Gong Junli had been waiting for almost two years – ever since his eight-year-old daughter Xinyue was stabbed multiple times and her body left in a poplar grove in northwest China – he had envisioned her killer finally being brought to justice.
But justice becomes complicated when the defendant is also a child.
Police say the boy who killed Xinyue was 13 at the time. His trial, which begins on Wednesday, will seek to answer a question that has rocked Chinese society: how should China deal with young children accused of heinous crimes?
Countries around the world have long struggled to balance punishment and forgiveness for children. But the debate is particularly salient in China, where a history of relative leniency toward young offenders stands in stark contrast to the limited rights of adult criminal defendants. For decades, the government has emphasized education and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders rather than incarcerating them.
But a backlash has begun recently. A series of child murders in recent years has led many Chinese to call for the state to take a tougher stance, and the government has responded. Xinyue’s murder is one of the first cases to go to trial since the government lowered the age at which children can be charged with serious crimes like murder from 14 to 12.
Several cases have stirred up debate this year. In January, police in central China dropped charges against a boy accused of killing a four-year-old girl by pushing her into a fertilizer tank, Chinese media reported, because the boy was under 12 and too young to be prosecuted. In March, police near the central Chinese city of Handan said three 13-year-old boys dug a grave in an abandoned greenhouse and took a classmate there to kill him, according to the report. The boys were charged soon after.
On Chinese social media, hashtags related to the Handan murders were trending: The video was viewed more than one billion times in a day, with legal scholars and ordinary social media users alike calling for the perpetrators to be severely punished, including with the death penalty. Some suggested that young people may be more likely to commit crimes because they know they will not be punished legally. A professor of criminal law with more than 30 million followers on Chinese social media accused those who try to spare minors from punishment of “moral relativism.”
But others point to factors that drive children to crime, such as parental abandonment and poverty. Many in China fear that poor rural children who have become defendants in some of the most high-profile cases are being abandoned as the price of economic development. Many of these children are described as “left behind” children, because their parents leave them at home while they search for better jobs far away.
Amid growing public pressure, the Supreme People’s Court last month issued new guidelines on preventing juvenile crime, including holding parents responsible for their children’s actions.
The court also recently announced that it had sentenced four children aged between 12 and 14 to between 10 and 15 years in prison – the first time it has done so in that age group. The court said it was unclear what violent crimes the children had committed, but that it had tried to treat them “with leniency and tolerance.”
According to Gong, Xinyue was a good-natured child who loved the animation “Paw Patrol” and loved eating mangoes and strawberries. On September 25, 2022, Xinyue’s grandparents were taking care of her while Gong, a single father who works in construction, was working at a site more than 100 miles away. That afternoon, Gong’s father called to say Xinyue was missing.
Gong hurried back to his impoverished village of about 40 families. When Xinyue arrived, a body had already been found in the area, surrounded by terraced corn and potato fields in Gansu province.
Police arrested a 13-year-old neighborhood boy who, according to an indictment provided by Gong, said the boy had seen but didn’t know the girl well, but had “developed a hatred for women” because he was “unhappy with his mother’s upbringing.” Citing physical evidence, witness statements and the boy’s confession, the indictment said the boy placed a knife in a grove, led Xinyue there and stabbed her in the neck.
It was unclear whether the teenager, who is being held in a local prison according to the indictment, had access to a lawyer. Rights activists have accused Chinese authorities of sometimes using pressure to coerce confessions. Local police and courts declined requests for comment.
Several attempts to contact the boy’s parents were unsuccessful. The Communist Party-run news agency Hongxing News reported that it had interviewed the boy’s mother, Chen. Chen did not say whether she believed her son had killed Xinyue, but said she had apologized and offered compensation to Gong’s family.
Chen also said her son had been bullied – once forced to eat excrement by a classmate – and admitted to hitting him over his studies.
After the boy’s arrest, Gong expected the case would be solved quickly. Instead, prosecutors didn’t indict him for more than a year. And because of the broad range of crimes for which the death penalty is applicable in China, Gong expected a death sentence. He was outraged to learn that the law prohibits the death penalty for minors.
He said the law protects minors, but “have the children we lost been protected?”
Anqi Shen, a law professor at Britain’s Northumbria University, said China has long been considered relatively more progressive on juvenile justice than some Western countries. International treaties recommend a minimum age for prosecution of 12. China set the minimum at 14 in the 1970s. (In the United States, the age of criminal responsibility varies by state, and most states have no minimum.)
In particular, in recent years, Beijing has encouraged prosecutors to divert juvenile offenders into education programs or community service. Studies from around the world have shown that incarcerating juvenile offenders does little to reduce recidivism rates. Between 2008 and 2022, the number of juvenile convictions plummeted by about 70%.
But alternatives to prison have many flaws: Juvenile correctional facilities and detention centers are often overseen by police officers rather than specially trained staff, and parents can choose not to send their children there.
Authorities were even less sure how to deal with students under the age of 14. In 2018, a 12-year-old boy who police said had killed his mother was allowed to return to school a few days later, but police said they had no other choice because they could not press charges.
Public outrage over the case prompted the government to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 12 in 2021, said Zhang Jing, a consultant at the China Association for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency in Beijing.
It’s unclear whether juvenile crime rates are actually rising. The Supreme People’s Court recently said it convicted 12,000 minors in the first three months of 2024, an increase of about 80% from the previous year. But experts say this may reflect a change in authorities’ prosecution decisions rather than an actual increase in juvenile crime. China does not publish arrest statistics, and social media has contributed to exaggerating individual cases.
The debate about punishment in some ways overshadows the debate about prevention, and in particular how to help the so-called “left-behind children” involved in these crimes.
Studies have shown that left-behind children — some 70 million of them — are more likely to be bullied or abused, as they are less likely to receive supervision and affection. State media said the three suspects in the Handan case were left-behind children, just like the victim.
In response, many Chinese people urge parents to return to their villages to raise their children, or argue that parents should be held responsible if their children cannot return to the village.
But Beijing-based professor Zhang said such calls overlook the reasons why parents are separating their children in the first place: Most Chinese children are banned from attending public schools outside their hometowns, making it difficult for workers to bring their children with them.
“Punishing parents is no use. Maybe it’s better to change the parents’ environment,” said Zhang, who also called for more rehabilitation and prevention resources, such as police officers specially trained to deal with juveniles.
Gong acknowledged the difficult choices many parents face, and said he himself was often away from home for weeks or months at a time because there were few jobs in his village.
“Who doesn’t want to give their children and their families a better life?” he says. “But everyone has to make it happen in their own way.”
Gong is currently working a second job near his home while awaiting trial.
Shingetsu was buried in the grove where he died. Kimi-san cut down a poplar tree and planted cherry and peach trees in its place, imagining Shingetsu reincarnated and eating from the trees.
Li Yu and Zhao Siyi contributed to the research.
