Hu Xinyu was 15 year old, he started attending a private high school in September 2022. He complained of stress, lack of sleep, and inability to focus to his teachers and classmates. At the end of September, he talked to his mom and cried that he did not want to study any more, he wanted to go home. His mother visited him during the October 1st national holiday, trying to calm him down.
On Oct. 14th, he was last seen around 6pm by students on campus. Since he did not show up for study session at night, the teacher and students searched for him in the school. The next day, local authorities started organizing searches around the school.
Since then, social media has extensively discussed the fate of Hu Xinyu. Many people speculated that he was killed for his organs. We will discuss that later.
About 160 meters from the school, there is a national grain reserve. It is a huge area with warehouses to store grains. According to the police announcement, Hu’s body was found hanging inside the compound.
According to Hu’s family, the body was hung with a shoe lace, almost no flesh was left on the body, and the clothes was the same he wore in October but was put on backwards.
The news were widely read, and reaction of disbelief was huge. This is mostly because the area has been searched again and again with police and mass of people. If he hanged himself there since October, the inability to discover the body only shows the colossal incompetence of the police.
The autopsy was asked to be performed. While people are waiting for the results, many different opinions are spreading on the internet.
The fact that the Chinese government harvest organs is not a secret. There is a Wikipedia page in English on this topic. The first time I heard about it, it was a testimony made by Harry Wu in the 1990s. I was so shocked that I thought he was just making things up. But of course, over the years, more and more evidence were reported.
Now in China, some Chinese internet users are calling themselves human mine (a reference to coal mine), 人矿. They accuse the government and people in power of treating Chinese people simply as a resource to enrich themselves without any regards for the well-being of the people. And now, in the context of organ harvest, human body becomes the resources.
This background is why a missing boy has kept the country’s attention for three months. Of course Hu is not the only young person missing. Every now and then, there are discussions of missing students on the internet. Almost every time, people think they are killed for their organs.
Lately, New York Times published an article: China Helped Raise My American Kids, and They Turned Out Fine. The author works in the fashion industry and had to flee China during the Shanghai lockdown, along with her family.
She described with nostalgia of her wonderful life in China, where her two daughters attended Chinese public school. She was singing praises of the life her family has had in China, comparing it to her fellow Americans. For example:
Raising kids in China was a plus in other ways — such as the heavy censorship, which results in a kid-friendly internet, and national limits on how many hours young people can spend playing online video games. Ironically, the tight control of the Communist Party surveillance state results in its own kind of freedom: With crime and personal safety concerns virtually eliminated, our daughters were riding the subway unsupervised in a city of around 26 million people from the age of 11. A constant but benign (and mostly unarmed) police presence kept order; streets and the green spaces around every corner were kept immaculate, and the sense of civic pride was palpable.
Many Chinese immediately commented that her children enjoyed the freedom of travelling simply because they are white, and no criminals dare to kidnap them. But Chinese people would not dare to let their daughter travel alone, in fear of them ending up as the woman in chain or Hu Xinyu.
At the end of the year of tiger, I saw one comment on twitter: the year of tiger began with the woman in chain and ended with Hu Xinyu.