Ten Years After Qiao Renliang's Death, His Parents Are Living the Crisis That Outlived Him
Ten years after the actor-singer's death, marked on Weibo on what would have been his 39th birthday, the day's heaviest posts were his father's account of the insomnia that preceded it — and his mother's point that the online abuse that once targeted their son now follows the parents themselves.
Ten years after his death, the Chinese actor and singer Qiao Renliang — known internationally as Kimi Qiao — was among the leading names on Weibo again on Thursday, which would have been his 39th birthday. The posts that carried the day were not tributes in the usual sense. They were his father's memories, and they doubled as an accusation aimed at no one and everyone: the online cruelty that helped break his son is now aimed at the parents themselves.
In an interview with the outlet Cover News, Qiao Kangqiang reconstructed the weeks before his son's death from the outside. The last real conversation was a call he took abroad for his shipping work, months before the end. "He said he was tired," the father recalled. "For many days in a row — half a month, twenty days — he couldn't sleep." The family still marked Mid-Autumn Festival together the night before he died; his father remembers resting a hand on his son's shoulder and feeling that his whole body had gone stiff. The detail was still fresh a decade later, offered now with the vocabulary of someone who has spent ten years learning what the signs meant.
The actress Joe Chen, Qiao's close friend, has posted for him every year for a decade, and this year's message carried the same line as ever: "Ten years — you are forever a boy" (十年了，你永远是少年), alongside photographs with Qiao's parents. Thousands of strangers echoed a smaller hashtag that has become an annual ritual of consolation: "surely Kimi Qiao is doing well now, wherever he is."
But the day's sharpest edge came from his mother, in the same coverage. After their son's death, Qiao's parents opened livestream channels to sell products from the clothing brand he had founded — a way of keeping something of him alive — and were met by years of online abuse: conspiracy theories about how he really died, accusations of cashing in on his name, insults about their grief. His mother's observation, quoted by Cover News, is the sentence the day's discussion turned on: what the two of them have endured is the same road their son once walked — the misfortune is that he did not make it to the end of it.
Chinese mental-health accounts used the trend to teach what the father's story described. One widely shared explainer, riffing on the hashtag, walked readers through "fine by day, collapsing at night" as the signature of hidden anxiety: daytime composure suppresses distress, and it resurfaces after dark as insomnia, nightmares and headaches. The advice — ten minutes of acknowledging the feeling, an outlet before it pools — is the kind of public psychoeducation that barely existed in China a decade ago, when Qiao's insomnia was, by his father's account, its most urgent warning sign.
The posts closed, as they do each year, on shared photographs and remembrance. The question his mother put back into the discussion does not close so neatly: ten years on, the abuse has simply changed targets, and the people still standing in it are his parents.