Throwback Thursday: A Look at the Crimes, Punishment, and Macabre Moments of 2008
Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our nine-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful of yesteryear.
We find ourself this Thursday at an interesting intersection: the 19th Party Congress concluded on Tuesday, following a spate of crackdowns and boosted security measures, and now this weekend will be one of the most debaucherous of the year, with booze-fueled celebrations of our bloodiest and most mischievious holiday, Halloween.
So Beijing, ever the land of juxtapositions and contradictions, once again finds itself in flux – between the tight-laced week of waiting patiently, quietly, and obediently at home, and a weekend of concealed identities and lots and lots of alcohol. Before you fly off the handle, letting loose all your pent-up unruliness, let us take you down memory lane to roughly nine years ago, when we took stock of recent crimes and their (at times) harsh punishments in the news.
First, a man was convicted of buying RMB 230,000 (now about USD 34,500) worth of tickets to the Beijing Olympics for resale at the Games. According to People's Daily: "The 41-year-old man, surnamed He, ... booked 527 Olympic tickets through the online ticketing system, using 2,500 pieces of identity information illegally obtained through his friend's construction company and other means."
While some may applaud his entrepreneurial spirit, the courts would not agree; he was fined around RMB 450,000 and sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
In a similar case of crime literally not paying, a farmer in northern Shaanxi province was sentenced to two years in prison and fined RMB 2,000 after it was discovered that he had doctored photos of the rare South China tiger in an effort to collect a reward for proof that the species still existed in the region.
Local authorities had hoped to attract tourists to the area by proving itself to be a habitat for the elusive tiger, offering a RMB 20,000 cash prize to anyone who could photograph the big cat in the province. Zhou Zhenglong, then 52 years old, had provided the photos and collected the cash before his ruse was exposed. He was sentenced to jail "with a three-year reprieve," meaning he wouldn't actually have to go, but was later sent to prison for failing to report to his parole officer.
Okay, so now that the boring financial stuff is out of the way, let's get down to the Halloween-y bits of yesteryear's news.
The stuff of the spiciest Korean dramas: a workplace love affair, murder, and an explosive fire! According to the Straits Times:
A Beijing man was sentenced to death for the murder of his mistress in a crime that included blowing up her apartment in the centre of China's capital, state press said Monday.
Ms Ding, who worked for Wu at the same company, was strangled by her boss and lover after an argument at her Beijing apartment that occurred while her husband was away on business, the report said. After killing Ms Ding, Wu then opened the apartment's natural gas line in an effort to make it look like she had accidentally suffocated, it said. When Ms Ding's husband arrived home three days later, the gas exploded, injuring him and causing extensive damage to over 30 apartments in the building, according to the report.
Wu was sentenced to death for his crime. Looking for an update on this case, I found that it's a tragically common narrative: wealthy, powerful man gets a sugar baby, sugar baby demands more money and a marriage, sugar baby gets murdered. The good news, though, is that if we're seeing news reports about these kinds of occurrences, then at least that means they're not being covered up (or not being covered up well).
Finally, we rehashed a then-recent spike in stabbings in Beijing in 2008: the tragic murder at the Drum Tower during the Olympics, two foreigners being robbed and assaulted, and also the case of a student killing a professor, leading to a police crackdown on knives in schools and universities. The day before our 2008 post, a man had gone on a stabbing spree in the square in front of the Beijing Railway Station. No one was killed in the indiscriminate attack, but 4 people were injured.
If last week's security crackdown had you feeling tense, you can at least rest assured that it was for good measure – no stabbings have been reported in Beijing within the past month.
Photos: Flickr
