Painful

A possible triple revenge murder in a village in southern Shaanxi Province during the Chinese New Year holiday triggered heated debate among Chinese netizens. Local farmer Zhang Koukou, 35, allegedly murdered his 72-year-old neighbour Wang Zixin and his sons Wang Zhengjun and Wang Xiaojun. Zhang later surrendered to police and claimed that he acted to avenge his mother. Wang Zhengjun, 39 when he was killed, was sentenced to seven years in jail for killing Zheng’s mother by hitting her with a wooden stick 22 years ago. Zhang’s sister meanwhile claimed that one of Wang Zhengjun’s brothers had in fact killed her mother, but the younger son was forced by the family to take the blame as he was a minor. Some netizens sympathised with Zhang for apparently taking the law into his own hands, going so far as to call him a “hero,” but others argued that turning into a vigilante will only create disorder in society. Zhang’s father has now applied for a retrial of his wife’s death, and netizens hope that China will act to halt people’s intent to “answer violence with violence” with a more sound and transparent legal system. 

Some parents recently discovered that take-out food platforms had allegedly sold cigarettes to minors via “code signals.” The suspected shops blurred the pictures of cigarettes, and labelled them with code words like “red” or “fireworks,” and put them into inconspicuous columns. The parents said that they asked their children to use the platforms when they had no time to prepare dinner, only to find that their money had flowed to tobacco sellers. The platforms involved have promised to investigate the suspect shops and penalise them, while netizens were just curious about how children knew those strange words represented cigarettes.