Crime in China

Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai has been found guilty of providing intelligence overseas, almost five years after he was first detained by Chinese authorities. Gui was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and deprivation of political rights for five years by a Chinese court on Monday. A statement by the Intermediate People’s Court of Ningbo said Gui would not appeal at the end of the trial. Gui, a Swedish national, ran Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong – an outlet known for selling gossipy titles about Chinese Communist Party officials.  He was one of five booksellers who disappeared in 2015. The Monday court statement also said Gui “agreed to restore his Chinese citizenship” in 2018, a move B

The last thing Shanghai man Tony Qian expected while walking with his wife on grassland below the 28-floor residential buildings of their community was to be hit by a falling piece of dog excrement. And yet, as he looked up to see where the foul missile had come from, he saw a tissue fluttering to the ground which, on closer inspection, was stained with the same muck which had struck him on the shoulder. Qian was lucky. There have been numerous reports in recent years of critical injuries and deaths caused by people flinging dangerous items – including a bicycle, stroller and even a kitchen knife – from their high-rise windows. But his efforts to bring the poo perpetrator to justice went now

A founding pastor of China’s Early Rain Covenant Church has been sentenced to nine years in jail by a Chinese court for inciting subversion of state power and other crimes. Wang Yi was detained in December 2018 along with other senior figures in the prominent underground Christian church during overnight raids across various districts of Chengdu, the southwestern city where the church was founded. On Monday, the Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court released its judgment, which said the pastor was also convicted of illegal business operations. In addition to the jail term, Wang would be stripped of his political rights for three years. Personal assets valuing $7,000 would also be confiscated.

China’s extrajudicial detention of sex workers or their customers, known as “custody and education (C&E),” is set to be abolished in what experts called a long-overdue move. The detention system has been used to crack down on prostitution, which is illegal on the mainland, since the 1980s. Sex workers and their clients could be detained for up to two years without trial in centers overseen by the police. More than 300,000 people were detained using C&E between 1987 and 2000, according to a report by Asia Catalyst, an advocacy group focused on health issues. Although the government does not publish regular numbers of detainees, mainland Chinese media have reported a steady decrease in detenti

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