How a Case the Police Refused to File Ended in a 16-Year Sentence for Child Rape
China's Supreme People's Procuratorate has publicized a case in which an 11-year-old girl was plied with alcohol and assaulted in a hotel while police declined to open a file — and the prosecutor's office forced the case back into the courts.
On February 24, 2024, an 11-year-old girl identified in court papers as Li was lured to a hotel room in Jiangsu province, drawn into a drinking game she could not hold her drink through, and sexually assaulted by two people: a 24-year-old man surnamed Kong and a 13-year-old boy surnamed Gao. By the time her parents found her that night, she had been trapped in the room for five hours.
What happened next is why the case is news now. When Li's parents reported the assault, the girl — who did not know Kong had been in the room — accused only the boy. Police investigated him alone, then declined to open a case: at 13, Gao was below China's age of criminal responsibility, which begins at 14 for ordinary crimes. The adult who had planned the evening and poured the drinks was, at that point, never investigated at all.
The family fought back through a mechanism most Chinese readers had never needed to learn: case-filing supervision (立案监督), the power of procuratorates to overrule a police decision not to prosecute. On March 11, 2024, Li's father applied to the district procuratorate. Prosecutors reviewed the hotel records and realized a grown man had been at the scene, then supervised the opening of a case against both.
What the reopened investigation found made the original decision worse. Kong, it turned out, had a history with young girls — two earlier molestations and an attempted rape of another child — and had repeatedly colluded with the boy to align their stories before questioning, according to the Supreme People's Procuratorate's summary of the case. He was convicted of rape and child molestation and sentenced to sixteen years. The boy, below the age line, was sent instead to a specialized correctional school.
The procuratorate's own framing, released November 6 with a batch of typical case-filing-supervision cases, is pointed: in assaults on minors where an adult and a child act together, the adult can deliberately use the minor's shallow experience, steer him into the crime, and shift the blame onto someone who legally cannot be prosecuted — walking away while the child absorbs the consequences.
Public reaction on Weibo has centered less on the adult than on the boy. One commenter asked why coverage kept calling the 13-year-old a "boy": "if the law can't strike back hard at an attacker, today he dares to rape, tomorrow he gets out and dares to kill." Another noted that sixteen years against a child's lifetime is hard to accept, and pointed to the mundane defenses that failed her — hotels' obligation to question unaccompanied minors at check-in, and body-boundary education that starts early.
Since 2021, criminal law has allowed children as young as 12 to be prosecuted for homicide or grave injury by especially cruel means, with the procuratorate's approval — but rape is not on that short list, which is why Gao faces a correctional school rather than a court. The case leaves the argument China has been having for years exactly where it was: the mechanism that saved this one case worked, but it only worked because a father knew to ask.