On March 31, 1996, at the Gaojing power plant in the Shijingshan district of Beijing, a man clubbed the sentry on guard with a heavy iron bar and took his Type 56 semiautomatic rifle. Bai Baoshan, thirty-seven, had only recently come out of prison, and when his repeated attempts to get his household registration restored in the capital failed, the anger he carried against society turned into a campaign. In a little over a year he attacked soldiers and police for their weapons, took three guns, among them the People's Liberation Army's newest Type 81 automatic rifle, killed fifteen people and stole more than 1.4 million yuan. Chinese police ranked it the country's most important criminal case of 1997.
He was born on November 6, 1958, into a working family in Shijingshan; both parents worked for the Capital Iron and Steel Company. His father died in 1960, and his mother sent him to her old home in Xushui county, Hebei, and remarried. He was brought back to Beijing at fourteen to go to primary school, felt ashamed of his background, and dropped out after two years. He was jailed in 1983, for theft by Chinese accounts and for robbery by others; English sources give the term as thirteen years for murder and robbery. After his arrest he confessed that in prison he had twice killed a fellow prisoner, making them dig what he called farm pits by day and burying them there by night; the prison had listed both men as missing.
After the Gaojing attack he took two more guns in Beijing, raiding a guardhouse in Shijingshan and a firing range in Fengtai. On July 26 he crept up at night on the sentries in Xushui, killing two and wounding a third, and took a Type 81 rifle. He also fought his way out of a gun battle with six patrol officers, wounding four. In Sichuan he met a woman named Xie, and they lived together; when she learned what he had done and wanted to leave, by her account, he threatened her family. On December 16, 1996, at the tobacco market outside Deshengmen in Beijing, he shot a woman trader from out of town and took her 60,000 yuan or more.
In the summer of 1997 he went to Xinjiang, in the far west. Around Urumqi and Shihezi he killed a man for his motorcycle, then went to the police station of the 149th Regiment and killed a police chief named Jiang and a security guard, taking a Type 54 pistol. On August 19, 1997, at the trade center of the Bianjiang Hotel in Urumqi, he and an accomplice robbed two merchants of about 1.2 million yuan in cash; in under ten minutes the taller gunman, Bai, shot dead seven people and wounded three or four. He later killed an accomplice so as not to share the money.
The police matched him to the Urumqi robbery. On September 5, 1997, by Chinese accounts, four officers went to his mother's home in Beijing and asked him to come to the police station to sort out his household registration. He meant to fetch his gun and shoot his way out, he said afterward, but when he turned and saw his mother come out of the room, he gave up rather than let her see him kill. Some English accounts date the arrest to October 16. He confessed. Of his time in prison he said that if the law gave him twenty years he would come out and kill adults, and if it gave him life he would come out too old for that and kill children, going to a kindergarten and killing as many as he could.
On December 3, 1997, he and Xie were taken to Urumqi, where most of the victims had died. In March 1998 the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court convicted him of intentional homicide, of robbing firearms and ammunition, and of robbery, and sentenced him to death. After review by the Xinjiang High Court and the Supreme People's Court, he was taken to the execution ground and shot in April 1998, on the eve of May Day; some English accounts give May 6. In all, counting the two prisoners, he had killed seventeen people and wounded fifteen. Xie was sentenced to twelve years for robbery and for harboring him. The case was later dramatized in a Chinese television series.