Obituary: Jia Jinglong died on November 15th

MAY 25th was an auspicious day for Jia Jinglong. It was his birthday by the lunar calendar, and in 2013 it was also the date of his forthcoming wedding to Li Lanlan. They had been going out for four years, a long time; but he was a shy boy, who had not wanted to go to college and didn’t read or write much, and who would blush whenever he spoke to a girl.

The wedding was to happen in his family house in North Gaoying village in Hebei province, near Beijing. “Village” no longer seemed the right word; the small houses were being rapidly swallowed up by the city of Shijiangzhuang, whose towers rose up to the sky at the end of the village streets, while the thump of pile-driving drowned out the birds. Nonetheless Mr Jia loved his spacious house. He and his father had built it only six years before; it was full of windows, not all of which looked out on the encroaching cranes. It had three storeys. His parents lived on the ground floor; his two Tibetan mastiffs were on the top; and the second storey, his part, was the wedding house. It was already filled with more than 100 plants, as well as bundles of straw which kept him, and them, warm. Around the village he was the number-one guy for plants, he said. He grew begonias, aloe vera and every kind of cactus: ball cactus, crab cactus, lithops. Sometimes he gave them away to neighbours. “Anybody’s kid who has an itchy neck knows to come to me for cactus,” he told the court before his sentencing. By then, however, the judges had stopped listening.

To make his house ready for the wedding, he went to endless trouble. He changed his job at the pharmaceutical factory from the day to the night shift, so that he could spend the days refurbishing. On his knees, with hands callused from hard work, he carefully wiped out dust with a damp rag from cracks in the floors. After repainting he bought new furniture and hung up red decorations, the colour of Chinese weddings. Most of them he had made himself (he liked to sew, especially cross-stitch). Pride of place went to a framed red-backed collage of 0.01yuan coins, collected for years, arranged to form the characters “I love my home.”

Men in black sedans

He knew that a shadow hung over it. In 2010 his father, Jia Tongqing, had signed a demolition order. It had been forced out of him by local party officials; if he didn’t sign, Tongqing was told, his aged mother’s request for a pension would be rejected. So it was done, and his parents had moved to the cramped high-rise flat they had been given by the government. No cash compensation came. The pattern of forced demolition and relocation, with developers and officials in corrupt cahoots together, is common all over booming China, and for the most part stoically accepted. But this particular doomed house was their only son’s home, too—his wedding house—and he did not agree, and would not move.

So when the black sedans drew up outside, 18 days before the wedding, and thugs with axes and sticks got out and began to throw bricks at the windows, he furiously resisted. He climbed on the roof of the second storey, waving a big red national flag, but no one listened. He was dragged out and beaten up. The house was smashed to rubble, with everything in it, all the plants he loved; his mastiffs were taken away. He told the court later that the pain tore and pierced him like a knife. And the worst of it was that, in two months, Lanlan called off the wedding. After all, her prospective husband now had no house to give her.

He wrote appeal after appeal for proper compensation, but got no answer. So in October 2014 he began to arm himself. Personal firearms being forbidden, he bought three nail-guns and began to fiddle with them. One did the job for him: in February 2015 he managed to shoot the local party chief, He Jianhua, in the back of the head at close range at a New Year party in the village. For this he was sentenced to death in the People’s Intermediate Court. His sentence was upheld this year in the Supreme People’s Court, China’s highest.

Plenty of protests were made on his behalf. Two party newspapers came out for him, as well as 12 distinguished lawyers. Most netizens of Weibo supported him. There were extenuating circumstances for the murder, not least the collapse of the wedding. Besides, Mr Jia had come to symbolise the plight of the unheeded little man in China, powerless before high-ups and unable to get justice. (“If the people had any choice in life,” he said, “I would not have taken this dead-end path.”) The courts were implacable, however. This was a long-planned murder of an official not especially to blame for the demolition; and all that online pressure to soften the law simply set a dangerous precedent.

His sentence might possibly have been commuted if he had turned himself in immediately after the murder, as he had meant to. But as he fled the scene in his car, he called Lanlan first to tell her what he had done. She was now married to another man and had a baby; but he still referred to her as his girlfriend, and had sent her 1,100 yuan in a red envelope for her wedding. While he talked to the woman who should have shared the house with him, He’s friends violently bumped his car; and it was in their custody that the nurseryman of North Gaoying village arrived at the police station, and sealed his fate.