Zhao was born in 1972 and lived in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. He worked as a labourer and a driver.
On April 9, 1996 a young woman was raped and killed in a public lavatory in the Hohhot railway district. Between then and July 2005 he killed ten women and girls in Hohhot and Ulanqab, suffocating them, and committed thirteen rapes and a series of robberies. Chinese reporting called him the Smiling Killer.
He was arrested in 2005 and confessed, including to the 1996 killing. That confession is why the case matters far beyond his own crimes.
Huugjilt, an eighteen-year-old Mongolian man working at a cigarette factory, had reported the 1996 attack. He was arrested for it, convicted, and executed on June 10, 1996, sixty-one days after the killing, in the course of a national anti-crime campaign under which cases were processed at speed. His parents spent the next eighteen years petitioning.
When Zhao confessed in 2005 the authorities did not act on it for nine years. In December 2014 the Inner Mongolia High Court quashed Huugjilt's conviction and declared him innocent. His family were awarded compensation, and twenty-seven officials involved in the original case were disciplined or investigated.
Zhao was sentenced to death on February 9, 2015, the Inner Mongolia high court upheld it in May 2015, and he was executed.
So the sequence is a killing, an execution sixty-one days later of a man who had come forward as a witness, a confession from the real killer nine years before anyone acted on it, and an exoneration eighteen years after the man was shot. This entry is marked as a miscarriage of justice for that reason, and it belongs beside the case of Nie Shubin in this archive, which followed the same pattern in the same decade.