a little insect, but now he can see birds and people, things bigger than he, things smaller. There are many kinds of insects. You could keep dividing them forever. Good insects, bad insects, strong insects.

This is the same for people. You have to classify them so that you can live your life. People do this naturally and it's part of life no matter where you live. But what happens when they run into totally new things? Things that aren't natural, that have just been created by humans in the city. Some people can't deal with that. These artificial things change the way you think. They shock you all the way through. They make you think: 'This wasn't what I had imagined'. People have to come up with a different way of thinking before they can continue their lives. They come back to the village changed.

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Zhang Qi is a 22-year-old rock climbing instructor. He told his story to sweeble.com Beijing correspondent Michael Armstrong.