From September 2009 Zhou Youping posted repeatedly on a Chinese gay website looking for what he called slaves. He wanted northern men between twenty-three and forty who were willing to play asphyxiation games, and he offered generous payment. A great many people answered.
Between October 11 and November 26, 2009, Changsha police found six men dead in hotel and guesthouse rooms across the city. All of them were naked and all of them had been hanged. They were tall, strongly built men from northern China, and what they had in common was Zhou.
He was forty-two by the time he was executed, from Xiangxiang in Hunan, with a vocational secondary education, and he had worked the Changsha song halls as a circuit singer, moving from venue to venue. He had a previous conviction for robbery.
The game had a rule, and he knew it. A person hangs suspended, and if nobody brings them down within about ten seconds they lose consciousness and die. Zhou never played it himself. He said he knew how dangerous it was. He liked to watch. He told investigators that his indifference to the men's lives went back to having been cheated himself, more than once.
The first was Feng Yu, from Gansu, who came to him on September 28, 2009. Feng said he liked him. On October 4 Zhou found a certificate in Feng’s bag showing a positive HIV test, and threw him out. Feng came back to Changsha on October 9. The next day they played the game, Zhou proposed hanging, and he used a red rope he had picked out of a trash heap.
The second the reporting describes was a man surnamed Fang, on October 22, who asked Zhou for five thousand yuan when they met. In his own account: he was angry, and he decided then to kill him by hanging. He sat on the bed while Fang hanged, and did nothing. He watched for ten or more seconds, until the man’s eyes closed and his feet left the ground, and when it was clear he would not come down, Zhou turned and left the room.
He was detained on November 28, 2009, on suspicion of robbery, and confessed to the killings.
His defense was that the men had hanged themselves and wanted to. The Changsha Intermediate People’s Court rejected it: he knew a hanging rope would kill, he used the victims’ own willingness to play to get them into it, he did not save them, and he either allowed them to die or intended it. His previous robbery conviction made him a recidivist and counted against him. On March 29, 2011 it sentenced him to death and to deprivation of political rights for life.
He appealed on the same ground. The Hunan Higher People's Court affirmed two of the six deaths and found the evidence insufficient on the other four. The death sentence stood on the two, and he was executed at Changsha five years after the killings. The Chinese reports of September 2014 give August 29 as the day the Supreme People's Court approved the sentence and, in some versions, as the day it was carried out.
Six, then, is the number of men who died and the number he was charged with, and two is the number the appeal court was satisfied of.
The case was reported in China as a sexual scandal and outside it mostly in the gay press, where the point made was about men meeting strangers privately in a country where those contacts were arranged online and not talked about. Only two of the six are identifiable from the reporting.