Case of teenager found dead after 106-day disappearance plunges China into mysteries

The body found in a forest in Yanshan County, China, should have put an end to a mystery that lasted more than 100 days. Hu Xinyu, 15, had been missing for three months, and search operations following his sudden disappearance have mobilized thousands of people.

The circumstances in which the body was found, however, raised more questions than answers. The corpse was hanging from a tree a few meters from the school where the teenager studied and where, in theory, the mission to locate him began. How the thousands of agents and volunteers didn’t find it before is one of the questions that the investigations will try to answer.

Hu disappeared on October 14, 2022. He was a newly enrolled student at Zhiyhuan High School, and the images that, so far, are the last of the teenager still alive were recorded there. Security cameras recorded Hu walking through the corridors in the area where the institution’s dormitories are located. It was 15 minutes before the start of evening classes, but the boy disappeared, and his family was notified six hours later.

One hundred and six days later, residents near the school notified the police that they had found a body hanging from a tree wearing the same clothes Hu was wearing when he disappeared. The teenager’s family and the lawyer who assisted her were called to the scene, but the body was formally identified only three days later based on a DNA test. It was Hu.

The discovery, however, fell short of enough to assuage the indignation of the Chinese. On Monday (30), the day after the police announced the body found, Hu’s death was one of the most talked about topics on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. Users, among laments over the tragic end of the searches, questioned how the various operations —with volunteers, sniffer dogs and drones— had not found a body so close to the school where the boy had disappeared.

The repercussions also generated a series of conspiracy theories, so that the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, published an article on Monday denying some of them. It was speculated, for example, that Hu’s body would have been thrown into a cesspool, taken to a hospital for organ removal or even melted by a chemistry teacher – in apparent reference to the American series Breaking Bad.

In early January, the police even issued a note in an attempt to contain the rumours. Authorities said there was no evidence that Hu was killed or involved in any accidents inside the school. The most likely hypothesis is that he left the institution alone, but the reasons and the sequence of events remain a mystery.

According to the Global Times, also aligned with the CCP, a card used to buy food at school and a voice recorder that belonged to Hu were found near where his body was – no details were released about possible audio recordings. of the teenager.

The Diário do Povo article also maintains that the case of the disappearance is not trivial and cites the population’s concern with the unanswered questions. The newspaper advises, however, that false information be avoided —which, in the context of Chinese censorship of the independent press, takes on ambiguous contours— and claims that the various mysteries surrounding Hu’s death will be clarified one by one.