Two Years After a Chinese Woman Was Beaten Unconscious and Thrown Off a Cliff, Her Family Waits for a Verdict

The second hearing in one of China's most closely watched murder trials lasted about an hour on Monday morning, in a courthouse in Yongshou County, Shaanxi. The defendant, a man surnamed Zhang, is accused of beating his wife — known in Chinese media by the pseudonym Miao — unconscious during an argument at home, then throwing her off a dirt cliff near Xianyang. Nearly two years after her death, the judges did not rule; the court said a verdict would come at a later sitting, while prosecutors argued the crime was exceptionally cruel and merited a heavy sentence.

What made the sitting consequential was the evidence. Miao's elder brother told reporters the family submitted photographs of old injuries, police records and chat messages in which she described the abuse. The defence, according to the family, leaned on a claim that Miao had been unfaithful — a suggestion her brother dismissed with a detail that has since travelled widely on Weibo: the men the defence cast as her lovers were her own male cousins, visiting the family home (Headline News).

The hearing's most quoted moment came from Miao's sister. "Even when my sister had her period, he forced himself on her — inside the marriage (婚内强奸)," she told the Shaanxi broadcaster The First Scene, in an interview that has been liked more than 15,000 times (First Scene). Since she began speaking publicly, she said, neither she nor her parents has slept a full night without medication. Her phrase circulated on Monday precisely because it is almost never said aloud in China: the criminal law contains no standalone offence of marital rape, and allegations like hers are usually folded into the wider violence of a case rather than prosecuted on their own.

Miao met Zhang through a matchmaking introduction and married him quickly — the Chinese shorthand is 闪婚, a "flash marriage." The marriage lasted nine years. According to her family's account, the violence began during her postpartum confinement after the birth of her first child, and continued through police reports and hospital visits. She asked a court for a divorce twice; thirteen days after the second petition was rejected, she was attacked and died of her injuries (Lightning News). That sequence — a petition refused, a deadline missed by days — is why the case has resonated beyond Shaanxi. It echoes the killing of a Hunan businesswoman a month after she first raised divorce, which put China's 2021 divorce "cooling-off period" under scrutiny (that case, covered here). To critics, both trials ask the same question: when courts decline to dissolve a marriage, whom, exactly, are they protecting?

The family, for its part, wants nothing from Zhang but a sentence. Relatives told Beijing Time that he once pulled a knife on Miao's mother and threatened his own child, and that they have rejected every offer of civil compensation; their stated position is the death penalty (Beijing Time). The verdict in Yongshou County is expected within weeks.