China's Top Court Explains How Lay Judges Decided the Peking University Abuse Case
The Supreme People's Court has published the inner workings of China's most-watched abuse case, showing how lay judges established that an unmarried girlfriend counted as 'family' under the criminal law. It is a quiet but consequential signal about who the abuse statute protects.
The Peking University student known to the public as Bao Li died by suicide in 2019, after months of demeaning messages from her boyfriend Mou — a case that has hung over Chinese conversations about intimate-partner abuse ever since. Her boyfriend was convicted and sentenced in 2023, but one legal question remained contested: could a girlfriend be a "family member" under China's abuse statute, which on its face protects family? On Thursday the Supreme People's Court answered in detail, publishing how lay judges decided it.
At a press conference on October 23, the court released its third batch of typical cases in which people's assessors — ordinary citizens who sit on collegial panels alongside professional judges — took part, and the Mou case led it. The court's account shows the assessors doing what a jury does elsewhere: digging into the texture of a relationship. They reviewed where the couple lived, how often, for how long, and how money moved between them, and concluded that the two "objectively already had a relatively stable shared life." On that basis, a girlfriend who is neither wife nor blood relative falls within the reach of the abuse law — and sustained verbal cruelty that drives a partner to death is a crime the statute covers.
That reading matters far beyond one verdict. Publishing it as a "typical case" is how China's top court steers the lower courts: the reasoning becomes a template, and cohabiting partners elsewhere can be treated the same way. As one legal summary on Weibo put it, the case's two hard questions were precisely whether cohabitation counts as family under the abuse crime, and whether long-running denigration counts as abuse — the assessors answered both.
The batch's second case is stranger and more familiar: children who urinated into a hotpot at a restaurant, and the question of what their guardians owe the other diners. There, the court said, the lay judges established that the household was "heavy on material provision, light on moral education" — a fact-finding that grounded the finding of liability.
The court framed the release as part of a deliberate push: more citizen participation in cases that touch the public interest or have already gripped the public, so that verdicts carry what it called a foundation of popular feeling and social acceptance. The topic reached Baidu's trending board within hours, listed alongside the hotpot case as the day's legal news.
What the release leaves open is the boundary. If years of cohabitation make a girlfriend family, what about a shorter relationship, or an engagement? The court has now extended the abuse statute to couples who never married — and, in doing so, told China's lower courts that the label "family" is a fact to be investigated, not a certificate to be checked.