Crime in China

American teacher Kim Lee has been hailed as a role model for domestic violence victims in China since 2011, when she initiated divorce proceedings against her celebrity husband in a landmark case that made legal history.  But Lee’s status as a voice for abused women came under attack last week, when she said she had forgiven her ex-husband. “My [ex] husband is a flawed person. His violent acts are beyond doubt, illegal and wrong,” she wrote in a long post in Chinese on the Twitter-like Weibo on Thanksgiving.  “But he is also the one who smiled like a child while feeding goldfish… more importantly, he is the father of my three lovely daughters.” The post has gone viral and shocked internet u

A Chinese woman accused of murdering seven people, including a three-year-old girl, has been captured after 20 years on the run. Lao Rongzhi, 45, allegedly killed seven people together with her boyfriend Fa Ziying over a three-year period. While Fa was caught by police in the eastern city of Hefei in July 1999, Lao managed to escape and had been living under a false identity since then. Fa initially refused to tell police anything about his girlfriend and later provided false information that helped her cover her tracks. He eventually confessed to kidnapping and killing seven people and was executed in December 1999 at the age of 35.  Police said last Friday that Lao had been arrested at a

Doctors spent four weeks removing pieces of paper from the eyes of a 7-year-old girl in China after an extreme bullying incident. Three boys stopped the young girl on her way to class and forced scraps of paper into her eyes. Doctors, who plucked-out dozens of paper fragments, said they had never seen a case like it, mainland media reported on Monday. The incident occurred in Yuzhou, a city in the middle of the central Chinese province of Henan, in September.  The girl said she was accosted by the boys as she returned to class after lunch one day.  “They opened her eyes wide … crumpled a few scraps at a time and squeezed them in,” her mother, surnamed Li, said. The girl complained of poor v

Authorities in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan said dozens of kindergarteners and staff in the city of Kaiyuan were victims of a caustic soda attack. More than 50 of the children were burned on Monday afternoon, two of them seriously, when a man scaled the wall of the kindergarten and sprayed the chemical, also known as lye or sodium hydroxide, on them. Police detained a 23-year-old man about 40 minutes after the attack, adding that they believed he was acting alone. In a statement, the Kaiyuan municipal government said that at about 3:35pm, a man surnamed Kong cut barbed wire and climbed over a wall into Dongcheng Kindergarten and sprayed sodium hydroxide on children and staff. It

The murder of a 10-year-old girl by a teenage boy has shocked China, reigniting fierce debate about the appropriate punishment for minors committing violent crimes. Many people were upset to hear last week that the 13-year-old boy, surnamed Cai, was given three years in a juvenile detention center, which officials said was the maximum punishment under current laws. Police in the northeastern city of Dalian said the boy confessed to taking the girl to his home on October 20 and tried to sexually assault her before stabbing her repeatedly. He then hid her body in bushes near their apartment building, where she was found the next day. In China, suspects aged 13 or under can’t be charged or pun

A Chinese court has sentenced six men to prison over an unsuccessful assassination job that was subcontracted a total of five times, in a case that a legal expert said was emblematic of deep-rooted aversion in the country towards litigation.  The men were convicted of attempting to murder a businessman in the southern city of Nanning, the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court said in a statement. The story started in 2012, when property developer Qin Youhui was sued by a business partner surnamed Wei over a project the two were working on together. Instead of fighting Wei in court, Qin decided to assassinate his former partner.  In October 2013, Qin gave a middleman, Qi Guangan, 2 million yuan

A Shanghai man who flew to Hong Kong to pursue a cyber-romance was jailed for 10 months on Tuesday after his supposedly 22-year-old girlfriend turned out to be 12. Interior designer Lu Wei, 28, came to the city last year to meet the girl, whom he had met playing games online, a Hong Kong court heard. Only after things had turned intimate did he learn that the girl, who had told him she was 22, was actually a decade younger. The District Court heard he decided to stay in the city and accept his punishment, despite having already bought a ticket home. He was sentenced on Tuesday after pleading guilty earlier to two counts of unlawful sex with a girl under 13, which carries a maximum sentence o

A crackdown on pick-up artists is under way in China. Last month, police in the eastern province of Jiangsu said it had made the country’s first-ever arrest of a self-proclaimed pick-up artist trainer. He was detained on fraud and obscenity charges. Training materials found by provincial and regional police objectified women as “pets,” “prey” and “targets,” according to their official social media accounts. The materials also coached men to seduce and control women in progressive steps, from how to extort money to how to ask women to hurt themselves or even commit suicide to prove their love. The suspect is a 24-year-old man, surnamed Xu, who ran a pick-up artist training website charging me

Online shopping, ubiquitous in China, is now available behind bars. In the southern megacity of Guangzhou, Conghua Prison has become the first in the country to allow inmates to shop online via touch-screen computer terminals, according to Chinese state media. Once a month, inmates can buy groceries, choosing from more than 200 items and paying normal market prices. The prison houses more than 1,000 inmates. Milk, instant noodles, preserved meat, cigarettes and even Lao Gan Ma — a chili sauce with a Sriracha-like cult following in China — are among the most popular purchases, according to China Daily. When reached by phone, a prison director surnamed Huang, who declined to give his full name

A former businessman and county official was executed in the central Chinese province of Henan on Tuesday for the rape of 25 minors – including 14 girls under the age of 14 – over a two-year period. The execution of Zhao Zhiyong, 49, brought partial closure to a case that has angered the country. Zhao was the former chairman of Kaifeng Tianyuan Flour Industry and a county-level member of the People’s Congress. The Kaifeng Intermediate People’s Court in Henan found Zhao coerced a woman named Li Na into finding young girls for him between June 2015 and January 2017, according to a notice posted outside the court on June 4. Li received a suspended death sentence and her husband Liu Hongyang –