From this brutal case, we can see that the argument “rapists cannot be given heavy sentences to prevent them from giving up and killing” is actually a fallacy used to defend oppressors.
According to the second-instance criminal judgment from Guizhou Provincial Higher People’s Court, Xiong and victim Wang Xiuzhen are fellow villagers. In 2017, after Wang Xiuzhen’s husband’s second brother passed away, Xiong began a romantic relationship with her second sister-in-law and lived together. In the eyes of the victim’s son, Xiong was considered a “half-relative” of his mother, and he usually called Xiong “Uncle.” At the time of the incident, his mother was living alone in her hometown in Guizhou, only two or three hundred meters apart from both families. According to Xiong’s confession, he had contact with the victim in 2021. At that time, an elderly person in the victim’s family had died, and Xiong went to help slaughter a cow. After that, they often contacted each other by phone. Until May 2023, because Wang Xiuzhen refused to answer Xiong’s calls, he suspected he had been blocked and became dissatisfied. Police investigation showed that Wang Xiuzhen’s phone had 197 call records with Xiong. In May 2023 alone, Xiong made nearly 60 calls, all unanswered.
On the morning of July 3, 2023, around 6:24 a.m., a camera in Wang Xiuzhen’s courtyard in Qingzhu Village (now Bao Bao Zhai Village), Dingxin Township, Qianxi City, Guizhou Province, recorded her last moments alive: wearing a sun hat, green rain boots, carrying a backpack, holding a sickle, leaving as usual to mow the grass. Soon after, in a nearby sweet potato field where few people pass, Xiong cruelly murdered her. According to the first-instance judgment from Bijie City Intermediate Court, Xiong confessed to the scene: “I told her to sit down somewhere, but her face immediately looked bad, she stood holding a sickle and said there was nothing to talk about, and didn’t want to talk to me.” He questioned Wang Xiuzhen why she had blocked him and grabbed her hand, forcibly touching her over her clothes twice, but she pushed him away. Xiong described it as “forcibly touching,” but in reality, it was outright molestation. Then, taking advantage of Wang Xiuzhen squatting on the ground to cut grass, he used a nylon rope from her backpack to kill her. During this, Xiong was worried she might not be dead, so after she fell to the ground, he strangled her again for up to 30 minutes. The Guizhou Qianni City Public Security Judicial Appraisal Center’s report showed that the victim’s neck from the front to the right side was 13.0cm x 4.0cm with a semi-circular skin darkening, and a broad 0.8cm strip-like leather-like lesion could be seen. The left hyoid bone was fractured, caused by violent strangulation leading to mechanical asphyxiation death.
After the attack, Xiong did not flee immediately but continued to mow the grass calmly and hid the body to destroy evidence. He covered Wang Xiuzhen’s body with dry branches, separated her phone and SIM card after cutting enough grass, and hid them under rocks in the bamboo forest, then returned home, pretending nothing happened. Around 7 p.m. that night, Xiong returned to the scene under the pretext of “going to the mountains to catch mud pigs,” carrying a hoe, stripped Wang Xiuzhen’s clothes, abandoned her body in a crevice, and used two large stones weighing 108.7 jin and 153.1 jin respectively to crush and bury her. Afterwards, he burned the murder weapon and the victim’s clothes in batches. His actions of hiding the SIM card, burying the body, burning clothes, and covering his tracks all show that Xiong was deliberately trying to cover up his crime, not acting impulsively.
The victim Wang Xiuzhen’s disappearance was initially discovered by her sister. After the incident, her sister called her multiple times over four days without response. Her son learned of the situation and found through home surveillance that his mother left home for the last time on the morning of July 3 and never appeared again, so he asked relatives to check the house. On July 7, when relatives kicked open the door and entered Wang Xiuzhen’s home, they saw chickens that had starved to death, pigs and cattle exhausted and starving. The family reported the case. Initially, the family and police suspected she might have fallen and been trapped while farming, but searches yielded no results. Over the following ten days, police, family, and villagers repeatedly searched around the mountains, cornfields, caves, and ditches near her home, but found no trace of Wang Xiuzhen. During this time, the suspect Xiong also mingled with the search team. Later, items carried by Wang Xiuzhen before her disappearance, such as a sickle and rain shoes, suddenly appeared in her yard, which alarmed the family. “These items seemed to appear out of nowhere. I checked the surveillance, and they weren’t there the day before. After a night, they appeared in the yard. The surveillance only caught a shadow, not a person.” Wang Xiuzhen’s son suspected that the person knew about the surveillance and deliberately avoided it to place the items. Afterwards, Xiong admitted that his purpose was: “I wanted her family to think she ran away with another man, so the police wouldn’t find out I killed Wang Xiuzhen.”
Because they couldn’t find the victim for a long time, her family resorted to folk superstitions and hired a Taoist priest to perform rituals at home. During the ritual, when the Taoist held a water bowl and asked villagers to watch, everyone gathered around, except Xiong, who stayed far away and did not come even when called. The victim’s second sister-in-law (a woman living with Xiong) testified that during that period, Xiong hardly ate, got angry when spoken to, went to sleep immediately after returning home, and sometimes sat by the stove smoking one cigarette after another. During the search, Xiong briefly turned on Wang Xiuzhen’s phone for about an hour but couldn’t unlock the password, so he removed the SIM card and turned it off again. During this time, her husband noticed the signal appeared near their home. Due to Xiong’s guilty conscience, the family suspected him. On July 26, police arrested Xiong. He confessed to murder, burying the body, destroying evidence, and led officers to the burial site and hidden phone. In November 2023, Bijie City People’s Procuratorate prosecuted Xiong for “intentional homicide,” and the case was tried in Bijie City Intermediate Court. The first-instance judgment showed that Xiong had no objection to the facts and charges, but his defense lawyer requested leniency, citing “Xiong confessed and showed remorse, and is a first-time offender.” The court adopted this defense. It is evident that the court’s judgment was unreasonable: even the most heinous acts are considered for leniency if it is a first offense. Moreover, “confession and remorse” was not truly demonstrated; Xiong showed no remorse during the murder, burying, and cover-up, and only confessed because he had nowhere to escape. On July 30, 2024, Bijie City Intermediate Court sentenced Xiong to death with a two-year reprieve and lifelong deprivation of political rights. The death sentence with a two-year reprieve generally means about twenty years of imprisonment, not actual execution. Xiong accepted the sentence and did not appeal. The People’s Procuratorate of Bijie City filed an appeal, citing evidence destruction, obstruction of police investigation, “vile motive,” victim’s innocence, failure to compensate the victim’s family, and their lack of understanding. On June 23, 2025, Guizhou Provincial Higher People’s Court issued the final verdict, maintaining the death sentence with a two-year reprieve and adding “restriction of reduction of sentence,” meaning the sentence would not be less than twenty years, plus a two-year probation, totaling at least 22 years of imprisonment. The family was dissatisfied and requested a retrial, demanding that Xiong be criminally responsible for forced indecency and theft, and that he be sentenced to immediate execution of the death penalty. On September 12, 2025, the victim’s family received a message from the Guizhou Provincial High Court 12368 litigation hotline, indicating the case had been filed and accepted. Two years after this tragic case, the perpetrator still has not received any proper punishment.
This case clearly shows that in the “Zhongxiu” society, the law is not a tool to protect victims or uphold justice, but a cover-up for bourgeois ruling order. Previously, Luo Xiang, a mouthpiece of Zhongxiu, hypocritically claimed that “heavy punishment for rapists is to prevent them from giving up and killing,” implying that if rapists were sentenced to death, they would feel they are doomed to die anyway and might kill the victim to take revenge. Therefore, sometimes harsh sentences can encourage crime, and leniency for rapists is to protect victims. This sounds “rational restraint” and “humanitarian concern,” but in reality, both logically and content-wise, it is absurd. Logically, such a statement is a form of formal logic, assuming that rapists will definitely commit rape. This denies that some potential rapists might fear the death penalty and thus refrain from rape, and denies that severe crimes themselves can deter crime. Nowadays, many people refrain from soliciting prostitution out of fear of punishment. Those who commit heinous crimes like murder and rape are often people willing to kill and unafraid of the death penalty. Contradicting Luo Xiang’s claim, light punishments for crimes actually encourage them. If the penalties for rape were as light as theft, many thefts would turn into rapes. According to basic legal logic, it must be acknowledged that punishment suppresses crime; harsher penalties are meant to deter more serious crimes. Yet, Luo Xiang claims that heavy punishments might encourage crime, creating a contradiction: he admits that punishment suppresses crime but also claims it encourages crime. This conclusion is based on his denial that severe punishment reduces crime.
From the content perspective, who does lenient sentencing protect? Abusers in domestic violence cases often go unpunished or are not recognized as domestic violence under Zhongxiu law. In Zhongxiu society, does domestic violence decrease or increase? The answer is obvious. In fact, Zhongxiu law even makes “yin-yang judgments.” In a case with a judgment document, a woman collected evidence for three years, but the Zhongxiu court did not recognize the existence of domestic violence and refused divorce. Later, the woman was beaten to death. When defending the abuser, the lawyer used her evidence, which had been collected but not recognized as domestic violence nine days earlier, and then it was deemed valid. The court considered that the abuser “did not intentionally murder,” but rather accidentally killed her during a domestic violence incident, changing the charge from “intentional homicide” to “causing death through injury,” reducing the sentence from eleven years to seven. This is what Zhongxiu calls “fair justice.”
Lenient sentences for domestic violence and rape actually promote gender oppression, allowing offenders to commit crimes recklessly. Zhongxiu is a society based on private ownership and patriarchy. Luo Xiang, as a mouthpiece of Zhongxiu, hypocritically claims to improve laws and pursue justice, but in reality, he is glossing over the fundamental nature of Zhongxiu society, disguising it as a technical issue of legal perfection. Such leniency theories are nothing but turning black into white, claiming to protect the lives and dignity of oppressed women, but in fact, they condone the evil acts of criminals. As early as the Qing Dynasty, the “ban and suppress” faction, when pleading for opium traffickers, made similar remarks: “Heavy punishment is unkind.” Lin Zexu sharply criticized this hypocrisy: “If not severely punished, wicked people will think it profitable; if not punished, calamities will not cease.” Legalists and landlords understood that lenient law leads to chaos, but today’s Zhongxiu judiciary goes against this, using regressive rhetoric to co-opt male chauvinists, suppress women’s liberation movements, and maintain their reactionary rule. In this case, Xiong’s murder, dismemberment, evidence destruction, and infiltration of search teams were all deliberate actions. He committed these acts carefully, motivated by his relationship with his girlfriend, and, after failing to assault her sexually, he resorted to murder, brutally killing Wang Xiuzhen, even checking if she was “dead through,” and then returning items to falsely claim she “ran away with another man.” Such a heinous rapist was sentenced to death with a reprieve, justified by “confession and remorse, first offense,” blatantly placing the rapist’s life above that of the victim.
In such cases, the “good attitude” of the murderer becomes a reason for leniency, and even in the second trial, the court maintained the death sentence with a reprieve, claiming that the restriction of sentence reduction was enough punishment. This verdict effectively condones the rapist and murderer, attempting to quell public anger and protests with a death sentence with a reprieve, denying justice for the murdered victim. The theory that “light sentences prevent larger crimes” is a reversal of cause and effect—rapists and murderers dare to kill because they know the law is weak and punishments are limited. The Zhongxiu law also sides with this, allowing the criminal to feel safe. In socialist society, such heinous acts of oppression will be severely punished to the greatest extent, to limit their occurrence, and to make oppressors understand that proletarian dictatorship and women’s liberation are on the same side, and that acts of oppression will not be tolerated.
https://act.quark.cn/apps/qknewsiflow/routes/article?item_id=6069363821446159323&entry=share_navi&from=uc_iflow&pre_page=ribao_home
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It is clear that Luo Xiang’s logic is indeed the same as Xiang’s, only playing with formal logic to deceive.
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Heaven-defying 
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