In January 2024, China executed Wu Xieyu (吴谢宇), once a star student at Peking University, for the murder of his mother nearly a decade earlier. The case has haunted the Chinese public ever since: not only because of the brutality of the act, but because this gruesome femicide seems to grow out of the very soil of academic aspiration, filial duty, and educational pressure that are so familiar to many young Chinese nowadays.
It is this tension that lies at the heart of The Abyss of Humanity: The Wu Xieyu Case (人性的深渊 吴谢宇案), published last spring by the Beijing-based Sanlian bookstore and publishing house. Far more than a true-crime retelling, the book asks the crucial question of how forty years of upward mobility in one provincial family ended with a son bludgeoning the very mother who had devoted her life to him.
To answer that question, reporters Wu Qi (吴琪) and Wang Shan (王珊) spent seven years interviewing relatives, classmates, teachers and lawyers, sifting through police files and the condemned man’s own letters. Their aim, stated plainly in the afterword, was to move beyond the courtroom verdict and trace how private love and historical trauma can become indistinguishable, and how devotion can calcify into a tragic fate.
In the autumn of 2012, a lanky eighteen-year-old from the coastal hills of Fujian walked through the gates of Peking University. Wu Xieyu was slender, reserved, and already known in his hometown as Yu Shen (宇神) —“God Yu”—for the way he had always dominated exam rankings. He spoke softly, smiled rarely, and carried himself with the assurance of someone who had never placed second. His mother, Xie Tianqin, a middle-school history teacher, had devoted her life to that assurance. She rose at dawn to prepare his meals, marked his mock exams in tri-coloured ink, and filled diaries with anxious notes about his health and future.
The family’s rise had already been improbable. Xie was the eldest daughter of a university lecturer left blind during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Her husband, Wu Zhijian, had climbed out of a mountain village where the only son bore the weight of the clan. By the early 2000s the couple owned two small flats in Fuzhou, allocated through their work units, and believed that hardship was finally behind them. Their only assignment now was to perfect their son.
But in 2010, Wu Zhijian was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer. Xie nursed him at home, while the young Wu Xieyu focused even harder on the gaokao tutorials that would later carry him to Peking University’s School of Economics. When his father died that same year, mother and son retreated into a silence so deep that neighbours thought the flat abandoned. Xie’s diaries from that period record exhaustion and fear; Wu, meanwhile, began waking in the early hours, convinced he was gravely ill.
This began a cycle that is difficult to comprehend. Wu Xieyu’s academic performance remained unscathed: in 2014 he aced the GRE exam and even received an award from his university during the first semester of his junior year. But in the second semester of that year, something fractured. He stopped attending classes and missed several midterm exams, triggering an academic warning notice from the university’s School of Economics. By mid-2015, Wu Xieyu’s thoughts had already turned murderous. Convinced his mother’s life had no meaning without his father, he decided she should not survive him. That spring he ordered dumbbells, knives, plastic sheeting, activated charcoal, and other supplies online. Having planned the murder, Wu Xieyu left the campus of Peking University and returned to his hometown in Fujian.
On the afternoon of 10 July 2015, he waited until his mother returned home to change her shoes and then repeatedly struck her on the head and face with a dumbbell bar, killing her. He wrapped the body in bed sheets and plastic, layering in activated charcoal and deodoriser, and pushed the bundle beneath his own bed.
In the following weeks, Wu Xieyu stayed at a hotel in his hometown, returning each day to clean the crime scene. During this period, he installed a surveillance camera in the flat and began sending text messages from his mother’s phone, forged a resignation letter in her name, and borrowed money from relatives who believed she had gone abroad with him.
The deception collapsed the following February, when Xie’s younger brother forced open the door and discovered the body. A nationwide warrant was issued. Wu evaded capture for nearly three years, drifting through cities under false identities, until his arrest at Chongqing International Airport in April 2019. He was heavier, carried dozens of forged ID cards, and slipped between regional accents with ease. At trial he offered only a fable: that his mother, who had loved the Dream of the Red Chamber and Leslie Cheung, wished to follow them into another world. Psychiatrists spoke of family history; the court of premeditation. In January 2024, after the Supreme People’s Court upheld his sentence, Wu Xieyu was executed by lethal injection at the age of twenty-nine. No relative claimed his ashes.
Sanlian’s book, however, insists that this was never just a crime story. Its slow accumulation of detail—family trauma, educational pressure, filial obligation—has drawn both admiration and fury. Admirers praise the authors’ Tolstoyan patience: the way they make a monstrous act feel inevitable rather than inexplicable. They see in the mother’s meticulous housekeeping and the father’s cheerful avoidance the quiet machinery of a tragedy that could belong to any striving household in post-reform China.
Yet others argue the same accumulation quietly shifts blame. One of the most-liked Douban reviews reads: “The dead can’t defend themselves; the husband cheated, the son killed, yet the victim is crowned the culprit once she’s gone.” Another asks why the book relies so heavily on the father’s relatives, while the mother’s siblings refused all contact. The imbalance is acknowledged by the authors, but acknowledgment does not undo the tilt. What results, critics say, is a woman already dead twice—once at the hand of her son, and again on the page, where her privacy is laid open while her voice remains absent.
The controversy lands precisely here. In contemporary China, where the one-child cohort has been reared on the promise that education redeems history, the book’s refusal to isolate the crime from its lineage feels both brave and unbearable. It suggests that the same meritocratic ladder which lifted these families from village to city can turn, without warning, into a scaffold.
Sanlian has never marketed the work as a whodunit. It offers no revelation, no psychiatric verdict, no courtroom redemption. Instead it gives something rarer and more disquieting: the realization that the most ordinary ingredients—love, debt, pride, illness—can combine into the unthinkable. Whether one finds that realisation compassionate or cruel depends less on the facts than on what each reader is prepared to forgive in the name of understanding.
This is the first in a series of posts where I bring trending Chinese media to the attention of an English-speaking audience. I am a data analyst by training and I bring my knowledge of data science into the study of contemporary Chinese media. I believe the world still understands far too little about China, and my goal is to help bridge a small part of that gap. If this article resonated with you, I’d be delighted if you followed my work—either here on my blog, or on the other platforms where I publish (Medium, Substack). Thank you for reading, and until next time!
