Hubei Farmer Shot Dead by an Air Rifle While Working His Field Before Mid-Autumn
A 64-year-old farmer in Jingmen, Hubei, was found shot dead in his field in the early hours of the Mid-Autumn Festival, out before dawn to beat the rain before his daughters' holiday visit. A man from a nearby village has told police he mistook him for game, and the confession is exactly what is keeping the case on China's trending lists: it explains the death only if the family's unanswered questions go away.
The headlamp went out around 3 a.m. That much the family's security camera recorded: a faint light moving across a field on the edge of Macheng Town, Jingmen, in Hubei province, then darkness. A few minutes later a pickup truck arrived, stopped for three or four minutes, and drove off.
Inside the field was Cheng, a 64-year-old farmer, out before dawn to beat the rain. This year's Mid-Autumn Festival fell on September 25, and his two grown daughters had arranged to collect their parents that morning and take them into the city for the holiday. According to his older brother's account to Chinese media, Cheng saw the forecast, put on a headlamp, and went overnight to tidy the dozen-odd mu — roughly a hectare — he and his wife farm, so that nothing would delay the reunion.
At around 6 a.m., his son-in-law took a call from the police. China News Weekly's report, which has drawn more than 30,000 likes, describes what the family found at the field: Cheng lying where he had been working, bleeding. A "non-natural death" certificate issued by the local police station for the funeral home records that he was struck by a lead pellet at the boundary of two villages and died of cardiac tamponade and acute blood loss.
A man from a nearby village has told police he fired the shot, saying he mistook Cheng for game, according to the family. Police confirmed on October 13 that the weapon was an air rifle. The case remains under investigation, and that is what has kept it on the trending lists for days: the confession explains the death only if the questions around it go away.
The family's list is long. They say the shooter fled and then returned; that the ambulance arrived an hour after the emergency call; that Cheng had two wounds, one to the left thigh and one running from right shoulder to left chest; and that no one has told them where the rifle came from, how two wounds were produced, or who made the call that brought the ambulance. One Weibo user went further, arguing that a man wearing a lit headlamp is a hard target to mistake for an animal, and that the second wound suggests a second shot. That is an accusation, not a finding — police have said only that the shooting was reported as a hunting accident.
What the case has reopened is the status of air rifles in a country with some of the strictest gun controls in the world. Private ownership of firearms is effectively banned in China, and an air gun above a low muzzle-energy threshold legally counts as a firearm; there is no licensed hunting culture in which "mistook him for game" would be a routine explanation. On Zhihu, the question attached to the case is whether hunting with an air rifle is legal at all — and what a shooter's responsibility is if it is not.
He just wanted to finish the farm work and reunite with his family. What his family has now is a certificate, a confession whose details do not all fit, and an investigation with no announced end.