Are violent crimes on the rise in China? - Week in Review #29 [re-pulished and free]
And whether it has something to do with our economy
[This was a partially paywalled article published in September, where I linked the rising wave of “lone-wolf and suicidal” crime to economic problems and projected for a policy pivot, right BEFORE the pivot actually took place in late September.
Now, I am making the article free, in light of the horrific Zhuhai mass murder that happened 2 days ago. I will write more later this week]
Last week, I commented on the killing of a Japanese schoolboy in Shenzhen and on how and why the Chinese government responded to such an incident. As I said, I didn’t expect it to expand into a mini-treatise on Sino-Japan relations, while in fact, my original intention is to discuss the recent spate of violent crimes in China.
In this article, I will finish my job. I will start with a discussion of the mysterious death of Liu Wenjie.
The deaths of the high-ranking official and her murderers in Hunan
Last Friday morning, three people fell to death in Changsha, Hunan Province, which is an inland province with a population size as large as France.
The three deceased included Liu Wenjie, who served as the head of the finance bureau of Hunan, and two other men with the same surname Jiang.
According to a police report, one of the men, the younger Jiang at the age of 31, was a businessman who traveled repeatedly to Macao recently and personally owed his debtors over 12 million yuan. The older Jiang, 35 years old, does not seem to be related to the younger Jiang. Not much was revealed about the older Jiang.
On Thursday afternoon, the two Jiangs were seen to be poking around in the apartment compound. On that night, they slept on the stairs of the top floor of a hotel opposite the target apartment building. On Friday morning, the two Jiangs broke into Liu’s apartment. Liu fought with the elder Jiang, and both of them fell from Liu’s balcony. The younger Jiang knew he was f***ked up now, but for some reason, he didn’t choose to flee through the front door. Instead, he tied curtains onto the balcony and tried to reach the lower floor with it. He might be fancying himself as Jackie Chan, but he was not able to hold on to his makeshift rope and became the third casualty of this saga.
It was later found that Liu’s furniture and wardrobes had been frantically pried, implying signs of robbery. The police also claimed that Liu had no previous “overlap” with the two Jiangs.
This is a highly unusual case. The way the three of them all died looked like some dark joke, taken straight out of a Cohen Brothers film. It was also highly unusual for such a high-ranking government official to die like this. The finance bureau which Liu headed is a core department of China’s local government. It’s tasked with managing the budget and helping to decide who gets how much money. So the unnatural death of a senior official, in charge of money management of an entire 66m-people province is no small matter.
The core detail of this case is whether Ms. Liu knew those two men previously. The nature of this story hinged on this fact.
Many people cast doubts on the assertion by the police report on this detail. I believe since the police explicitly said there was no overlap between them, the chance that the police have lied about this is infinitely small. This is because in our highly digitalized society, something like an “overlap” will be really hard to erase. It’s easy to fabricate the existence of something, but quite difficult to fabricate the non-existence of something that does indeed exist. No police department in their sane mind would take responsibility for telling such a blatant lie in such a high-profile case.
So given that Liu didn’t know the two Jiangs, what are we looking at here?
The most likely sequence of events given all the known facts is something like this:
The younger Jiang was broke. He had lost everything and still owed others tens of millions. So he decided to rob someone. Who do you rob in today’s China, given we now live in a cashless society, and CCTV cameras are everywhere so you have nowhere to hide? The natural choice: a corrupt official. A corrupt official is likely to store loads of cash, jewelry, Swiss watches, gold bars, and bottles of Moutai inside his or her apartment. A corrupt official is also not likely to report the robbery to the police. In fact, robbing storehouses held by corrupt officials is a big part of China’s many urban legends.
So which official should they rob? Naturally, their eyes were set on the money manager of the whole province. They very likely had reasoned, that since she was in charge of money, she must be corrupt! And given the high-profile nature of someone with this position, it’s not hard for the two Jiangs to identify Liu, follow her around to identify where she lived, and finally, decide to do their deeds.
It was unfortunate for the Jiangs though, that Liu seemed to be a finance chief who was actually clean. (At least the apartment she lives in is clean.) Not only that, Liu seemed to have a fiery personality and courageously fought with her attackers with bare hands. Because my company was also registered in Hunan, I asked around for people who personally knew her. What I got in response was universal and in line with the official obituary, that Liu was hard-working, capable, humble, and principled.
Overall, I see the Jiangs as hapless victims of TV shows and short videos. They seemed to believe that if it’s a government official, they must be hoarding cash at home, and the younger Jiang also seemed to believe you can actually flee a high-rise apartment by curtains.
Now, with key details cleared, let’s review the keywords of this murder case.
Finance chief.
Debt.
Robbery.
Liu may be clean, but it’s undeniable this case has something to do with money.
Other deadly episodes in the last few months
Money, heh? Could that be the root cause for many other recent violent episodes elsewhere? Do we have data and evidence to confirm this?
As I said last time, I do have a vague feeling that violent crimes are on the rise lately.
Again, statistics are scant in this regard. The most recent data point I can find is from the Supreme Court’s 2024 Work Report, in which it is said that in 2023:
审结故意杀人等严重暴力犯罪案件5.2万件6.2万人，同比增长17.2%
"52,000 cases of intentional homicide and other serious violent crimes were concluded, involving 62,000 people, an increase of 17.2% year-on-year."
I don’t know about the data for this year yet. But just in the last few weeks, there have been some really shocking cases already.
There were last week’s Shenzhen stabbing, and Liu Wenjie and her robbers’ deaths.
There was this rare event in Jilin just a few weeks ago, when a man in Jilin grabbed a gun from the police and killed a police officer, before getting himself killed as well.
Also in this month, a school bus in Shandong crashed into the crowd, killing more than 10 and injuring many others, many of whom are kids. It does not look like an accident at all.
In June, a property guard chopped two owners to death in broad daylight in Guangxi.
There was also the Suzhou stabbing incident.
There was also the Jilin stabbing, involving the American tutors.
All of these violent crimes, with the exception of perhaps the Liu Wenjie case, share one thing in common: they were all done in broad daylight, and the perpetrators knew without a doubt that they would get caught for such action. They were almost like suicides, except they wanted to bring more lives with them while committing this “suicide”. They were, for lack of a better word, cases of “lone-wolf terrorism”.
It was clear the Liu Wenjie case had something to do with money. However, it was not clear if the other cases had to do with this, as the motives had never been announced. But if I have to take a guess, and in light of the Supreme Court’s 2023 statistics, I will say money, and more specifically the lack of economic prospects, may be playing a crucial role here.
This reminds me of higher crime rates back when I was a primary schooler, around 1997-early 2000s periods, which was also a period of great economic uncertainties and pains during another tough period of economic transition. At the time, many SOEs were dismantled, privatized or leaned, letting go tens of millions SOE employees who for their whole lives have only known how to work in an SOE.
Crimes were quite commonplace at that time. There were violent crimes of course, but what people felt in everyday life was the ubiquitous thefts and robberies. I remember I myself lost at least 3 bikes and 2 phones to thefts. I was almost robbed by a gang of older teenagers not far from the gate of my school, and my school was considered the best in our city.
As our economy entered some troubled waters again, it’s only natural for crimes to surge. Only this time several things have changed.
First, ubiquitous CCTV cameras, AI facial recognition technologies, and absolute digitalization of payments make thefts and robberies almost non-existent (apart from stealing a corrupt official’s home, of course.) It simply doesn’t make sense to steal now.
But that doesn’t mean desperate people won’t resort to crimes. Two forms of crimes will be on the rise because of this new landscape:
First, those suicidal, lone-wolf terrorist kind of crimes. Since the perpetrators are already suicidal, possibly due to a combination of economic, social, and emotional reasons, they won’t care about prosecution anymore. Those kinds of crimes will be impossible to prevent at the last minute.
The second type of crime will be telecom scams, precisely because our societies have been highly digitalized now. In the same report by the Supreme Court, it was reported that in 2023 they:
严厉惩治境内外电信网络诈骗犯罪，审结电信网络诈骗案件3.1万件6.4万人，同比增长48.4%。
Severely punish telecom and internet fraud crimes both domestically and abroad, with 31,000 telecom fraud cases concluded involving 64,000 people, representing a year-on-year increase of 48.4%.
The final silver lining
It’s inevitable that we will have surging crime even if we are already an extra-safe society. Unlike Western societies where economic pains may lead to organized crimes and drug-related crimes, and unlike China of 2 decades ago where it mostly thefts and robberies, we will have more desperate violence and telecom scams. No matter what form it takes, crimes will be on the rise.
But this may actually answer the question of when Chinese decision-makers can resort to stronger measures to stimulate the economy.
If you have to do a priority ranking between social stability and economic prosperity in the minds of China’s rulers, the former always trumps the latter. But if the lack of economic prosperity threatens stability, the whole state machinery will also try hard to come to the rescue of it.
And what’s the most extreme level of signs of instability? A falling stock market is not. A falling real estate market is not. People whining on the Internet is not. Ultimately the only things that can be reliably used as the barometer of social instability are crimes, violence, and all physical forms of display of desperation, the things that would make ordinary citizens question their physical safety.
The same pattern was repeated in late 2022 too. At the time, it was as if China would be sticking to Zero-Covid forever, only until the mass unrest threatened social and even political stability, authorities pivot 180 degrees.
The same pattern may be repeated now.
This is why I have been extra sensitive to these crime stories. They are not just gory. Like I said, in China:
bad news and good news often happen in tandem.
Without bad news, there may be no good news.
The worse the bad news, the more likely you will see the good news.
Ho Robert. Not sure it's in the rise but anyhow it's more publicized than ever before. I remember when I was young and still living in Holland before social media came. Then we saw the same. Everybody saw increase of criminality. But the facts were different. Before the police and officials kept all crimes under the hat. For the simple reason the more attention you give to it the more it attracts others to copy it.
Time will tell or this the same here in China.