Midnight China: True Crime & Dark Stories from the Middle Kingdom
True crime, dark history, and the shadows of modern China — told in English.Each episode digs into real cases that most Western listeners have never heard: serial killers, bizarre murders, family annihilations, unsolved mysteries, and crimes tangled with China’s turbulent politics and history.From the bloodiest serial killers of the reform era to lesser-known horrors that reveal something deeper about power, fear, and everyday life in China, Midnight China brings you carefully researched stories that rarely make it into English-language true crime.Some nights are pure nightmare. Others are darker still.
The Hammer in the Dark: the Xinhai Yang Case
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Midnight China
In 2003, China’s Ministry of Public Security made a string of rural killings its number-one supervised case of the year. A short, quiet man from Henan had been moving through villages in four provinces, entering houses at night and killing entire families with a hammer. By the time police caught him in a railway culvert in Cangzhou, sixty-seven people were dead. This is the story of Xinhai Yang —the case that became known as the Monster Killer—and of the ordinary homes that never saw morning.
Xingshan Teng : The Man Executed for a Living Victim
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Midnight China
In April 1987, the dismembered remains of a young woman were found in the Jinjiang River in Mayang County, Hunan. Police identified the dead woman as Xiaorong Shi, an 18-year-old from Guizhou who had been working at a local lodge and then disappeared. They soon focused on Xingshan Teng, a butcher from the village across the river. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed by firing squad in January 1989, still insisting he had killed no one.
Four years later, Shi Xiaorong walked back into her home village...
Gao Chengyong: The Baiyin Ripper
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Midnight China
Between 1988 and 2002, eleven women and girls were killed in the industrial city of Baiyin and in Baotou. Most of the attacks happened in daylight, inside homes and dormitories. The cases stayed unsolved for twenty-eight years. In 2016 police arrested Gao Chengyong, a quiet married father who ran a small grocery store with his wife, after a relative’s DNA sample led them to his family line. This episode follows the lives that were cut short, the fear that settled over Baiyin, the long search, and the ordinary surface of the ma...
Houses Built by Flesh: The Mine Compensation Murders
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Midnight China
In the early 2010s, a cluster of cases began to surface across northern and western China. Men were being lured into small, often poorly regulated mines, killed underground, and their deaths staged as ordinary accidents. Then people posing as relatives would appear and negotiate private compensation settlements with the mine owners—sums that could reach several hundred thousand yuan. The bodies were cremated, the ashes discarded, and the money divided.
Many of the people involved in these schemes came from the same poor mountain villages in Yunnan, pa...
The Dancer Who Never Came Home: the Xing Rui Case
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Midnight China
In May 2013, Rui Xing finished her master’s defense at the Beijing Dance Academy, ate with friends, and texted home that she would be there in half an hour. She was twenty-four, a dancer already known in her own world, and a volunteer coach with Beijing’s first wheelchair ballroom team. By eleven her phone was off. She has not been found.
A year later her cousin, the Latin dancer Wenbo Fan , kept a promise they had made and danced their cha-cha on national television, asking the coun...
The Arm in the Gobi: the Qu Yayuan Case
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Midnight China
The Arm in the Gobi: the Qu Yayuan Case
In November 2004, a shepherd crossing the Gobi in Toli County found an arm in the gravel, a ring still on one finger. DNA matched it to Qu Yayuan, a television presenter and national first-class announcer from Karamay who had been missing for two and a half years.
On the night of May 21, 2002, Qu Yayuan left a farm school in Wuerhe after visiting a student she had long supported. The girl had asked her to stay. She...
Eight Names at Dawn: The Hong’an Lime Plant Murders
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Midnight China
Eight Names at Dawn: The Hong’an Lime Plant Murders
Hong’an County, Hubei. 26 December 2007.
The Liming Lime Plant sat in a hollow behind a cement works, a few hundred metres from Shangxinji township. Shishu Wang and his wife had built it from village land. They were trying to sell it. They wanted a quieter life with the son who drove a taxi in Wuhan. That night eight people were killed in and around the plant: the owners, three kiln hands, a cook, her husband, and...
Dai Guihua — The Orphan Girl
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Midnight China — Dai Guihua: The Orphan Girl
They called her the Orphan Girl because the losses started early. Guihua Dai grew up in Langtang, a mountain town in Xinhua County, Hunan. Her mother died when she was small. Her father followed. She left school for factory work in the south, came home, married a man in glasses and cheap good suits, and tried to build the ordinary life the country kept promising: a rented flat, a car, two children, birthday cakes on WeChat.
Then the numbers stopped adding up. On...
She Xianglin: The Man Who Came Back from the Dead
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On a winter night in 1994, Zhang Zaiyu left her home in Jingshan County, Hubei, in a sweater and sweatpants. She was unwell. The marriage was strained. She told people later that she did not know where she was going — only that she had to keep walking.
Three months on, a body surfaced in a village pond. Relatives, working from height and hair and grief, said it was Zhang. There was no DNA test. She Xianglin, a twenty-eight-year-old patrolman and the father of their little girl, became the only suspect. After ten da...
After the Snow: The Diao Aiqing Case
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After the Snow: The Diao Aiqing Case
In January 1996, after a heavy snow in Nanjing, a sanitation worker on Huaqiao Road picked up a bag that looked like discarded food. It was the first of several packages found around Nanjing University’s Gulou campus. The remains belonged to Aiqing Diao, a nineteen-year-old student from a farming family in Jiangyan, Jiangsu. She had been on campus a little more than three months.
This episode of Midnight China tells her story before the case file: the exams, the adult-education se...
