Ma Jiajue was 22 when four of his friends were killed over three days in February 2004 in the city of Kunming, in southwest China's Yunnan Province. The dead were Tang Xueli, Shao Ruijie, Yang Kaihong and Gong Bo. Ma had known them as classmates and companions at Yunnan University, where he studied. After the killings he left the city by train and was named on a national wanted notice issued by the Ministry of Public Security, which offered a reward of 200,000 yuan.
He was arrested on the evening of March 15 in Sanya, on Hainan Island. The Kunming Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to death on April 24, 2004, for intentional homicide. He did not appeal, the Yunnan Higher People's Court approved the sentence, and he was executed on June 17, 2004.
The case was followed closely in the national press. A university student from a poor rural family had killed four of his friends after a quarrel at cards. The reaction took the form of a long public discussion of mental health on campus, the position of students from poor families and the way universities supervise students. His court-appointed lawyer, who met him three times, told a newspaper after the execution that Ma had left the world with too many questions unanswered.
China Youth Daily reported in March 2004 that Ma was born on May 4, 1981, in a village in Binyang County, in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. A local reporter who visited the family's home after the crime described the household as poor. His father told the reporter that his son had been sensible and had never quarreled with anyone, that he did not waste the family's money, and that he kept his school awards in a drawer instead of telling his parents about them. Ma was the youngest of the children in his immediate family, and he had more than ten siblings and cousins in the wider family. In letters home he wrote that he felt inferior to his brothers and sisters and weighed down by the cost of school.
He did well in school from the first grades onward. At Binyang High School, a key school in Guangxi, he was reserved and had no close friends; his one pastime was basketball. In 2000 he entered Yunnan University in Kunming, the first person from his village to attend a key university. He chose biology, and told his parents in a letter that it would make finding a job easier.
His parents paid his tuition and gave him what was left of their savings, and little else. His eldest sister sent 100 yuan a month. He took out a student loan and worked part-time, according to China Youth Daily. A court spokesman said at the sentencing that his family was very poor and that he was still living on a student loan.
Classmates described a young man who kept to himself. He joined no clubs and was said to spend long hours on the internet. He ran at six in the morning and took cold showers. According to China Youth Daily, he tried to become more sociable, but jokes that he meant as friendly often backfired and left others finding him ridiculous. He grew irritable, quarreled, slammed doors and on occasion struck roommates. Classmates stopped playing basketball with him after he lashed out when he was fouled or bumped. He tended to believe that other people were targeting him, and he did not examine his own part in conflicts. Several classmates told the reporter that everyone had assumed he had psychological problems, and that nobody dared approach him.
He rarely went home or wrote to his family. His father's only impression was that he had become quieter. His last call home came on Lunar New Year's Eve, when he said he would stay in Kunming to work and would not return for the holiday.
Reports at the time, citing the Yunnan Information Daily and Beijing News, described the four young men who died as friends of Ma. They were not in the same class, but they played basketball together, often skipped classes together and were known to get along. Ma was part of a group of five. Witnesses said he appeared to be on good terms with the four. Tang, Shao and Yang were described as athletic and fond of sports.
Ma later told police that the trouble began in early February 2004, in a quarrel over cards in which he was accused of cheating. He denied cheating and said he felt insulted by Shao and Yang. He told police that Gong had not invited him to a birthday. Prosecutors and the lawyer for the victims' families told the court that about five days passed between the quarrel and the first death, and the court found that he planned the killings ahead of time. He prepared forged identity papers and a train ticket for his departure from Kunming.
The court found that Ma killed the four men one after another over three days. According to the People's Court Daily's account of the case, Tang died on the evening of February 13, Shao on the evening of February 14, and Yang at midday on February 15; Gong died that evening. The Xinhua report on the sentencing gave the same four times of day: the night of the 13th, the night of the 14th, noon and night on the 15th. The four deaths took place on three separate days.
On the evening of February 15, Ma left Kunming by train for Guangzhou. He was carrying cash and the forged papers he had prepared.
On February 23 Kunming police opened an investigation and named Ma as the suspect. Yunnan's provincial police issued a wanted notice, and within days the Ministry of Public Security followed with a Class A national notice and a reward of 200,000 yuan for information leading to his capture.
China Youth Daily noted that the arrest came on the last day of a deadline the ministry had set for solving the case.
Ma was arrested in Sanya, in Hainan Province, on the evening of March 15, 2004, at about 7:30 p.m., after a member of the public gave police a clear tip. Provincial police in Yunnan held a press briefing the next evening to announce that the case had been solved. He was brought back to Kunming in the early hours of March 17.
China Central Television carried an interview with Ma recorded by police, in which he described the quarrel during the card game as the cause and denied that he had cheated.
CCTV reporters who visited Yunnan University on the afternoon of March 17 found a calm campus. A graduate student told them that on hearing of the arrest on the evening of March 15 "a stone fell from my heart," and that Ma should be punished. Another graduate student said the university was not gripped by fear, and that teachers and students were reflecting instead on how the school was run, on relations between teachers and students and on how students got along. Students said their own awareness of safety had grown.
The reporters also saw changes in how the university supervised its students. The school had adopted what staff called a "zero report" system, under which each college and class reported the whereabouts of its students every day, and dormitories were checked daily. Two groups of patrolling staff were on duty, which students said they had rarely seen before. Posters in the dormitory corridors dealt with mental illness, depression and living with roommates. Students said the case seemed to them connected to Ma's character and state of mind. The university had a counseling hotline, but many students did not know about it.
Elsewhere in Kunming the case was a constant subject of conversation. A woman in her forties told the reporters she had been grieved by it and would talk more with her son; a man said he bought a newspaper every morning to follow the news.
Ma's father hired a Beijing lawyer, and the two signed an engagement on March 21. On April 20, two days before the trial, the court told the lawyer he could not appear for the defense, because Ma had refused to engage any lawyer. China Youth Daily reported that Ma had turned down several lawyers who proposed to argue that he was not guilty. The court appointed two lawyers instead: Zhao Yao, a senior lawyer at a Yunnan law firm, and a director at the Kunming legal aid center. A team of eight lawyers from Shanghai offered to represent the victims' families free of charge.
The families of Shao, Yang and Tang filed civil claims with the Kunming Intermediate People's Court asking for compensation that totaled more than 820,000 yuan. The Shanghai lawyers said they had not given up the idea of suing the university but would not do so in this case. Gong's family brought no civil claim.
The Kunming Intermediate People's Court heard the case in open court on April 22, 2004. The Kunming People's Procuratorate prosecuted Ma for intentional homicide. The panel consisted of two judges and a people's assessor. More than 100 people attended, among them deputies to people's congresses, members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, relatives of the four men and of Ma, and reporters.
Ma did not ask for any member of the court to step aside and accepted that the charge in the indictment was true. His lawyers challenged the psychiatric assessment on the grounds that it had been too short and did not set out its method, and asked for a new one. The court refused, because the defense could not give it a basis. A forensic assessment had found that Ma was fully responsible for his actions and had no mental illness.
Prosecutors and the lawyer for the victims' families rejected the argument that the killings were a sudden impulse, noting the five days between the quarrel and the first death, and rejected the claim that he had given himself up, saying he had been caught, not surrendered. A court spokesman, Cai Shunbin, later said that Ma had fled, was found only after a national alert and a tip from the public, and had time to surrender but did not; he had also said at trial that he did not want to.
In his own statement Ma said that anger and an inability to let the quarrel go were behind the killings. He said he regretted them and that before and after he had been afraid and had trouble sleeping. He accepted that he had hesitated many times beforehand but said the plan had been settled from the start. He said he should pay compensation, but that his only property was a computer. In his final statement he asked the court to impose the heaviest sentence, and he hoped others of his age would learn from what he had done.
The court limited the civil claims to material losses. It rejected the request of Yang's family for an apology from Ma, since an apology was outside the scope of the civil claims, and it declined to mediate on compensation because Ma could not pay. The hearing was adjourned the same day, with the verdict to follow.
On the afternoon of April 24, 2004, the Kunming Intermediate People's Court announced its first-instance judgment. It found Ma guilty of intentional homicide and sentenced him to death, with deprivation of political rights for life. The court found that he had killed several people in succession to vent a private grievance and take revenge, with especially serious consequences, and that he must be severely punished. It applied Articles 232, 57(1) and 64 of the Criminal Law.
The court rejected the argument that he had surrendered and found him fully responsible for his acts. The judgment ordered Ma to pay compensation of 20,000 yuan to each of three groups of plaintiffs, 60,000 yuan in all. Ma was taken back to the detention center after the verdict.
Ma did not appeal within the statutory period. His lawyer, Zhao Yao, told Southern Metropolis Daily after the execution that Ma had said he did not want to appeal and wanted the case concluded quickly. Zhao said that he could not promise any result from an appeal and could not tell Ma he must file one. He had hoped that an appeal would bring a second public hearing and a second assessment of Ma's mental state, which he put at better than a 60 percent chance. Ma's family wrote an appeal petition during the appeal period, but it had no legal effect without Ma's own consent; Zhao explained this to them, and they came to understand Ma's decision.
Zhao saw Ma three times, the last visit coming on April 30 after the verdict. He described Ma as cold and detached. In the three meetings, he said, Ma never asked about his parents' health and showed no remorse or emotion. Ma gave the lawyer the same motive he had given police, being teased about cheating at cards and about himself, and said it made him feel his self-image had collapsed, which Zhao said made no psychological sense to him. He attributed Ma's attitude to a self-centered personality, which he linked to the indulgence Ma had received as the youngest child and to weaknesses in family and school education. He said he could not reach a conclusion on whether Ma had a mental illness or a psychological disorder. He had encouraged Ma to write down his thoughts for young people and for society.
Because the sentence was death, the Kunming court sent the case to the Yunnan Higher People's Court for approval. After review, that court ruled that the Kunming judgment be approved: intentional homicide, death and deprivation of political rights for life. It found that Ma had disregarded the law, had formed the intention to take revenge for a grudge against his fellow students, and had planned and prepared; it said the circumstances were especially serious and the consequences especially grave. It accepted the defense's point that he had admitted the crimes and shown remorse, calling it consistent with the facts, but said that because the crimes were so grave it would not reduce the punishment. It found that the conviction was correct, the sentence appropriate and the procedure lawful.
On the morning of June 17, 2004, at about 9 a.m., the Kunming Intermediate People's Court announced the ruling. Ma was executed that morning. Nearly 100 people, among them members of the Kunming people's congress and political consultative conference, representatives of the Yunnan higher education committee and reporters, attended the announcement.
Within days of the arrest, commentators on CCTV and in the press were asking what the case said about students. A CCTV commentary of March 16 said that the mental health of college students was a problem that neither individuals nor schools could neglect. Readers' comments on CCTV's website called for mental health classes and counseling, pointed to the pressure on students from rural families and to a lack of genuine care between people, and criticized an education that rewarded grades over character.
Universities held their own discussions. At China Agricultural University in Beijing, staff said in April 2004 that the case showed gaps in education and management: schools stressed teaching knowledge over psychological education and tended to deal with problems only after they arose. They proposed bringing management forward to prevent trouble, enlarging student affairs staffs, running campaigns in legal and moral education, extending mental health education to all students instead of only those in crisis, and giving students from poorer families targeted help for their emotional and social well-being. A teacher in the university's mental health center said that psychological despair was one reason for the tragedy.
A psychology professor, quoted by CCTV on the day of the trial, argued that the crime came chiefly from doubt about the value of life and indifference to it, not from poverty. The People's Court Daily's account of the case quotes a People's Daily commentary to the effect that a person who lacks respect, or is poor, must never answer with killing.
His state of mind was the main contested question. A forensic assessment found no mental illness and full criminal responsibility, and the court adopted that finding. His lawyers argued that the assessment was too short and unexplained, and the court refused a second one. Zhao Yao said after the execution that he could not say whether Ma had a mental disorder.
His motive is on record only as Ma gave it: a quarrel over cheating at cards, a sense of insult and a snub over a birthday. His lawyer said the explanation made no psychological sense to him. The professor quoted by CCTV rejected poverty as the cause; reporters and university staff pointed to isolation and to the strain on a student from a poor family. None of these explanations was tested in court.
May 4, 1981: Ma Jiajue is born in Binyang County, Guangxi.
2000: Enters Yunnan University in Kunming.
Early February 2004: A quarrel over cards among Ma and four friends.
February 13, 2004: First of four deaths, in the evening.
February 14, 2004: Second death, in the evening.
February 15, 2004: Third death at midday and fourth in the evening; Ma leaves Kunming by train that evening.
February 23, 2004: Kunming police open an investigation; Yunnan police issue a provincial wanted notice.
Late February to early March 2004: The Ministry of Public Security issues a Class A notice with a reward of 200,000 yuan.
March 15, 2004: Ma is arrested in Sanya, Hainan.
March 17, 2004: Returned to Kunming in the early hours.
April 20, 2004: The court tells Ma's father's Beijing lawyer he may not appear; two lawyers are appointed.
April 22, 2004: Trial at the Kunming Intermediate People's Court.
April 24, 2004: Sentenced to death for intentional homicide, with deprivation of political rights for life.
Spring 2004: No appeal is filed within the statutory period.
June 17, 2004: The Yunnan Higher People's Court's approval is announced; Ma is executed.