MCLC: fury over 1995 poison attack

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: fury over 1995 poison attack
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (5/10/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/world/asia/zhu-ling-case-re-emerges-unlea
shing-chinese-fury.html

Poison Attack Revives Fury in China Over ’95 Case
By ANDREW JACOBS 

BEIJING — The mysterious illness began with crippling stomach pain,
followed by blurry vision and sudden hair loss. By the time Zhu Ling, a
talented musician and chemistry student at one of China’s top
universities, emerged from a coma weeks later, she was partially paralyzed
and nearly blind, her faculties reduced to those of a child.

The 19-year-old sophomore, doctors later determined, had been
intentionally poisoned with thallium, a highly toxic heavy metal sometimes
used in Chinese rat poison. A culprit was never found, though suspicions
fell on a roommate from a well-connected family who was questioned by the
police but then released.

Now, nearly two decades after Ms. Zhu was poisoned, with her name
forgotten by all but a determined band of supporters, her case has
ricocheted back into public consciousness, electrifying the nation with
allegations of a bungled investigation and uncomfortable questions about
the power of China’s political elite in a society where justice remains
elusive.

In recent days, Chinese social media has been consumed by the case despite
an earlier effort to quash the conversation through aggressive censorship,
a move that only fueled wider interest — and greater fury. “Nineteen years
ago, the young Zhu Ling was poisoned,” Yao Chen, a film star with 45
million followers, wrote on China’s equivalent of Twitter. “Nineteen years
later, this name has again been poisoned.”

On Monday, an online petition was submitted to the White House’s “We the
People” platform imploring the American government to intervene in the
case. The petition 
<https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/invest-and-deport-jasmine-sun-wh
o-was-main-suspect-famous-thallium-poison-murder-case-victimzhu-lin/Rd8C54p
1>, which had drawn more than 143,000 signatures by Friday, calls on the
Obama administration to deport to China the primary suspect, despite a
lack of evidence that she even lives in the United States.

“There was always anger and frustration over this case but it’s exploding
right now,” said John Aldis, who has followed Ms. Zhu’s plight since his
years as a doctor at the American Embassy in Beijing during the 1990s. “A
new generation of Chinese young people are realizing that a terrible
injustice was done, and they want their voices to be heard.”

The renewed interest was inspired by a lurid murder last month in
Shanghai, where a medical student at the prestigious Fudan University was
accused of spiking the water of his roommate with a toxic chemical. The
police said the student, who has been charged with intentional homicide,
was driven by a grudge described as “trivial.”

What began as an online conversation about the pressures of China’s
cutthroat education system and the dearth of mental health services gave
way to discussion of other cases of poisoning in China, many of them
committed by students consumed with jealousy.

But it was the attempted murder of Zhu Ling — and the notion that the
perpetrator was given a free pass because of her political pedigree — that
dominated the discussion. Those suspicions tapped into the widely held
belief that well-placed Communist Party officials and their relatives are
above the law.

“We want what we’ve always wanted — truth and justice,” Wu Chengzhi, Ms.
Zhu’s father, said in a phone interview.
Although the narrative of the case is riddled with unanswered questions
and unsubstantiated allegations, Ms. Zhu’s family and supporters have
latched onto the one known fact: that Ms. Zhu’s roommate at Tsinghua
University, Sun Wei, had access to thallium and was questioned by the
police, but was quickly released, according to accounts in the state media.

The police say they lacked evidence for an arrest. Critics have speculated
without any proof that Ms. Sun’s grandfather, a senior official in the
decades after the Communists came to power, and another relative, a former
vice mayor of Beijing, had made the problem go away. As for a possible
motive, they suggest that Ms. Sun was envious of the victim’s beauty, and
of her musical and academic achievements.


Ms. Zhu’s friends say crucial evidence from her dorm room disappeared
before the police began their investigation. According to Mr. Wu, the
father, investigators closed the case in 1998 but did not tell the family
for nearly a decade.

“If the investigation reopens, there should also be an investigation of
police wrongdoings and who tried to intervene with the original
investigation,” said Zhang Jie, a lawyer who represents Ms. Zhu’s family.

Despite the mounting pressure, the authorities are not keen to revisit the
matter. On Wednesday, in a rare public response
<http://news.sina.cn/?sa=t124v71d8617231&pos=108&vt=4%20> to media
inquiries, the Beijing Public Security Bureau defended its investigation
but said the passage of time and paucity of evidence limited its ability
to reopen the case. The statement also rejected accusations that its
inquiry had been influenced by outsiders. “The dedicated investigation
team worked according to law, and the investigation was never compromised
or interfered with in any way,” it said.

But in one encouraging sign for Zhu Ling’s supporters, the topic has been
unblocked on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblog service,
suggesting that high-level officials have decided that suppressing the
controversy is counterproductive.

Still, the case has become something of a public relations challenge for
China’s new leadership. In the five months since he was appointed
Communist Party secretary, Xi Jinping has been trying to address rampant
public cynicism by attacking official corruption and the abuse of power,
although most of those efforts have so far been widely viewed as
superficial.

In one especially ham-handed attempt to grapple with the controversy,
Global Times, a bilingual tabloid published by the party-owned People’s
Daily, said in an editorial that public indignation over the Zhu Ling case
was largely the result of poor communication by the authorities. But the
editorial <http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/779695.shtml#.UYl4RLWG2Sq>
acknowledged that the truly powerful can influence the criminal justice
system by insisting that Ms. Sun’s family “was not distinguished enough”
to have such sway.

The accused has remained out of public view these past two decades,
although after her name began to spread across the ether in 2005, she
posted a brief online defense, saying she was innocent and in fact also a
victim because of the unfounded accusations against her. “On the Internet,
even though everyone is just a virtual ID, one should still be rational,
objective and responsible for their own words and actions,” she wrote.

The case has provided a fascinating showcase for the power of the
Internet. It was in early 1995, after Ms. Zhu’s illness stumped doctors at
one of Beijing’s premier hospitals, that a desperate high school classmate
posted a cry for help on one of the few wired computer terminals then
available in China. Amid the hundreds of replies from Western medical
experts, most correctly identified the syndrome as thallium poisoning and
suggested the antidote — a commercial dye known as Prussian blue
<http://www.bt.cdc.gov/radiation/prussianblue.asp>.

The information saved Ms. Zhu’s life, but she remains severely disabled,
her aging parents forced to tend to her round the clock. Ms. Zhu’s
72-year-old mother, Zhu Mingxin, has said she is not willing to give up,
despite the authorities’ refusal to reopen the investigation. “In the
prime of her youth she nearly lost her life, and she’s been miserable ever
since,” she told China National Radio earlier this week. “I hate the
perpetrator.”

In recent years, the family has been receiving help from an American-based
nonprofit group that has been raising money and reminding people that the
crime remains unsolved.

The renewed focus on her case has prompted a flood of contributions that
recently surpassed $520,000. He Qing, a volunteer with the group, the Help
Zhu Ling Foundation <http://www.helpzhuling.org/english.aspx>, has been
moved by the response as well as by the frustration expressed online.

“It’s the lack of justice, the unfairness and the feeling that people with
privilege can get away with anything,” said Ms. He, an automotive engineer
from China who now lives in Michigan. “People have just had enough.”

Mia Li and Sue-Lin Wong contributed research.