THE BEAST IS RED

BY ROBERT FOYLE HUNWICK

THE BEAST IS RED

BY ROBERT FOYLE HUNWICK

A chilling look at China's mass murderers and the world around them

对于常人来说，他们令人发指而又不可理喻；对于警方来说，他们的落网总是为时已晚

This year, as millions across the country were readying for the Spring Festival mass migration, 36-year-old Li Hao was preparing for his fi nal journey.

On January 21, the former fi reman was strapped down before being injected, in orderly fashion, with barbitone, a short-action anesthetic barbiturate, followed by a muscle relaxant of pancuronium bromide and, fi nally, potassium chloride, which fi nally stopped his heart for good—thus carrying out the sentence that had been handed down in 2012 for crimes that included multiple murder, rape, kidnapping, prostitution, and illegal imprisonment.

But it was a bizarre, and some might say uniquely Chinese, series of events that eventually led to the headlines in 2011 revealing how Li, then 34 and enjoying the lifestyle of a mid-level drone at the local Technological Supervision Bureau, had spent the last 22 months cruising karaoke bars in Luoyang picking up victims, while telling his wife he was moonlighting as a part-time night watchman.

In fact, there was a macabre truth to Li's claim. He had, indeed, been keeping watch—albeit over a harem of kidnapped KTV hostesses aged between 16 and 23, held captive in a remarkably sophisticated prison, constructed four meters under a rented basement and locked behind seven iron doors.

In this subterranean kingdom, shut off from the outside world, the civil servant apparently exerted a compelling inf l uence over the six women, who called him “Big Brother” and competed for his affections and sexual favor. Li, meanwhile, kept his victims weak through lack of food and water and occasionally tortured them for gratif i cation, police say. Anyone who resisted was raped; two girls were put to death for “disobedience”.

Eventually, Li progressed to staging “pornographic web shows”, acting as both producer and gaoler. Seeing an opportunity to make more money, Li even progressed to pimping, which proved a fatal mistake: one of the women was left alone long enough to make a bold escape. A relative later went to the police—who set about dealing with the matter as discreetly as possible.

Li was swiftly caught attempting to fl ee the city, and his extraordinary crimes and punishment might ordinarily have warranted a few terse statements somewhere in theLuoyang Evening News. But, a remarkable conf l uence of events would ensure the opposite. In the same September that Li Hao made his ill-fated fl ight, journalists from around China had gathered in Luoyang, drawn by the highly publicized case of Li Xiang, a TV journalist investigating so-called “hogwash” gangs. The gangs were selling recycled, toxic cooking oil dredged from gutters, and police claimed to have cracked the case.

Li Hao's case was hardly exceptional—his deeds mirrored those of Zeng Qiangbao, a 39-year-old Wuhan janitor who received a suspended death sentence in 2010 for imprisoning and torturing a pair of 19 and 16 year olds for months; however Luoyang off i cials were pushing a Civilized City campaign and that meant stamping down on negative publicity even harder than usual.

After the reporter announced on Weibo that he was“following illegal cooking oil dens closely”, Li was found dead outside his apartment in the early hours, with 13 stab wounds. Police subsequently charged two local ruff i ans with robbery and murder. A botched mugging—or was there a conspiracy to silence the press, as others wondered. Had someone taken the crackdown too far? One who suspected so wasSouthern Metropolis Daily's Ji Xuguang, a journalist from a powerful media organization outside Henan with a reputation for bold muckraking. Ji was still looking into Li Xiang's death when he picked up a lead on the (far more sensitive) Li Hao story. Henan police, keen to put him off, threatened Ji with the serious crime of revealing “state secrets”—so Ji simply left Henan.

Thanks to Ji, the resulting story of the Chinese man who kept his victims in a secret torture dungeon would make headlines worldwide, just as the Cleveland kidnapping

A wanted poster for Zhou Kehualying on the street of Chongqing, not far from the spot where Zhou was shot to death on the morning of August 14, 2012. A total of 1.8 million such posters were issued by the local police.ase would in 2013. Had local authorities had their way, however, the scandal would have disappeared from view, ike one of Li's KTV girls.

“People don't care much,” says Li Qiaoying, a former riminal psychology researcher with the Taiyuan Procuratorate in Shanxi. “Even in a village where a newcomer used to get attention, nobody nowadays ares…People only look after their own business.”

“I picked prostitutes as my victims because they were asy to pick up without being noticed,” explained 54-year-old Gary Ridgway, or the Green River Killer, after the Seattle serial killer was fi nally brought to justice n 2003. They may as well be the words of Li Hao—or Wu Jianchen, a serial rapist who killed 15 in Hebei in 1993; or Li Shangxi, Yang Mingjin, and Li Shangkun rom Guangxi, who killed 26 between 1981 and 1989; or Peng Miaoji who murdered 77 across Shanxi, Jiangsu, Anhui, and Henan, executed in 2000; or Yang Shubin, who was tracked by one resourceful police off i cer for ight years, following a trail of robbed and murdered KTV girls from Shenzhen to Guangzhou to Jilin, fi nally nding in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, where Yang and his gang had used their millions in blood-soaked RMB to et up a family-run massage business.

During the early to mid-20th century, when its erial-killer population exploded, America was a developed country engaged in rapid urbanization: densely packed slums became populated by anonymous migrants in constant fl ux, and its cities interspersed with vast tracts of deserted land—running throughout and serving as newly built getaway conveniences with highways and railroads. This helped birth the kind of shadowy, itinerant killer for whom anonymous and transitory existences are their fodder: the crossountry trucker with a penchant for making friends at deserted rest stops, the mooching outlaws ofIn Cold Bloodcrawling through small towns in a stolen car and couting for victims.

In the early1980s, China underwent its own period of rapid industrialization, truncating over a century of American-style urbanization into just a few decades. Crime experts now point to the period of Reform and Opening Up as a time when society fragmented, ommunities scattered, and itinerant workers and riminals fl ourished.

Thehukou[household registration] system, which had previously kept people strictly rooted in place, was elaxed and, frequently, simply overlooked; strange people appearing in the neighborhood no longer eemed strange. “The police don't have effective ontrol of who was in their district doing what,” says Yin, a criminologist from the University of Politics and Law who asked for his real name to be withheld. Disappearances are just as common: a migrant might go home, marry a villager, or have to deal with a family matter. They get a better job—or perhaps, if they're a sex worker, their client wants a full-time mistress to himself.“Even parents don't really know what their children are doing in the city or where they live,” says Li Qiaoying.

Then there are other potent ingredients, such as poor education in rural areas that leave many even unaware of such crimes. During 2012, a small county in Yunnan was traumatized by the disappearance of 17 young men. Local parents had fi ngered a plausible motive: the boys were being kidnapped and forced to work in illegal brick kilns near Kunming. Such kidnappings are not uncommon in the provinces, such as the case of Lei Yusheng, a Yunnanese boy who was snatched at knifepoint and forced to work with 30 other abductees for 10 hours a day.

This led some parents to pursue their sons' fates in the hundreds of illegal kilns that dot the province—a diff i cult and dangerous task in itself—and one which police have little time for. What these anxious parents were not to realize was that their sons had actually fallen victim to an Ed Gein-like predator called Zhang Yongming, who lived a hermetic existence nearby in a shack fi lled (according to later-deleted mainland articles and Hong Kong media) with bags of bones, dried human fl esh, and wine bottles fi lled with preserved body parts. Although the disappearances had been going on for months and although Zhang had a murder conviction from 1978, police never saw fi t to investigate him.

Zhang himself was considered more a local oddball than a serious suspect despite his criminal past. An incident involving Zhang in 2011 gives a small window into the treatment of mental illness in the country: Zhang was caught strangling a 17-year-old youth outside his house with a belt but “laughed off the episode, saying that he was just fooling with the boy”, the media later reported. Only after a year of killing was Zhang caught.

WHAT THESE ANXIOUS PARENTS WERE NOT TO REALIZE WAS THAT THEIR SONS HAD ACTUALLY FALLEN VICTIM TO AN ED GEIN-LIKE PREDATOR CALLED ZHANG YONGMING

April 2010, Zheng Minsheng, who stabbed eight students, was sentenced to death

Mental illness remains a closeted topic in China; neither medication nor modern psychiatric treatment is widely used and a 2010 analysis in British medical journalThe Lancetestimated that 91 percent of the 173 million Chinese adults suffering mental problems receive no professional help whatsoever. Li Zhanguo, who targeted 11 men with severe learning diff i culties between 1991 and 1995, is a different example of how China's attitude towards mental healthcare can be exploited by villains: Li successfully counted on police and victims' families to blame their disappearances on their illness.

Then there is the stringent censorship. Edicts and regulations are regularly sent out to media, warning editors not to report on this suspect, or diverge from an off i cial line on those murders. “Do not report, comment on, or hype up the series of vicious murder cases,” read one typical directive in 2011, around the same time as censors were also attempting to suppress details of the Li Hao case. The cannibalized bodies of several women had been found in Hunan, and off i cials did not want the public to know there was a killer on the loose in their province.

An unusual exception to this rule, however, was the cross-province manhunt for Zeng Kaigui, aka Zhou Kehua, an ex-military policeman who'd earned the nickname “Flat Head” during his eight years as a near-mythically elusive killer. In 2004, Zhou pulled a heist that netted around 500,000 RMB (only 60,000 RMB of which was ever recovered. The rest went to his family; Zhou was at least fi lial). After committing at least seven other murders, including that of an armed PLA soldier in Chongqing in 2009, Zhou pulled a dramatic daylight robbery in downtown Nanjing shortly before Spring Festival, 2012, making off in a getaway car with 200,000 RMB, leaving one bystander dead.

The news spread quickly on microblogs. Unable to contain the story—and with eight years of failure to reckon with—authorities authorized an operation involving a bounty of 2.45 million RMB and up to 13,000 off i cers with helicopters, all hunting a man withsupposed gifts for marksmanship, disguise, and countersurveillance who communicated through “grunts and body language”. The improbablesounding Zhou was fi nally shot dead in an alley following a shoot-out with police.

Huang Yong, charged with the murder of 17 boys but believed to have killed many more, faces trial

HIGH-PROFILE CRIMES LIKE ZHOU'S UNDERMINE THE SUPPOSED EFFICACY OF THE GOVERNMENT, WHICH IS EXPECTED TO KEEP ITS CITIZENS SAFE

High-prof i le crimes like Zhou's undermine the supposed eff i cacy of the government, which is expected to keep its citizens safe, and damage the image of the police. Sure enough, rumors among a skeptical public—that the “real Zhou” was still at large; and police had shot the wrong man; that there was a conspiracy—were denied by police, then deleted by state media.

Meanwhile, shortly after doing his job and reporting on Henan's serial kidnapper Li Hao, Southern journalist Ji was interviewed at length on web portal Sina.com and invited to speak on the subject at public security universities. Speaking just a few weeks after the story broke, though, he was fi nding the scrutiny “very stressful…I don't want to be a celebrity, or a star reporter, I just want to do my job.”

The criminal psychologist Li Chaoting argues, though, that“sometimes, the smaller in scope for this kind of news, the better it is for the public.” He points to the spate of copycat killings that took place on schoolchildren in 2010 and caused an outbreak of soul-searching among the Chinese public for an explanation. (In fact, a similar series of attacks took place in 2004 in four provinces, leaving 13 dead and 85 injured, but that spree was largely forgotten by the time the fresh wave began six years later.)

The killers this time included Zheng Minsheng, 42, who stabbed eight students to death because “he had been repeatedly frustrated in his romantic life” according to the court, and Wu Huanming, a relatively prosperous villager who hacked nine people to death, including seven children, at a Shanxi kindergarten, which was explained away as Wu havingan unspecif i ed grudge regarding the school.

All the attackers were middle-aged, male, and unemployed, while the victims were mostly children. “The fi rst few cases provided later examples to criminals about how to take ‘revenge' on society,” says Li, citing a motive commonly ascribed to mass killers in China's state media. Newspaper and television reports, claims Li, should “bear some responsibility for spreading an alternative method of revenge; that is, directing the hatred of grown-ups toward children.” After Wu's attack, a blackout on reporting the school slayings was enforced.

But most killers and victims do not get the kind of media attention in China to which Li refers.

Take 2003, for example: a bumper year for serial killers. There was the pair of killers from Henan, Shen Changying and his brother Changping, 22, who started by kidnapping and killing prostitutes. They spared their next victim, Li Chunling, 23, after she offered to lure potential victims for them. Li was initiated into the murders, and the trio began practicing cannibalism, recruiting a further two female accomplices who helped them kill a total of 11 “hair salon” girls. They were caught by police during their preferred method of body disposal—dissolving with sulfuric acid—and sentenced to death in 2005.

In the same year as the Chens' murderous rampage, 43-year-old Ma Yong and female accomplice Duan Zhiqun, 20, were arrested outside Shenzhen for the murder of 12 women picked up with the promise of migrant work, robbed for their mobile phones and cash, then their bodies dumped in a river.

To the north in Beijing, long considered one of the world's safest capitals, “devil driver” Li Pingping was meeting women outside karaoke bars, driving them to Haidian, then raping, murdering, dismembering, and buring them at the foot of the Fragrant Hills. His reason:“because they made money easier than me.” Li's wife, Dongmei, is said to have witnessed one of the killings during the Spring Festival of 2003; instead of reporting him, she fetched a hammer and assisted Li in holding down the struggling girl. Her husband was a serial killer? She had a son and sick father to worry about, Dongmei told police.

Li's case, though, is still rare for Beijing, a city which certainly benef i ts from fi rmer policing due to its political status. Although China doesn't have a centralized criminal investigative organization like the FBI, the Public Security Bureau “could be regarded as a huge police network that adopts a policy of cooperation,” says Li. “They are supposed to provide the necessary help to each other, and the information on their intranet is all connected.” Yet in practice, Li admits, inter-provincial crime is viewed as a low priority. “When off i cers are not under that pressure, it's hard to expect them to solve the case as diligently.”

Yin says there are bureaucratic disincentives as well.“Solving other [provinces'] cases doesn't contribute to performance assessment,” he explains. Nor do the costs of arresting, detaining, and repatriating criminals, as well as the attendant paperwork. “Assisting other police is not considered their responsibility.”

The detection and detention of serial murderers in any country the size of China requires the sophisticated coordination of up-to-date tactics, but all too often, law-enforcement techniques are neither sophisticated or cooperative.

Failures are swept under the carpet and the off i cial instinct is to scapegoat one or more mid-level bureaucrats with nominal responsibility and strictly contain all media fallout. Four senior off i cers took the fall for Henan kidnapper—killer Li Hao. After Yunnan cannibal Zhang Yongming, who killed 17, was caught, the off i cial Xinhua agency said that authorities had fi red or disciplined 12 off i cers for “failing to meet their responsibilities” including a county chief and the head of the township police. Search terms such as “Yunnan disappeared” and “Yunnan murder” on microblogging services were swiftly blocked.

Yet current strategies do little to prevent further instances. After 27-year-old ex-soldier Huang Yong was arrested in his ramshackle village abode in Henan, it was discovered he had been hanging around local Internet cafes for years, picking up teenage boys with promises of video games at home. Over several years, police and schools had ignored complaints of missing children, fearing public panic and their own possible responsibility, until Huang was charged with the murders of 17 teens; the families claim many more.

A central directive was issued in response to the bungled investigation, which decreed that PSBs must warn the public of any potential serial killers in their midst. Three years later, however, the same thing happened again in Heilongjiang: 33-year-old Gong Runbo was a convicted rapist who spent months trawling Internet cafes, picking up schoolchildren. He was eventually charged with six murders; again, locals claim he was responsible for at least four more.

Ministry of Public Security spokesman Wu Heping admitted “failings”, but pointed the blame away from the police. “Despite the government's ban on minors in Internet cafes,” he said, “Gong was taking these kids in and out without being confronted or reported.” Had those minors read of Gong and Huang's crimes at the Internet café, perhaps they might have been saved.