Fa Ziying was arrested in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, on July 23, 1999, after the wife of a kidnapped man told police that a ransom was being demanded. The arrest ended a run of robberies and kidnappings that had begun three years earlier in Nanchang and passed through Wenzhou and Changzhou. On November 18, 1999, the Hefei Intermediate People's Court tried him and sentenced him to death. He was executed on December 28, 1999.
The court found him responsible for seven deaths in three separate events: three in Nanchang in July 1996, two in Wenzhou in 1997 and two in Hefei in July 1999. A fourth crime, a kidnapping for ransom in Changzhou in 1998, ended with the victim alive and was not part of his judgment. He did not act alone. The woman who travelled with him, Lao Rongzhi, escaped from Hefei, lived for twenty years under other names and was arrested in 2019. Her own case ran through the Chinese courts until December 2023, and much of what the public knows about Fa Ziying came out during it.
Fa Ziying came from Jiujiang, a Yangtze river city in northern Jiangxi Province. Southern Metropolis Daily reported that he was born in October 1964 into a rural family and had only a junior high school education. Southern Window magazine added that he was the seventh child in his family, about 1.73 meters tall, thin in the face and wore a small mustache, and that he was known in the local underworld.
His criminal record began young. Southern Metropolis Daily gave the date as 1981, when, still a minor, he was sentenced to eight years for robbery and intentional injury. Chu Tian Metropolis Daily, in a report picked up by The Paper, gave his age at that time as 16 and said the sentence was for robbery. The South China Morning Post likewise reported that he had served eight years in prison for robbery before he met the woman he would travel with. After his release he had no steady work, Chu Tian Metropolis Daily said, and was a short man who looked older than his years.
He met Lao Rongzhi at a friend's wedding banquet around 1994. She was a primary school teacher; the reports give her age as 19 or 20 and his as 29 or 30. Southern Metropolis Daily quoted his lawyer as saying that Fa told him she admired "people like me who dare to fight." He was a married man and, his lawyer said, had a family in Jiangxi with another woman and a daughter. One report quoted Fa as saying that Lao did not know he was married. Southern Metropolis Daily wrote that she gave up her teaching post to follow him.
In 1996 Fa Ziying was involved in a brawl in which another man was injured, and he left Jiujiang to avoid the police. The Paper's timeline of the case records that he left with his girlfriend, then 22, who had taken leave from her school. Southern Metropolis Daily put his flight a year earlier, in 1995, after a robbery. The dated crimes that followed all began in 1996.
Over the next three years the pair moved from city to city and committed crimes in four of them. Prosecutors at Lao Rongzhi's 2020 trial described both as principal offenders who planned the crimes together with a clear division of tasks. The Nanchang Intermediate People's Court accepted that finding in her case in 2021. In its words, the plans were joint ones and the roles were divided, with Fa responsible for the violence. The 1999 and 2021 findings differ on some details.
The first crime the courts attributed to the pair took place in Nanchang, the provincial capital of Jiangxi, on July 28, 1996. The victim was a man surnamed Xiong. He was killed in that city. The pair then went to his home and robbed it. His wife, surnamed Zhang, and the couple's daughter, who was three years old according to The Paper and Fa's 1999 judgment, were killed there as well.
The Hefei court counted these three deaths as one case of kidnapping and robbery.
Nanchang police opened a case that remained open for three years.
The pair were in Wenzhou, a port city in Zhejiang Province, in the autumn of 1997. Reports disagree on the month: The Paper's timeline and its account of Fa's own judgment give October 1997, while National Business Daily and a Paper account of the CCTV report give the start of the case in September. Two women died. One, surnamed Liang, was 22; the other, surnamed Liu, was 27.
The Hefei court described the case as a violent robbery of a home after which the two women were killed to keep them from reporting it. Prosecutors at Lao Rongzhi's trial said the deaths followed a telephone call in which Fa was told that money had been withdrawn. Fa's own account, as the Red Star News comparison of the two judgments summarized it, was that he planned the robbery with Lao after deciding Liang had money, and that he killed both women. The 2021 court found that Fa killed them only after the money had been taken.
In the summer of 1998 the pair were in Changzhou, in Jiangsu Province. A victim surnamed Liu was held at a rented apartment and wounded, and the pair demanded a ransom of 70,000 yuan, which was paid. Liu survived. The reports differ on whether Liu was a man or a woman; the court summaries published in 2021 describe Liu's wife bringing the money, which indicates a man. Liu was the only person known to have survived the pair's crimes.
Fa described the Changzhou crime to police after his arrest in Hefei and named Lao as his accomplice, but the evidence was not thought sufficient to charge it in 1999. It did not figure in his judgment. It was charged against Lao Rongzhi twenty years later, for the first time.
In June 1999 they rented an apartment in Hefei. On July 22 a man surnamed Yin was held for ransom, and a demand was made to his wife. A second man, Lu Zhongming, 35, was killed, the court found, to show that the threats were serious. When Lao Rongzhi was caught in 2019, Lu's widow spoke of the arrest to Chu Tian Metropolis Daily, in a report reprinted by The Paper.
Yin's wife, whom the reports identify by a pseudonym, played for time. She told Fa she needed it to collect the money and secretly told police. On the morning of July 23 police moved in. Chu Tian Metropolis Daily said Fa refused police appeals to give himself up and was wounded during the arrest. He was taken into custody. The South China Morning Post's early account placed the arrest at the home of the kidnapped man's family and put the ransom demand at 300,000 yuan. The Hefei judgment, as Red Star News reported it, found that Yin was killed on July 23. Lao Rongzhi was not in the apartment and was not caught.
According to Southern Window, Fa gave police false accounts. He claimed he had been hired, put blame on Lu, produced many leads that led nowhere and changed his story more than once. He denied Lao's involvement and said they had parted in 1997, taking responsibility alone. Chu Tian Metropolis Daily wrote that police learned during questioning that he had an accomplice, and that he refused to say where she was. The South China Morning Post reported that he first refused to say anything about her and later gave information that helped her cover her tracks.
Police looked for her in Henan province without result, Chu Tian Metropolis Daily said. His lawyer, Yu Xi, told the Chongqing Morning Post, as the South China Morning Post reported in 2019, that Fa's refusal to cooperate and his cover-up "provided time for Lao to escape."
Yu Xi met his client four or five times before the trial. Southern Metropolis Daily quoted him as saying that he came away from each visit with a sense of cold, as if he had not been speaking to a person. Fa was slight and frail in appearance, the lawyer said, and did not look like someone who had done what he was accused of. At first Fa said that Lao did not exist; later, that she had killed no one. When Yu told him she had not been caught, Fa smiled, in the lawyer's words, from the heart.
Southern Window quoted the lawyer as describing a man indifferent to life, his own included. Fa said he did not fear death, that his only regret was letting the kidnapped man's wife go downstairs to collect the money, and that he killed witnesses for safety. Asked why he had killed a three-year-old child, he answered that it was a sin, a remark the South China Morning Post also reported, adding that the lawyer said this was the one killing that troubled him. The newspaper quoted Fa as saying that his best ending would be to go straight from the crime scene to the execution site.
He told his lawyer he needed no defense because he would die whatever happened. According to Chu Tian Metropolis Daily, he showed little interest in his own case and mostly asked about Lao Rongzhi.
The trial opened at the Hefei Intermediate People's Court on November 18, 1999, on charges of kidnapping, intentional homicide and robbery. According to The Paper's timeline, he tried seven times during the hearing to shield Lao Rongzhi. The South China Morning Post reported that he offered no defense of his own. The court sentenced him to death the same day, with deprivation of political rights for life.
As Red Star News later summarized the judgment, it found him guilty in three cases. In Nanchang, kidnapping and robbery in which three people were killed. In Wenzhou, a violent home robbery in which two people were killed. In Hefei, the kidnapping of a man surnamed Yin, aged 35, in which a man surnamed Lu, also 35, was killed to put pressure on Yin's wife, and in which Yin was then killed. That makes seven deaths. The judgment relied mainly on Fa's own statements, Red Star News noted.
Fa Ziying was executed on December 28, 1999. The Paper's timeline, Red Star News and Southern Window give that date; the South China Morning Post reported only that he was executed in December 1999.
Southern Metropolis Daily reported that, shortly before the execution, Fa asked to see Yu Xi again and went through his crimes, seven killings among them, and spoke of other cases. The court did not recognize those, the lawyer said, because the chain of evidence was incomplete and rested on Fa's words alone.
Lao Rongzhi was detained in Xiamen, Fujian Province, on November 28, 2019, after nearly twenty years. The Nanchang People's Procuratorate filed charges on August 31, 2020, and the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court tried her on December 21 and 22, 2020. On September 9, 2021, that court convicted her of intentional homicide, robbery and kidnapping and sentenced her to death, with deprivation of political rights for life. The Jiangxi High People's Court heard her appeal from August 18 to 20, 2022 and on November 30, 2022 upheld the first-instance judgment. The Supreme People's Court reviewed and approved the death sentence, and she was executed in Nanchang on December 18, 2023.
At her trial Lao said she had been coerced by Fa and could not break away for fear that he would retaliate against her family, as the South China Morning Post reported. The court rejected the claim. In its reasoning, the court said the two had planned and divided the work, and that she was a principal offender. Guangming Online, relaying the court's statement on her execution, described Fa as having been tried separately, with his death sentence approved and carried out.
Because Fa was executed twenty years before she was tried, the two courts worked from different material. Red Star News compared the 1999 judgment with the 2021 judgment, and found that Fa and Lao gave inconsistent accounts of key details in all three cases.
In Nanchang, Fa said Lao was not present during the crime; Lao said she had been there. The 2021 court did not accept Fa's account. In Wenzhou, their accounts differed on who first decided the women had money. In Hefei, Fa said at one point that he had killed Yin himself and that an earlier statement had been false; Lao said she mostly went along. The 2021 court found that Lao had added threatening content to notes written by Yin. The Nanchang court relied on Lao's own statements, which it regarded as consistent, and on witnesses. The 1999 Hefei court had relied mainly on Fa's.
Red Star News reported that Lao's appeal might argue that the evidence for the 2021 ruling was insufficient. The Jiangxi High People's Court upheld the judgment on November 30, 2022.
The Changzhou kidnapping, which Fa described to police, was not part of his judgment. Other killings that Fa mentioned to his lawyer before his execution were not accepted by the court. Southern Metropolis Daily and The Paper differ on the year he left Jiujiang (1995 or 1996). The reports give his age when he met Lao as 29 or 30. They differ on the month of the Wenzhou case, and on whether he was caught at the rented apartment or at the home of the kidnapped man's family. The South China Morning Post reported that 200,000 yuan was taken in Nanchang, a figure the Chinese court summaries do not carry.
October 1964: Fa Ziying born, Jiujiang, Jiangxi.
1981: Sentenced to eight years for robbery as a minor.
Around 1994: Meets Lao Rongzhi at a wedding in Jiujiang.
1995 or 1996: Leaves Jiujiang after a brawl or robbery.
July 28, 1996: Three people killed in Nanchang.
September or October 1997: Two women killed in Wenzhou.
Summer 1998: Kidnapping for ransom in Changzhou; the victim survives.
July 22, 1999: A man held for ransom in Hefei; a second man killed.
July 23, 1999: Fa arrested in Hefei; Yin dies; Lao escapes.
November 18, 1999: Tried and sentenced to death, Hefei Intermediate People's Court.
December 28, 1999: Executed.
November 28, 2019: Lao Rongzhi detained in Xiamen.
September 9, 2021: Lao sentenced to death, Nanchang Intermediate People's Court.
November 30, 2022: Jiangxi High People's Court upholds the sentence.
December 18, 2023: Lao Rongzhi executed in Nanchang.