On October 24, 2025, the second trial of the case of Dalian woman Xu Yuan being beaten and stabbed to death by her boyfriend Dan Mou was held, and the verdict was announced after only two minutes of court proceedings, declaring Dan Mou not guilty, once again letting the suspect with significant suspicion go free. The victim, Xu Yuan, entered into a romantic relationship with Dan Mou in February 2022, and by April, she was found dead from stab wounds when alone with Dan Mou, who also beat her multiple times that night. Clearly, this is very likely a murder case. Dan Mou himself is a thug and scoundrel; he does not work at all, relying on his family’s funeral home business to indulge himself daily, thus his morals are very corrupt and his conduct is notorious. In 2014, Dan Mou was sentenced to one year for intentional injury, with a two-year probation, and during the probation period, he was also sentenced to four years and two months for gathering a crowd to fight. In 2021, he was detained for 15 days for fighting and had also beaten his ex-girlfriend. When Xu Yuan and Dan Mou started dating, she was already subjected to his violence, and even accidental contact with Dan Mou led to beatings and scolding. On the night of the incident, Xu Yuan refused to cook instant noodles for Dan Mou and was beaten and dragged again, with multiple bruises on her limbs, bleeding and torn mucous membranes around her eyes, nose, left ear, and lower lip, all of which were confirmed and admitted by the public security, prosecution, law enforcement, and Dan Mou himself (though this is also Dan Mou’s side of the story, and no one was present at the time). It is obvious that Xu Yuan’s death is absolutely inseparable from Dan Mou, this parasite thug. Dan Mou’s attitude towards Xu Yuan was never one of equality; he treated her as a slave or livestock, and once provoked, he would resort to fists and kicks, which must have caused great physical and mental harm to Xu Yuan. Moreover, this barbaric attitude of not treating people as humans, often beating and kicking, is a clear indication that he did not care about her life or death, and such behavior is a crucial reason for her death.
However, the public security, prosecution, and law enforcement never mentioned Dan Mou’s extremely reactionary attitude towards Xu Yuan, and during the investigation, there was serious cover-up. According to undisclosed reports revealed by Xu Yuan’s sister, Xu Yuan had a fractured rib in addition to the injuries mentioned above. Ask yourself, can a suicide cause a rib to be broken directly with a single stab? Dan Mou initially claimed the knife was a green-folding knife, then said it was a yellow non-folding knife, showing a huge discrepancy. The police did not care at all and instead claimed that the blood-soaked knife handle made fingerprint extraction impossible. However, the yellow non-folding knife handle in the photos is very clean. How to explain this? There were even three autopsies, but two of the examiners refused to produce reports or testify in court. In fact, only one result was publicly released: “…the left-sided stab wound on the body could be self-inflicted, but homicide cannot be ruled out…”. According to China’s official “presumption of innocence” principle, such partial disclosure amounts to a conclusion: Dan Mou is not guilty! The public security, prosecution, and law enforcement are merely tools of the ruling class, and in China, this is no exception. This case has exposed their true nature. Chinese law enforcement generally dismisses physical evidence, which benefits them in two ways: if they need to fabricate charges, abandoning physical evidence and using torture are the easiest methods; if they want to exonerate criminals colluding with the government, ignoring physical evidence is the best approach. The government’s protection of Dan Mou is the second point. The above doubts were not clarified by the police, but instead, the “physical evidence” they released was one-sided and exculpatory for Dan Mou, unable to extract fingerprints from the knife handle or determine if the wound was caused by homicide. The reason for police covering for Dan Mou is also because Dan Mou and his family are wealthy. First, the funeral home run by Dan Mou’s family is highly profitable. Second, running a funeral home requires large sums of money to bribe hospitals and officials to attract clients, so only the wealthy petty bourgeoisie or bourgeoisie can afford to operate such a business (reference: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/617652189). Dan Mou and his family are part of the exploitative class colluding with Chinese officials—that is part of China’s ruling foundation, and thus they are “protected” by the law. The woman who was stabbed to death, Xu Yuan, was from a rural family background, with no money, no status, and was female—under the social system of private ownership, her family labor was not recognized by society, and she was not considered an inheritable asset, so her social status was very low. Moreover, in China, this Confucian-capitalist country, there is widespread discrimination that “only women and villains are hard to raise,” which explains why the investigation was so biased in favor of Dan Mou. During the residence period assigned to Dan Mou, he was still able to travel and post on social media. If the case was still under investigation, poor and powerless workers would inevitably face brutal torture and forced confessions, pressuring them to admit guilt quickly to close the case. From past wrongful cases, to large numbers of people being beaten to death during detention, to recent years where police use residence assignments to torture detained people, the contrast clearly shows who China’s police serve.
The court also protects Dan Mou, seemingly based on the materials provided by the prosecution, but in reality, the biased materials cannot produce a just verdict. Moreover, the court shamelessly claimed that even if Xu Yuan’s death was a suicide, it had nothing to do with Dan Mou, because he did not expect such consequences when abusing her. Such absurd reasoning! Even based on Dan Mou’s flawed confession, Xu Yuan’s “suicide” was entirely the result of his abuse. Yet, the court shamelessly distorted the facts by substituting Dan Mou’s subjective thoughts for the objective outcome, which is a blatant disregard for facts. As a result, this habitual domestic abuser left court without any punishment! Such an unjust verdict has caused great public outrage. During the second trial, over a hundred people protested outside the court, shouting slogans like “Killers must pay with their lives,” but the court only took two minutes to uphold the original verdict, declaring Dan Mou not guilty. The government even dispatched special police and armed police to arrest and disperse the crowd, preventing them from gathering outside the court. The state machinery refuses to hold Dan Mou accountable for Xu Yuan’s death but instead violently suppresses the people, openly showing that the court, police, and Dan Mou are all in the same camp!
Xu Yuan’s death remains without a true resolution, and the criminals go unpunished. The fundamental reason is not the collusion between Dan Mou’s family and the government, nor the negligence of the public security, prosecution, and law enforcement agencies. In fact, this is a reflection of their “competence.” (State organs are tools for maintaining class rule.) They “competently” protect the interests of exploiters, “competently” suppress protests, and “competently” prevent justice from being served. Not only in Xu Yuan’s case, but in all cases in China’s bourgeois dictatorship, without mass struggle, all cases would end the same way. The oppressed are heavily sentenced, while their oppressors never face proper punishment: for example, Cao, who was killed by her husband while fleeing, is sentenced to 11 years for intentional homicide; delivery workers beaten and killed by their supervisors are also sentenced for intentional homicide and face the death penalty; even more serious crimes like intra-marital rape by Yin have gone unpunished, with the Chinese government compensating him over 2 million yuan; murderers like Tian Yongming, who committed rape, attempted murder, and fled for over ten years, only received a suspended death sentence. These bloody and tearful histories over decades fully demonstrate that China’s capitalist judiciary will never deliver justice to the oppressed, women’s lives are arbitrarily trampled, workers’ rights are unprotected, and the grievances of the people have no outlet.
However, “hope for salvation has not disappeared,” and China was not always like this. Before China’s restoration of capitalism, the Chinese people, under the leadership of the Communist Party and Chairman Mao, overthrew the three mountains and once truly held power. If there were trials that did not guarantee the rights of oppressed women, the masses would oppose and demand retrials, and wrongdoers like vice presidents would be criticized (人民日报 1951-10-15电子版,人民日报历史). It is only because socialist China was overthrown that the judiciary became an instrument of the exploitative class dictatorship.
In today’s bourgeois dictatorship, although it is impossible to eradicate the phenomenon of the judiciary protecting oppressors, regarding the Xu Yuan case, we must put forward the following basic demands:
1. Immediately disclose the full truth of the “Xu Yuan case,” publish all doubts (such as the different knives, discrepancies in confessions) and all autopsy reports, and accept public supervision;
2. Legally reopen the case, severely punish the murderer Dan Mou and all responsible persons involved in covering up, condoning, or falsifying evidence.
Only when the people control the state machinery and the proletariat leads society anew can tragedies like Xu Yuan’s be prevented. Women’s liberation must be based on overthrowing all exploitation and oppression—that is the solemn answer of Marxists to history, reality, and the future.