Published: May 10, 2013
BEIJING — The mysterious illness began with crippling stomach pain, followed by blurry vision and sudden hair loss. By the time Zhu Ling, a talented musician and chemistry student at one of China’s top universities, emerged from a coma weeks later, she was partially paralyzed and nearly blind, her faculties reduced to those of a child.
The 19-year-old sophomore, doctors later determined, had been intentionally poisoned with thallium, a highly toxic heavy metal sometimes used in Chinese rat poison. A culprit was never found, though suspicions fell on a roommate from a well-connected family who was questioned by the police but then released.
Now, nearly two decades after Ms. Zhu was poisoned, with her name forgotten by all but a determined band of supporters, her case has ricocheted back into public consciousness, electrifying the nation with allegations of a bungled investigation and uncomfortable questions about the power of China’s political elite in a society where justice remains elusive.
In recent days, Chinese social media has been consumed by the case despite an earlier effort to quash the conversation through aggressive censorship, a move that only fueled wider interest — and greater fury. “Nineteen years ago, the young Zhu Ling was poisoned,” Yao Chen, a film star with 45 million followers, wrote on China’s equivalent of Twitter. “Nineteen years later, this name has again been poisoned.”
On Monday, an online petition was submitted to the White House’s “We the People” platform imploring the American government to intervene in the case. The petition, which had drawn more than 143,000 signatures by Friday, calls on the Obama administration to deport to China the primary suspect, despite a lack of evidence that she even lives in the United States.
“There was always anger and frustration over this case but it’s exploding right now,” said John Aldis, who has followed Ms. Zhu’s plight since his years as a doctor at the American Embassy in Beijing during the 1990s. “A new generation of Chinese young people are realizing that a terrible injustice was done, and they want their voices to be heard.”
The renewed interest was inspired by a lurid murder last month in Shanghai, where a medical student at the prestigious Fudan University was accused of spiking the water of his roommate with a toxic chemical. The police said the student, who has been charged with intentional homicide, was driven by a grudge described as “trivial.”
What began as an online conversation about the pressures of China’s cutthroat education system and the dearth of mental health services gave way to discussion of other cases of poisoning in China, many of them committed by students consumed with jealousy.
But it was the attempted murder of Zhu Ling — and the notion that the perpetrator was given a free pass because of her political pedigree — that dominated the discussion. Those suspicions tapped into the widely held belief that well-placed Communist Party officials and their relatives are above the law.
“We want what we’ve always wanted — truth and justice,” Wu Chengzhi, Ms. Zhu’s father, said in a phone interview.
Although the narrative of the case is riddled with unanswered questions and unsubstantiated allegations, Ms. Zhu’s family and supporters have latched onto the one known fact: that Ms. Zhu’s roommate at Tsinghua University, Sun Wei, had access to thallium and was questioned by the police, but was quickly released, according to accounts in the state media.
The police say they lacked evidence for an arrest. Critics have speculated without any proof that Ms. Sun’s grandfather, a senior official in the decades after the Communists came to power, and another relative, a former vice mayor of Beijing, had made the problem go away. As for a possible motive, they suggest that Ms. Sun was envious of the victim’s beauty, and of her musical and academic achievements.
