In February 1998 the Kunming Intermediate People’s Court sentenced a young man named Sun Xiaoguo to death, to be carried out immediately, for rape, forced indecency, assault and picking quarrels.
Twelve years later, in April 2010, a middle-aged man walked out of prison. He put his name on the shareholder register of several companies and became the owner of a bar in a Kunming entertainment district. In that world people called him Boss Sun.
They were the same person.
Investigators later worked out the arithmetic. From death sentence to suspended death sentence, from suspended death sentence to twenty years, from twenty years to a series of reductions, Sun Xiaoguo served twelve years and five months in total. He had been due to die in 1998.
One. The first time, 1994
Sun was born in Kunming on October 27, 1977. His identity documents said October 27, 1975. His stepfather, Li Qiaozhong, made that change. At the time Li was deputy head of the police affairs office at the Yunnan armed police border command, and his stepson was too young to enlist, so the birth date was adjusted to suit.
That small forgery is worth pausing on. A senior officer used his post to give a boy two years he did not have. The same instinct, applied later to much larger questions, runs through the next twenty five years of this file.
From 1992 to 1994 Sun served in the armed police border forces.
His first serious offence happened during that service. In December 1995 the Panlong District People’s Court in Kunming sentenced him to three years for rape. He appealed. In April 1996 the Kunming Intermediate People’s Court dismissed the appeal and upheld the sentence.
At that point he should have gone to prison. He did not. While the case was being handled he was released on bail and then on medical parole, and an investigation later found that the medical parole had been obtained illegally and that he had never been taken into custody at all.
Both of those procedures have a legitimate purpose. Release on bail means that a defendant is not held while the case is prepared. Medical parole means that a prisoner who is ill may be treated outside the walls. Neither was available to Sun on the facts. The investigators eventually used two words for what had happened instead: illegal processing.
A three year sentence, of which not one day was served.
Two. Six months in 1997
What happens to a young man who commits a serious crime and pays nothing for it is the answer this case provides.
Between April and November 1997, while on medical parole, Sun offended repeatedly. Two episodes ended up in the judgment. From April to June 1997 he raped four underage girls by force and threat. On November 7, 1997, he and his accomplices seized two seventeen year old girls in a public place, assaulted and humiliated them, and left one of them with serious injuries.
None of those victims has ever been named in public reporting. What the record gives is a pattern: six months, six known victims, some of them children, all of it committed by a man who was at that moment avoiding a prison sentence.
In February 1998 the Kunming Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to death.
Three. From a death sentence to twenty years
The death sentence did not end the case.
In March 1999 the Yunnan High People’s Court changed it on appeal to a death sentence with a two year reprieve. In Chinese law that is a distinct punishment rather than a delay. If the condemned person commits no further intentional crime, the sentence is commuted to life imprisonment after two years. Between the two lies a two year observation period, and the distance between them is a life.
China has no jury, and a death sentence is not final when a court pronounces it. Every one of them must be approved by the Supreme People’s Court in a separate review, which is one reason a Chinese criminal case is so often fought over the sentence rather than over the facts. That review was where Sun was finally stopped. It was the earlier stages, the appeal and the retrial, that let him through.
In September 2007 the same court issued a retrial judgment and changed the suspended death sentence to twenty years of fixed term imprisonment.
Two steps down, seven years apart. On April 11, 2010, after further reductions, Sun walked out, having served twelve years and five months.
What had happened in those seven years was established later. His mother, Sun Heyu, and his stepfather, Li Qiaozhong, worked their way through the stages one by one, from the trial and the appeal to the petition for retrial and the execution of the sentence itself.
The notice issued by the court system in 2020 explains why the case was reopened at all. It said that during the original proceedings judicial officers had been suspected of taking bribes and of perverting the course of justice, and that a judgment which had already taken legal effect was wrong both in its findings of fact and in its application of law.
In plain language: the two reductions had been arranged from the start.
Four. The man who invented a manhole cover
The reductions included one episode so strange that investigators set it out in full.
To speed up the reductions, Sun Heyu and her circle arranged an invention. The chief engineer of the Yunnan No. 1 Prison supplied a set of drawings. A guard carried them inside. Other prisoners built the model from the drawings. Out of this came a patent for an anti-theft manhole cover registered in the name of Sun Xiaoguo.
Sun Xiaoguo took no part in any of it.
To get the false patent through the approval process, Li Qiaozhong and Sun Heyu arranged to have him transferred from the No. 1 Prison to the No. 2 Prison. There, with the help of the deputy warden, Zhu Xu, the invention was recognised as a major patent achievement, and a court reduced his sentence by a further two years and eight months.
In those same years his rehabilitation assessments were excellent and he was repeatedly named a model prisoner. That record came off the same production line.
The point of the episode is not the manhole cover. It is the number of institutions that had to cooperate to produce it. A prison supplied the drawings. A guard carried them in. Other prisoners built the model. A second prison recognised it. A court then reduced the sentence on the strength of it.
Five. Boss Sun
Once out, Sun Xiaoguo stayed in the Kunming nightlife business.
His first move was a change of name. Investigators recorded two names he had used, Chen Guo and Li Linchen, and it was the second that he carried through the bars and clubs of Kunming.
Public records show him as a shareholder in Yunnan Mitu Investment Management, Yunnan Yinhe Investment and the Kunming Xiji Trading Company, and as a shareholder or effective controller of several bars, including the M2 bar in the Kundu district.
At the same time he and his associates were running another operation altogether. The charges that later appeared in the judgment of the Yuxi Intermediate People’s Court included organising and leading a mafia style criminal organisation, running gambling dens, picking quarrels, and unlawful detention.
Six. A KTV in July 2018
What brought all of it down was a small assault case.
On the evening of July 21, 2018, a group of flight attendants from a Yunnan airline went to a KTV on Jinzhi Road in the Guandu district of Kunming to drink and sing. Late in the evening a flight attendant named Li quarrelled with a male colleague named Wang. Li told him not to leave, and made a telephone call.
Shortly afterwards a group of tattooed men pushed into the KTV. The man leading them was Sun Xiaoguo. He kicked Wang hard in the abdomen and ruptured his bladder on the spot, an injury later graded as serious. Then he walked out as if nothing had happened.
A ruptured bladder sits well inside the Chinese threshold for serious injury. An injury of that grade would ordinarily mean arrest and detention. More than a month later, Sun was released on bail instead.
What followed was what he had expected. By the time the case was transferred to the Guandu District People’s Court on January 3, 2019, a settlement had been reached with the victim.
He was confident that this time would be no different. This time he was wrong.
Seven. Three characters in a file
The turn came in March 2019.
While handling the assault case, staff at the Guandu District People’s Court noticed three characters on the file: the name Sun Xiaoguo. A deputy secretary of the Kunming political and legal affairs commission described in a documentary what went through his mind. How was this man out? Had he not been sentenced to death? How was he out and committing crimes again?
On March 18, 2019, the court ordered his arrest. Investigators then opened a full inquiry into what he had done since his release in April 2010.
In April 2019 the 20th central inspection team for the campaign against organised crime arrived in Yunnan and made this its number one case. In May the national office for the campaign listed it as a case under direct supervision and sent a special team to Yunnan.
Twenty years of the file were reopened and read again: every trial, every appeal, every petition, every assessment and every reduction inside prison.
Reopening a judgment that has already taken effect is unusual, because finality is the whole point of a final judgment. The mechanism exists for the case that arose here, where the judgment was obtained through corruption. In this instance it was used to restore the 1998 sentence and to attach to it the crimes committed after release.
On July 18, 2019, the Yunnan High People’s Court ordered a retrial. The hearing was held on October 14. On December 23 the court announced its judgment. It upheld the conviction and sentence imposed by the Kunming court in 1998, merged it with the sentence for the crimes committed after his release, and ordered the death penalty, with deprivation of political rights for life and confiscation of all personal property.
On February 12, 2020, the Supreme People’s Court approved the sentence. On February 20, 2020, acting on that approval, the Kunming Intermediate People’s Court executed Sun Xiaoguo. Before the execution the court arranged for him to see close relatives.
Eight. The net
One man could not have done the arithmetic of those twenty two years alone. The case became, in the end, a study of how many signatures one sentence requires, and of how nearly every one of them was obtainable.
Investigators concluded that the network had been woven over many years by his mother, Sun Heyu, and his stepfather, Li Qiaozhong. Following it downwards, there was someone at every stage, from the trial and the sentence to the management of the prison.
The sentences at the end were these. Sun Heyu received twenty years, Li Qiaozhong nineteen. Seventeen officials, among them Liang Zian, Luo Zhengyun and Liu Siyuan, were given terms of between twelve years and two years for perverting the course of justice and taking bribes. Six senior officials, including two former presidents of the Yunnan High People’s Court, received internal party discipline.
In its work report in 2021, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate named the case and used a phrase that entered the language: serving a sentence on paper. The report said that in cases of that kind prosecutorial supervision had become a formality, and it drew the conclusion in two parts. Where the execution of sentences goes badly wrong, a supervisor that should have seen it and did not has failed in its duty, and one that saw it and did not correct or report it has committed a dereliction.
Both halves matter. The court system had already taken its share of the blame through the sentences handed down to the officials involved. The procuratorate was saying that its own side owned a share too.
Nine. A manhole cover
Before the execution, a state television documentary broadcast a sequence from the detention centre where the judge read out the order and the officers guided Sun Xiaoguo through signing the paper. His eyes filled. As they led him away, he smiled.
His mother appeared in the same film. She said she had felt deeply ashamed and guilty, that in the way she raised her son and in the way she treated the law, she had gone wrong and done wrong.
The arithmetic is the part that stays with people. Sun Xiaoguo was sentenced to death at twenty. He walked out of prison at thirty two, opened bars, offended again, and was finally executed at forty two. The sentence that killed him was pronounced in 1998 and confirmed twenty one years later. Everything in between was the work of people who had sworn to enforce it.
A great deal in this case is worth remembering. In the vocabulary of Chinese true crime, this one became the case that proved a sentence is only as strong as the people carrying it out. One thing about it is unique.
On the findings of fact, the only invention Sun Xiaoguo ever produced in his life was a manhole cover. Someone else drew it, someone else built it, and his hands never touched it. And with that, the single most important gate in his life, the ending that should have come for him in 1998, was pushed back by twelve years.
