Photos of Yingying Zhang on a tree on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana, Ill. Photo: Stephen Haas/The News-Gazette via AP
Lifeng Ye, the mother of Yingying Zhang, cries out in grief as her husband Ronggao Zhang, far left, addresses the media after a jury found Brendt Christensen guilty of her murder. Photo: Matt Dayhoff/Journal Star via AP
The Chinese government keeps the total number of executions per year classified. It’s generally estimated to be in the thousands and accounts for 80 percent or more of state executions globally. Western critics point to this as another example of the country’s abysmal human rights record, while Chinese officials and prominent academics claim that the legitimacy of capital punishment is ingrained in Chinese tradition and endorsed by its people. “Cultural difference” makes for a convenient excuse to validate the self and exoticize the other. Yet historically, the Middle Kingdom was not any more punitive than its Western counterparts, and recent surveys show a two-thirds support rate for the death penalty in China, roughly the same as those from the U.S. over the same time period. Beyond the immediacy of war, when is a state justified to kill? The heart of this question is not about measuring the harms of specific conduct but mapping the contours of state authority. In England and colonial America, as legal historian Stuart Banner writes, “the death penalty circa 1700 was the equivalent of prison today—the standard punishment for a wide range of serious crimes” including arson, theft, and counterfeiting. The spectacle at the scaffold routinely attracted larger crowds than any other public event. The public execution, according to Michel Foucault, was not only a judicial but also a political ritual, through which the state manifested its absolute power.Beyond the immediacy of war, when is a state justified to kill?
People line up outside the federal courthouse for the first appearance of Brendt Christensen on July 3, 2017. Photo: Robin Scholz/The News-Gazette via AP
The issues of racism, misogyny, and mental health crises in the sciences and in graduate school did not start with Christensen and have not vanished with his incarceration. Three months before he kidnapped, raped, and murdered Yingying, Christensen had sought help at the university’s counseling center, where he admitted to suicidal and homicidal ideations. Yingying’s family sued the social workers at UIUC for negligence. The case was dismissed. I’m not trying to find excuses for what Christensen did, but to view it as an isolated incident, an example of the “dangerous few,” would be to miss the underlying context and eschew collective responsibility. Less than 10 percent of murders and 20 percent of rapes are committed by strangers. For a woman, the most dangerous place is often the home. Cruel as his act was, to cast Christensen as a uniquely-depraved individual would be to ignore all the historical and contemporary acts of mass violence, of wars, genocides, slavery, and colonization.To view it as an isolated incident, an example of the “dangerous few,” would be to miss the underlying context and eschew collective responsibility.
The memorial garden for Yingying Zhang outside Campbell Hall on the UIUC campus, near where she was last seen. Photo: Stephen Haas/The News-Gazette via AP