Ten Years After Jiang Ge's Murder, Her Mother Is Closing the Last Case
Jiang Qiulian has spent a decade in courtrooms since her graduate-student daughter was murdered in Tokyo — first in a civil suit against the friend at whose door Jiang Ge died, then against the strangers who abused the family online. This week she posted that the final suit, a private criminal prosecution in Gansu, is nearly done.
For the third time, Jiang Qiulian traveled to Jinchang, a small city in Gansu province she has come to dread, for a hearing she hopes is the last. Her daughter Jiang Ge was murdered in Tokyo in 2016; the decade since has been spent in court — first in a civil suit against the friend at whose door Jiang Ge died, and then, one after another, against the online strangers who tormented the family. This case, a private criminal prosecution against one of those abusers, is the final one. On September 30, she posted a letter she titled "Ten years of seeking justice; the dust will finally settle" — a post liked more than 27,000 times.
The letter was also an apology. A video from an earlier trip had led Jinchang residents to believe she was angry at their city, and she wanted that corrected. "The wind in Jinchang is gentle, the mountains and rivers quiet, and every stranger I met was kind," she wrote. "But this city holds my years of running around, my exhaustion and heartbreak. I love all the calm and beauty of this world — I simply never want to cross paths with Jinchang again."
The post folded in the anniversary that started it all: ten years since she first landed in Japan, in August 2016, to visit a daughter she had not seen since Jiang Ge began graduate school at Hosei University. She remembered the red-eye flight to save money, the subway she did not know stopped running at midnight, and the two of them passing the night in Narita airport because a taxi felt too expensive. In her suitcase were mooncakes for the coming Mid-Autumn festival, dried figs and red dates — and snacks a couple back home had asked her to carry to Liu Nuanxi, the friend Jiang Ge shared a home with. Her daughter, who weighed less than fifty kilograms, insisted on hauling every bag herself.
The Jiang Ge case became a fixture of the Chinese internet in a way few crimes have. Her mother's decade of litigation — against the friend who was inside the apartment that night, and against anonymous users who piled on afterwards — turned her into a test case for what a private citizen can win from Chinese courts when the abuse comes from strangers. "Ten years. An ordinary mother, carrying the loss of a daughter, went to court again and again, traveling a thousand li each time," one supporter wrote. "That isn't obsession. That's love."
What "the dust settling" means in practice is the case's last question: a verdict in a private prosecution, brought without state prosecutors, by a mother who says this was her final trip. She has already made the promise that closes the letter: "For the rest of this life, I will never set foot in this city again."
