Crime in China

China’s top lawmakers are reviewing a plan this week to get tough on violent juvenile offenders and their parents after a spate of murders and violent assaults by children as young as 11 years old.  Not only is China considering lowering the age of criminal liability to 12, but a new draft amendment would expand the scope of crimes that a child can be charged with, notably to allow kids to be prosecuted for violent assaults.  The plan has been submitted to lawmakers and is currently being reviewed.  Separately, a draft for the Law on Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency wants to hold parents or guardians partly responsible for any violent crimes committed by their children. The draft legislat

A daughter’s devotion and a dedicated group of internet volunteers have solved a decades-old mystery that shattered one family and haunted another. The daughter, Li Yantao, grew up wondering why her mother looked so different from everyone else in her village. She also spoke a language that nobody could understand. When she was 11 years old, Li found out the truth – her mother had been abducted and sold to her father as a bride five years before Li was born. Determined to help her mother return to her childhood home, Li started a 19-year journey of discovery. Now 30, that dream has come true, thanks to a group of keen internet users. Li learned her mother is 59 years old, of the Buyei ethni

Having survived repeated beatings by her ex-husband, Lhamo, a young Tibetan woman, was turning her life around when the unthinkable happened.  On the evening of September 14, the man she had divorced less than three months ago made a surprise visit to her home on the edge of the Tibetan plateau in southwestern China. He was carrying a knife and a bucket of gasoline.  Tang Lu doused his ex-wife and set her on fire. Two weeks later, the 30-year-old mother of two died in a coma, with burns covering 90% of her body.  The killing has led to a moment of reckoning in a country that has struggled to curb violence against women, despite rising awareness of domestic abuse and recent legislation to pr

A Chinese court is retrying the case of a woman who was tortured to death by her husband and in-laws because she could not get pregnant.  People criticized the “disproportionately light” punishment after the father-in-law was sentenced to three years in prison, the mother-in-law for 26 months and the husband got two years.  This sentencing came after the court heard that the family had abused Fang Yangyang for seven months before she died on January 31, 2019 at the age of 22. Fang died from serious injuries and malnutrition.  She had spent seven months in an ordeal of severe beatings, starvation, confinement and even being forced to stand outside for extended periods of time in frigid winter

Beijing’s police say they have detained more than 150 people in a week who held sham marriages to trade the Chinese capital’s hard-to-get vehicle license plates – including one woman who had allegedly married and divorced 28 times since 2018. Major cities in China limit the number of cars on the road in an effort to tackle congestion and pollution. Beijing, with its notorious smog and jammed streets, has strict limits on the number of license plates it issues. This restriction means that for every plate, there will be about 3,000 applicants competing over it.  Those seeking a license plate for an electric car through the official channels can be kept waiting for up to nine years, the local t

A series of cases in which husbands reportedly killed their wives in China have prompted online outrage over persistent domestic violence and the lack of legal protection for women. Domestic violence has been a persistent problem in China, and a new generation of feminists are pushing back against what they say is structural gender inequality that leads to women’s vulnerability to spousal violence.  More women are reporting domestic violence incidents and expressing outrage over a new law that mandates a 30-day cooling-off period for couples seeking a divorce. They argue that the rule would make it harder for women to escape abusive marriages.  The recent string of murders has only galvanize

He Xiangjian, the Chinese billionaire who founded the world’s biggest home appliances maker Midea Group and was the victim of a recent botched kidnap attempt, is a man of few words. The man with a $25 billion fortune shares only 26 words with his staff and customers on Midea’s official website. But plenty has been written about He – China’s sixth-richest person, according to Forbes – since June 14, when five kidnappers with explosives held the 77-year-old for ransom after breaking into his luxury villa in Foshan, his and Midea’s birthplace in southern China. Local police arrested the suspects after He’s son – 55-year old He Jianfeng, who sits on the Midea board – sneaked out of the property

A man who was kidnapped as a child has been reunited with his parents after 32 years, bringing an end to one of China’s most notorious abduction cases. Mao Yin was two in 1988 when he disappeared in Xian, the capital of the northern province of Shaanxi, and was sold to another family who raised him as their own son. Mao, who was renamed Gu Ningning by his adoptive parents, was reunited with his mother and father – Li Jingzhi and Mao Zhenjing – on Monday at a press conference organized by the police and shown live on the state broadcaster CCTV. Mao, who now runs a home decoration business, was tracked down in early May by Xian police. They used facial recognition technology to analyze old ch

A man in northwest China has been detained after his 79-year-old mother was buried alive. The woman, who was partially paralyzed, was rescued after three days and is in a stable condition in a hospital in Shaanxi province, police said. Prosecutors in Jingbian county said the woman’s son, a 58-year-old identified only by his surname Ma, had been charged with attempted murder. On Tuesday his wife told local police that Ma had taken the bedridden woman named Wang away on a cart and she had not returned home. Police said the man had confessed to burying her in the woods and she was rescued later that day. “Ma was there when police were digging up the two-meter deep grave. He didn’t say anything

Chen Xiaobai, a graphic designer from Changsha city in southern China’s Hunan province, has been running a WeChat messaging group since the beginning of February called The Victims of Online Masks Fraud. The group has attracted about 170 members, all of whom had been cheated out of money while trying to buy face masks online to protect themselves or other people from the spread of the novel coronavirus. Online fraud has a long history, but fears about the coronavirus outbreak and a shortage of masks have brought swindlers a fresh pool of potential victims among China’s 800 million internet users. With the demand for masks far exceeding the supply many have no choice but to turn to private c