“Suicide note” from Shishou makes matters more confusing

Tu Yuangao’s suicide note, as declared by the police

The death of a chef who worked at the Yonglong Hotel in the city of Shishou, Hubei province, sparked a mass incident involving tens of thousands of residents and riot police.

There were accusations that the police had tried to “steal” the body several times, and had faked the circumstances of his death － the owner of the hotel had government connections and according to some sources, the chef Tu Yuangao had found out the source of its income: drugs.

The contentious incident was reported by the China Daily today, but before there was widespread coverage on English language sites such as Global Voices and Twitter, but few and far between on the Chinese － apart from official Xinhua reports.

The incident led tens of thousands onto the streets (Time China blog), and questions over the nature of the death remain a mystery.

An Op-Ed attributed to the Southern Metropolis Daily discusses the incident, and a suicide note supposedly left by Tu.

In China, “jumping from a building” means suicide: this has long ago become the common knowledge of netizens, from the case of Gao Yingying to Tan Jing. According to the latest Southern Metropolis Daily report, in the afternoon of the 21st, the parents of the deceased Tu Yuangao signed a contract for the provincial legal and medical department to look into the body, also saying that they hoped for the quick release of the results.

Investigation of the corpse is important, but the result isn’t important to netizens. From the results that culminated from the Shishou incident, it doesn’t matter where the decision came from, and it doesn’t matter what the truth is, in the end there is only one word that is being told to the people: suicide.

It is not difficult to deal with anything, but the difficulty is not to have any aftereffects. Hubei’s relevant bureaus should learn from the heavy effects of their “anti-angle”, this time, for the Shishou incident they must not lift stones and hit themselves again. I fear that the Internet will become your administration’s forever Battle of Waterloo. As a Hubei native, I am also sad.

What’s different about this case of “jumping” is that Tu Yuangao left a note before jumping, and only after examining this note can there be agreement between the different ideas of the netizens.

One, it was written in Southern Metropolis Daily that the family were suspicious of the suicide note. “Three Joys (三喜) [the nickname of the deceased] moved out to learn the craft when he was 13: his education only consists of three years of primary school. From what we know of him, how can he write this suicide note?

Southern Metropolis Daily also made public a picture of this suicide note, the handwriting on that picture also confused people: having such a good script after only three years of primary school education － if it isn’t a miracle, then it’s extremely rare. For this reason the police should immediately make public other documents that may have been left by Tu Yuangao when he was alive, for evidence. If this is not done quickly then for this picture of the “suicide note” there will be a crowd of netizen “onlookers” forever.

Two, “the evidence came from the police, who checked in the room in the hotel where the deceased was, and discovered that he had left a note. The contents were roughly pessimistic: he was sick of life and wanted to die, so the police used this to eradicate the notion that he was killed and designated it as suicide.” This clarified that the police had taken the note from his room, but it’s not enough; we hope that the police will make open their work related to it: where did the paper come from? And where is the pen? Has there been a test for fingerprints on the pen? What was the result? And the other circumstances of the room, has this been made open?

Aside from this, on the afternoon of the twentieth the young man who set fire to Yonglong Hotel must be caught quickly. This fire makes people extremely suspicious, because it would obliterate everything at the scene: the dead body was on the first floor at the time, and the dead’s father Tu Deming and mother Chen Guixiang were also on the first floor: setting fire to it really was not within the bounds of reason.