Zhang Jun was the leader of a group that carried out robberies in Chongqing, Hunan and Hubei in the 1990s and killed people during them. Courts in Chongqing and Changde found that between June 1991 and September 2000 he, acting alone or by organizing and directing others, committed 22 incidents of robbery and killing, in which 28 people died. The property taken was valued at 5.369 million yuan. He was arrested in Chongqing on September 19, 2000, sentenced to death on April 21, 2001, and executed on May 20, 2001, together with thirteen others from the same case.
The case was reported across China at the time as a rare example of violent crime by an organized group since 1949, and the Ministry of Public Security supervised it directly. Police in Chongqing had formed a special investigation team in 1994, after the first killing in the series, and worked on it for six years. It was a robbery in Changde, Hunan, on September 1, 2000, that gave detectives from several provinces the lead they needed.
Phoenix Media, a mainland news portal, reported that Zhang Jun was born on August 5, 1966, in a village in Anxiang County, which is part of Changde in Hunan Province. His family was poor and farmed. He was the youngest of seven children, and his older brothers and sisters, who came from his mother's earlier marriage, carried a different surname. When he was 12 his mother fell seriously ill, and the same report says he saved for a school term to buy a little meat for her.
Poverty ended his schooling in the first year of senior high school. He turned to fighting and acquired a local reputation. He was fond of martial arts films and practiced martial arts himself. Little is on record of his years before 1994. The courts dated the offenses from June 1991, three years before the earliest incidents described in the press; which events fall in those first years is not known.
In 1994 Zhang Jun went to the southern border region looking for illegal supplies. A feature published by China News Service in October 2000, reprinted from the magazine Zhiyin, says he tried to cross into Vietnam, was caught by local police and sent back, and then escaped from a detention shelter. The trial coverage by the same agency in April 2001 records one of the earliest killings the court heard about: in February 1994, in Ningming County in Guangxi, he killed a man to take 6,000 yuan. He admitted in court that he had done it for money. He fled to Kaiyuan, in Yunnan.
In Kaiyuan he met Yan Min, a woman from Fuling, a district of Chongqing, who was then 32 and divorced. He used the name Jiang Ping and presented himself as a businessman. She lent him money, and with it he made the first of the illegal purchases that later supplied the group. China News Service, again quoting Zhiyin, says he then killed two women in the Kaiyuan area. A separate China News Service report of October 10, 2000, based on what Chongqing police learned from suspects held in Yunnan, put his first such purchase in the first half of 1994 and named the seller as Na Bo; police recovered the items when he was arrested in 2000.
Zhang Jun and Yan Min moved to Chongqing, renting a room in the Shapingba district. On November 23, 1994 he killed a man in Jiangbei District and took about 6,000 yuan. The man's daughter was among those who wept when Zhang Jun was driven away to be executed in 2001. On January 25, 1995, in Yuzhong District, a man who had withdrawn 50,000 yuan was killed and robbed. According to the Zhiyin feature, Yan Min had a part in it and was paid 5,000 yuan.
The two incidents showed a pattern the police would come to recognize: someone carrying cash was followed, killed and robbed, and no one was left who could describe the attackers.
Reports from 2000 name several women who came into Zhang Jun's life in Chongqing, and the courts later convicted a number of them. The prosecution's description, reported by China News Service in April 2001, was that he led an organized group in which Qin Zhibi, Quan Hongyan, Li Zejun, Chen Shiqing, Zhao Zhenghong and Yan Ruoming each had a part.
Qin Zhibi, a divorced woman of 48 when he met her in late 1994, according to the Zhiyin feature, gave him a place to stay between incidents. Yang Mingyan, whom he met in a Fuling nightclub in 1996 when she was 24, became his wife under an assumed name. After learning what he was doing she stayed. She carried supplies from Fuling to men of the group, and in July 2000 made two trips to a hotel in Fuling, where two of them were staying, in preparation for the Changde robbery. Quan Hongyan, 38 in 2000, met him in 1998. The feature says he forced her to take part in a killing in May 2000, near Changsha, so that she could not leave.
Men joined from Hunan. Li Zejun was described as the group's second in command. Chen Shiqing, Zhao Zhenghong, Yan Ruoming (who was Zhang Jun's brother-in-law), Xu Jun, Li Jinsheng and Wang Yu completed the group that was later tried in Changde. Police told reporters that Zhang Jun made new members take part in a killing, so that none of them could turn back. China News Service reported in September 2000 that he trained the group in remote mountain areas and held seven false identity cards.
The group also had a supply line, which the court described in its findings: Zhang Jun bought, or had others buy, large quantities of illegal supplies from four sellers, Mo Jinying, Na Bo, Zhu Jiawu and Wang Jun, who were arrested in Yunnan in October 2000. Chongqing police sent seven officers to Yunnan after his arrest, and Yunnan police helped them find the sellers in Hekou, Pingyuan, Kunming and Kaiyuan.
On December 22, 1995, Zhang Jun and Qin Zhibi robbed the gold counter of a department store in the Shapingba district of Chongqing. The court found that one person was killed and two were seriously injured, and that gold and platinum jewelry worth about 455,000 yuan was taken. The earlier China News Service account from 2000 puts the value of the jewelry at over 600,000 yuan. On the day of the executions in 2001, a man whose wife had been killed at that store stood in the crowd outside the court, close to tears, as the vehicles carrying the condemned left.
On December 25, 1996, Zhang Jun and Yan Ruoming robbed the gold department of another large store in Chongqing. Two people were seriously injured and one lightly injured, and more than 630,000 yuan in gold jewelry was taken. Video from the store and witnesses who helped police months later pointed investigators toward Yan Ruoming.
On November 27, 1997, Zhang Jun, Li Zejun and Yan Ruoming robbed the gold counter of a store in Changsha, the capital of Hunan. The court found that two people were killed, one was seriously injured and one lightly injured, and jewelry worth about 1.372 million yuan was taken. The trial coverage also listed among the dead Peng Chenghui, 31; the date of his death is not on record.
On January 4, 1999, Zhang Jun, Li Zejun, Chen Shiqing and Zhao Zhenghong robbed a gold jewelry counter at a shopping center in Wuhan, Hubei. One person was killed, three were seriously injured and three lightly injured. The group took more than 30,000 yuan in cash, jewelry worth about 2.634 million yuan and a taxi. At the trial a journalist, Liu Guoqin, testified that he had photographed men with covered faces during the Wuhan robbery, and that his photographs had helped investigators.
Zhang Jun hid for several days afterward with Yang Mingyan at a restaurant that Qin Zhibi ran in Wuhan, which he had financed in October 1998 with 30,000 yuan.
By the summer of 2000 the group was preparing a larger job in Hunan. A first-person account by Gui Renqun, a reporter for the Changde Daily, printed in the People's Public Security News on May 25, 2001 and reprinted by China News Service the next day, describes an earlier incident that police tied to the case. A couple from Anxiang County, Hu Menglian and his wife, were killed on August 15, 2000. Whether this incident is among the 22 the courts counted is not on record.
On June 19, 2000, in Yuzhong District of Chongqing, cash being carried from a savings office of a Chongqing bank was taken. The court found that two people died and two were injured, and that the group took more than 140,000 yuan and a taxi. One of the dead was a 29-year-old woman. Zhang Jun, Li Zejun and Chen Shiqing were named as the three men involved. The woman's father, aged 69, sat in the courtroom in April 2001. In Chongqing the incident became known as the "6.19" case, and police set up a task force around it that was led by the head of the municipal Public Security Bureau, Chen Bangguo.
The work that followed was broad. At a press conference on September 22, 2000, Chen Bangguo said police had checked more than 1.5 million people from the city's floating population, interviewed more than 13,500 travelers and contacted more than 6,200 taxi and private car drivers. Officers had compared about 2.38 million fingerprints. Residents gave 688 leads, and the accounts of witnesses produced sketches of two of the suspects. A restaurant owner who helped with the sketches later recognized one of them, Chen Shiqing, in the street, according to a China News Service report on September 30, 2000.
At about 6:06 p.m. on September 1, 2000, three men with covered faces robbed a cash transport vehicle of the Agricultural Bank of China in the north of Changde. The robbery lasted less than two minutes. China News Service reported that evening that six people had died; the court later found that seven were killed and that four were seriously injured, with one more lightly injured. The South China Morning Post, quoting Changde police, reported that the men left empty-handed because a key to the vehicle's cash compartment had broken before they could take it.
The gang's escape, in a taxi and a second car, ended in the suburbs, where it split up. The city offered a reward of 200,000 yuan for information, and Hubei police added a similar reward of their own for the two men who were still at large. The Ministry of Public Security issued its top-level wanted notice for Zhang Jun and Chen Shiqing.
At the trial in April 2001 the family of one of the dead, a 33-year-old man, was in court: his wife and their eight-year-old daughter attended, the trial coverage said. The prosecutor's list of the 28 dead ran to five pages, and most of those named on it were in their twenties or thirties, many of them parents.
Two police forces were looking for the same men without yet knowing it. Chongqing detectives traveled to Changde on September 2, a day after the robbery, concluded that it belonged to the series they had been following, and agreed with the Hunan investigators to work together. Chongqing's fingerprint and witness records from the "6.19" case helped identify suspects in Hunan, and Hunan police received more than 10,000 tips. Beijing police helped locate the home of one suspect, a man named Zhao, within two hours.
The first arrests came quickly. On September 5, 2000, police in Yiyang, Hunan, arrested Zhao Zhenghong and Li Zejun. The same day, in Changde, they arrested Li Jinsheng, Wang Yu, Yan Ruoming and Xu Jun. China News Service reported on September 7 that about 20 people had been taken in connection with the Changde robbery. Chen Shiqing, whom the agency called the group's second leader on September 20, was still at large then. A trial feature in April 2001 says that he surrendered on October 7.
The path to Zhang Jun ran through Fuling, a district of Chongqing. According to the China News Service account of September 30, 2000, a jailed inmate told Chongqing detectives that Yan Min had once been close to a Hunan man called Jiang Ping, who might have had access to illegal supplies. On September 13 Li Zejun, in custody, mentioned a pregnant woman called "Juanzi" who had met Zhang Jun in Fuling. Police identified her as Yang Mingyan, who worked at a welfare home in the Fuling district and had married a man who used the name Long Haili. The man was Zhang Jun.
Zhang Jun had meanwhile left Hunan. The report says he spent a few hours in Guangzhou before returning to Chongqing and going straight to his home in Fuling. Police set up a command post there. Yang Mingyan was arrested at her home on September 18, 2000, and the Zhiyin feature says she denied knowing him for hours, even after he was caught.
On the evening of September 19, police received information that Zhang Jun would meet Quan Hongyan at a place they had agreed on. Plainclothes officers watched two spots in Yuzhong District. Zhang Jun had telephoned Quan Hongyan asking for money and a package for his escape, and police monitored the call. At about 9:50 p.m., in Yuzhong District, three officers took hold of him. No force was used against the officers and none were hurt, Chen Bangguo told reporters on September 22. Police recovered items from him that they described as dangerous; the reports differ on the count (178 or 180). Thirteen people connected to the group were arrested in Chongqing that night.
China News Service reported on September 20 that Xinhua said police had identified him by a scar on his left arm and a mole on the sole of his foot. The Ministry of Public Security sent a congratulatory telegram on September 21. The South China Morning Post reported that he was 34, and quoted him as telling interrogators that he had been ready to resist and would have done so given a fraction of a second. In all, 16 other people were captured with him, according to Chen Bangguo on September 22, and the whereabouts of all but one were known.
Next, the investigation reached the suppliers. On October 9, 2000, five people from Yunnan, Mo Jinying, Na Bo, Chen Shixing, Wang Shan and Zhou Jiaqing, were brought back to Chongqing, accused of supplying the group. Deputy police chief Wen Qiang said the capture of all the members marked the complete end of the group.
The numbers changed as the case went on. The South China Morning Post, reporting soon after the arrest, wrote that the group had committed 17 robberies in five provinces, killed 26 people and wounded 20, and taken six million yuan in cash, gold and jewelry. China News Service in September and October 2000 gave 26 killed and more than 6 million yuan. The courts' findings in April 2001, 28 killed in 22 incidents with property of 5.369 million yuan, are the figures on which the convictions rest.
Zhang Jun was held at a detention center in Chongqing, and the principal Hunan defendants in Changde. A report by China Youth Daily reporters, carried by China News Service on May 21, 2001, describes the guard detail in Changde: 50 soldiers of a special police unit formed a guard force, all leave was recalled and no visits were allowed. The report says Li Zejun offered a guard 100,000 yuan on September 17, 2000 to carry out a message and was refused. On February 20, 2001 a man who said he was a relative of Zhao Zhenghong offered another guard 2,000 yuan and was also refused. The unit stayed on duty for more than eight months.
The Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court and the Changde Intermediate People's Court tried the case in two places at once. The indictment against the Chongqing defendants ran to 46 pages and more than 20,000 characters, and prosecutors took about an hour and a half to read it, China News Service reported. Public hearings began on the morning of April 14, 2001. In Chongqing the First Criminal Tribunal heard Zhang Jun and ten others over three days, ending on the evening of April 16. In Changde seven defendants were tried: Li Zejun, Chen Shiqing, Zhao Zhenghong, Yan Ruoming, Li Jinsheng, Xu Jun and Wang Yu. Notices were posted three days earlier, and each courtroom held only a little over 200 spectators, so people gathered outside.
Prosecutors showed the court thousands of items of evidence by multimedia, including physical exhibits, witness statements, expert findings and records of the scenes. They described the targets as ranging from a cigarette wholesaler and gold counters in department stores to cash transports. Zhang Jun, who appeared composed at first and later sat with his head down, agreed in court that the killing in Ningming was for money, and said that he had chosen anyone who had money. He refused the defense a lawyer offered and told the court he accepted a death sentence. Li Zejun, according to the report, spoke weakly and called his crimes unforgivable. Chen Shiqing said that nothing he had done could be defended. Yan Ruoming accepted legal responsibility, and Qin Zhibi, tearful, asked for leniency.
Relatives of the dead sat in the room. A woman whose husband had been killed in Chongqing about six years before the hearing cried out that the killers had finally been caught. The Chongqing court also heard the civil claims attached to the case.
A separate matter, the trial of another defendant, accused of harboring a criminal, was put back to April 21, 2001.
On the morning of April 21, 2001, the Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court read its judgment at about 10:45 a.m. Zhang Jun was convicted of robbery, intentional homicide, robbery of restricted items and illegal possession of restricted items. The court combined the sentences and imposed death, with lifetime deprivation of political rights and confiscation of all personal property. It found that he had committed 22 incidents of robbery and killing between June 1991 and September 2000, alone or by organizing and directing others, in Chongqing, Hunan and Hubei; that 28 people had died, five had been seriously injured, 15 lightly injured and two slightly injured; and that property worth 5.369 million yuan had been taken, together with five rental cars. The court described the group's crimes as long-lasting, frequent and extremely cruel.
Ten other defendants were sentenced in Chongqing, and the listed counts were as follows. Qin Zhibi, robbery, intentional homicide and illegal transport of restricted items: death, lifetime deprivation of political rights, confiscation of all personal property. Quan Hongyan, robbery, intentional homicide, illegal transport of restricted items and illegal private possession of restricted items: death, lifetime deprivation of political rights. Yan Min, robbery and illegal transport of restricted items: death. Mo Jinying, Na Bo, Zhu Jiawu and Wang Jun, illegal trafficking in restricted items: death. Chen Shixing and Yang Mingyan, whose offenses were illegal trafficking and transport of restricted items, and, for Yang Mingyan, harboring a criminal: death with a two-year reprieve. Yang Mingjun, theft of restricted items: life imprisonment.
In Changde the court sentenced Li Zejun, Chen Shiqing and Zhao Zhenghong to death, on charges that included robbery, intentional homicide and robbery of restricted items, with intentional injury added for Chen Shiqing and extortion for Zhao Zhenghong. Yan Ruoming and Xu Jun, convicted of robbery, and Li Jinsheng, convicted of intentional homicide, also received death sentences. Wang Yu, convicted of robbery and intentional homicide, received life imprisonment. In total, of 18 defendants, 14 were sentenced to death, two to death with a two-year reprieve, and two to life imprisonment.
Eleven defendants appealed: Li Zejun, Yan Ruoming, Xu Jun, Li Jinsheng, Qin Zhibi, Quan Hongyan, Yan Min, Mo Jinying, Na Bo, Zhu Jiawu and Wang Jun. China News Service reported on May 20, 2001, citing Xinhua, that the Chongqing and Hunan Higher People's Courts found the facts clear, the evidence sufficient, the convictions accurate and the sentences appropriate, rejected the appeals, and, under authorization from the Supreme People's Court, approved the death sentences for Zhang Jun, Li Zejun and the others. The Hunan Provincial Higher People's Court rejected the appeals of Li Zejun, Yan Ruoming, Li Jinsheng and Xu Jun on May 19, 2001.
Fourteen people were executed on May 20, 2001, in Chongqing and Changde. People's Daily Online reported in English that Zhang Jun and Li Zejun were among them.
In Chongqing the crowd gathered at the court from early morning. A China News Service reporter described people lined up along the gate and across the street, much as they had been at the sentencing a month before; a woman who ran a small shop had closed it and arrived at 7:30 a.m. The proceedings began at 9:30 a.m. and after almost an hour the court rejected the appeals. Eight men and women, Zhang Jun, Qin Zhibi, Yan Min, Quan Hongyan, Mo Jinying, Na Bo, Zhu Jiawu and Wang Jun, were taken to vehicles waiting outside. People shouted that blood debts must be repaid. Relatives of two of the dead were among the onlookers: a man whose wife had died at the department store in Shapingba, and a woman whose father had died in Jiangbei. Many stayed after the vehicles left and said they hoped no criminal like Zhang Jun would appear again.
In Changde a public sentencing and execution rally was held at the city sports center at 10:20 a.m. The court president read the judgments against Li Zejun, Chen Shiqing, Zhao Zhenghong, Yan Ruoming, Li Jinsheng and Xu Jun, and they were taken to the execution ground at about 11 a.m. Earlier, at the Changde detention center, a Chongqing reporter had spoken to them. Li Zejun asked the reporter to page his wife and add the number 520, since the date, May 20, sounds in Chinese like "I love you." He said he hoped to be a good police officer in another life. Chen Shiqing asked that his two sons study hard and forget their father. Yan Ruoming said he wished he had never become Zhang Jun's relative. Li Zejun had also said, according to a separate report, that without Zhang Jun he would not be where he was.
The Ministry of Public Security had treated the case as one under its direct supervision. A Chongqing police official said in 2007 that it had caused a national sensation, and on July 26, 2007 the Chongqing Public Security Bureau donated items connected to the case to the China Police Museum, among them six false identity documents. The People's Court Daily and the Supreme People's Court's official account republished a review of the case in November 2018, calling it one of the most extreme violent group crimes in China since 1949.
The press of 2001 placed the trials inside the national "Strike Hard" campaign against crime. China News Service reported that prosecutors had been brought in early, that the indictment was filed on March 30, 2001, and that the courts were ready for trial within about two weeks. The campaign context shaped how the case was reported: coverage of the verdicts and the executions in state media emphasized speed and severity.
Proven by final judgment: the 22 incidents of robbery and killing the courts found between June 1991 and September 2000, the deaths of 28 people, and the convictions of Zhang Jun and his co-defendants on the counts set out in the verdicts.
Reported differently: the number killed in Changde on September 1, 2000 (six in the first reports; seven in the court findings and the later trial coverage; eight in the South China Morning Post's early report); the totals at the time of the arrest (26 dead in 17 robberies in five provinces, per the South China Morning Post and the 2000 Chinese reports) compared with the court's 28 dead in 22 incidents; the value of the jewelry taken at the Shapingba store in December 1995 (about 455,000 yuan in the court findings; over 600,000 yuan in the 2000 police account); the spelling of several names (for instance Chen Shiqing and Chen Shixing are different people; Li Jinsheng is also written Li Jingsheng).
Not on record: which of the incidents counted by the courts took place between June 1991 and 1994; whether the August 2000 killing of the couple in Anxiang is part of the 22; and the date of the killing of Peng Chenghui.
June 1991: start of the period in which the courts found the first incident.
February 1994: a man is killed in Ningming County, Guangxi; Zhang Jun later admits the killing was for money.
First half of 1994: Zhang Jun makes illegal purchases in Yunnan.
November 23, 1994: a man is killed in Jiangbei District, Chongqing; 6,000 yuan taken.
January 25, 1995: a man is killed and robbed in Yuzhong District; 50,000 yuan taken.
December 22, 1995: robbery at a department store in Shapingba, Chongqing; one person killed.
December 25, 1996: robbery at a department store in Chongqing; no deaths found by the court.
November 27, 1997: robbery at a store in Changsha; two killed.
January 4, 1999: robbery at a shopping center in Wuhan; one killed.
May 2000: a killing near Changsha in which Quan Hongyan took part, per the Zhiyin feature.
June 19, 2000: robbery in Yuzhong District, Chongqing; two killed.
August 15, 2000: a couple from Anxiang County, Hunan, killed (reported as part of the case).
September 1, 2000: robbery of a cash transport in Changde; seven killed.
September 5, 2000: Li Zejun and Zhao Zhenghong arrested in Yiyang; four more in Changde.
September 13, 2000: Li Zejun names "Juanzi" in custody; police identify Yang Mingyan.
September 18, 2000: Yang Mingyan arrested in Fuling.
September 19, 2000: Zhang Jun arrested in Chongqing.
October 7, 2000: Chen Shiqing surrenders, per the trial coverage.
October 9, 2000: five suppliers returned to Chongqing from Yunnan.
March 30, 2001: indictment filed.
April 14, 2001: public trials open in Chongqing and Changde.
April 21, 2001: verdicts.
May 19, 2001: Hunan Higher People's Court rejects appeals.
May 20, 2001: fourteen people executed in Chongqing and Changde, including Zhang Jun.
July 26, 2007: items from the case donated to the China Police Museum.
November 2018: People's Court Daily and the Supreme People's Court account republish a review of the case.