(0)

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition addressed to the president of the United States.

Zhu Ling, a sophomore studying physical chemistry, was sick for days before her symptoms were finally identified — with help from the early Internet — and an antidote was administered, but the talented and promising young student was left paralyzed and almost blinded from the attack. The only suspect was a roommate, Sun Wei, the granddaughter of a senior government official. Police held Sun Wei for eight hours before releasing her, but the case was never solved. Many believe she got off because of her political connections. Now Chinese netizens have taken to social networks to demand Zhu Ling's case be reopened.

ChinaFile reports: "Hundreds of thousands of Internet users sympathetic to Zhu are now pursuing their version of justice through online vigilantism—by exposing personal information of the suspect, [and] by tweeting and commenting on the case on China's microblogs."

In May, the phrase "Zhu Ling" was censored on Sina Weibo — even the word 'thallium' is flagged. No matter, Chinese netizens found another way to make some noise: petition the U.S. Government. Sun Wei now lives in the U.S. — or is believed to live in the U.S. — with a new name, and the petition, submitted through the We the People portal, asks for her to be deported back to China. (It appears that the petition creator is located in Miami, but many of the signatures do not have U.S. locations and are in Chinese characters.)