Are violent crimes on the rise in China? - Week in Review #29

And whether it has something to do with our economy

[The second half of this post, where I will put recent crime stories in the broader picture, is for paying subscribers. Again, if you are already a paying member of Baiguan, please contact me for free access here]

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.

Liu Wenjie, 1966-2024

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.

A famous scene from the 2016 anti-corruption TV drama “In the name of the People”, showing a mid-level official hoarded 134 million RMB worth of banknotes in his villa, even inside the fridge

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?