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An American Tourist Is Murdered, and Conspiracy Theories Abound

By Tim Wu
Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2008, at 12:22 PM ET

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A Chinese police detective tries to block a photo of the Drum TowerWhat would make you stab a 62-year-old tourist to death in the middle of the day and then leap off a 150-foot tower? That's a question you can't help puzzling over if you're in Beijing. What on earth was going on in the mind of Tang Yongming, the 47-year-old man who stabbed two Americans and their Chinese guide over the weekend? Todd Bachman, the father-in-law of the U.S. men's volleyball coach, was killed in the attack.

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To be sure, the most probable explanation is that Tang was simply insane, or extremely frustrated for his own reasons, and somehow snapped, making the whole thing what officials call an "isolated incident." That's the official story—that Tang "was distraught over family problems," including two divorces and a son who was in trouble with the law. Yet the timing (the Olympics), the victims (foreigners), and the location (the ancient drum tower) have certainly left plenty of room for Beijing's residents and resident foreigners to speculate that something else was afoot. Here are the theories (from the partially grounded to the ridiculous) that I've been hearing.

The murderer wasn't Chinese. This idea reflects on somewhat understandable disbelief that a Chinese person would want to ruin a time of national pride by killing a foreigner for no good reason. When I told the owners of a store in an alley near the drum tower about the murderer, they concluded, immediately, "He wasn't Chinese." They suggested that he was perhaps Malaysian, because Malaysians often look Chinese. When I insisted he was Chinese, their theory was that he probably wasn't Han Chinese (i.e., that he was an ethnic minority of some kind).

The Americans got involved in a Chinese fight. At a foreigner's party, I heard it suggested that the murderer knew the Americans' tour guide and was perhaps even a jilted lover. He confronted her, the Americans heroically intervened to defend their guide, and in a fit of rage, out came the knife. Afterward, when Tang realized that he'd been possessed, so to speak, he leapt off the tower to his death.

This explanation does make the event something like a mixture of United Flight 93 and the climax of The Exorcist, but it doesn't really explain why Tang was carrying a knife or what about the Americans prompted him to use it.

An enemy of the party. A Chinese friend, last name Yang, who did graduate studies in New York, suggested early on that the killer could be an enemy of the Communist regime—like someone from the Falun Gong religious movement. The idea here is that killing a foreigner is about the best way to weaken the party—by making it look bad during the Olympics. The killing, therefore, would be a rather extreme form of protest.

There's no evidence, however, of any such ties. What's interesting about this theory is the extent to which the Falun Gong is made out to be the Knights Templar or Freemasons of China—that is, an exaggerated bogeyman sometimes taken as the source of all evil, a group vicious enough even to endanger the good image of the Olympics. In response to my doubts, Yang replied that the Falun Gong is capable of doing extreme things, such as persuading beautiful young women to set themselves on fire.

An angry migrant (non min-gong). I heard early speculation that the killer was non min-gong—one of the generally mistreated peasant laborers who do manual labor for very little money. These fellows have been treated somewhat poorly as the Olympics have arrived, along the lines of "Thanks for building the stadiums—now get lost."

The notion that Tang was an aggrieved laborer may represent some guilt the Chinese feel about the treatment of migrant workers. (A Chinese acquaintance also commented, rather unfairly, I thought, that a peasant laborer would be incapable of even understanding the idea that murdering a foreigner would be a way to send a message.) The idea was upended, though, when Tang turned out not to have been a peasant at all. Nonetheless, scaled down, the general idea that the killing was motivated by the frustrations of contemporary life has a ring of truth. (Another, quasi-related rumor that I heard: Tang was depressed because he lost all his money in the stock market.)

A Neo-Boxer movement. In 1899, a secret cultlike group known as the Righteous Harmony Society, or the Boxers, began a campaign to purify China from all foreign influence, ultimately murdering more than 200 foreigners and thousands more Chinese Christians. For several months in 1900, the expats of Beijing and Tianjin were not to be found drinking in bars—as is today's tradition—but were holed up in fortresses holding out against the Boxers, until a wholesale foreign invasion saved their bacon.

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The Boxers were somewhat like a Chinese Ku Klux Klan, and so it seemed to me that a residual anti-foreigner movement might still be around. However, no one I talked to seemed to consider this remotely plausible. My friend Yang, for one, pooh-poohed this idea, reminding me that "we don't hate Westerners anymore; we hate the Japanese."

A Cultural Revolution holdout. While we're in the realm of implausible theories, Dai, a young member of the Communist Party whom I've befriended, speculates that—while it's highly unlikely—Tang could have been protesting the general abandonment of socialism over the last few decades or could even be an extremely rare holdout from the Cultural Revolution. While the latter seems unlikely, there are definitely those who think China has gone too far toward capitalism, said Dai, and the Olympics are something of a symbol of this.

A classic conspiracy. Classic conspiracy theories don't take much skill to make up, because they aren't required to follow the usual rules of logic. Take, for example, this Internet idea that the murderer was a paid CIA agent, ordered to kill Americans to create trouble for China. Yes, that makes so much sense.

five-ring circus:
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An American Tourist Is Murdered, and Conspiracy Theories Abound

By Tim Wu
Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2008, at 12:22 PM ET

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Jacob Leibenluft is a writer from Washington, D.C. Tom Scocca is a writer in Beijing. June Shih is a lawyer and former Beijinger. Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?

Entry 1: Photograph by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images. Entry 2: Photograph by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images. Entry 4: Photograph of Michael Phelps by Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images. Entry 5: Photograph of Vivian Lee by Hot Tang. Entry 6: Photograph of a man selling a ticket by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images. Entry 7: Photograph of the Beijing beach volleyball cheerleaders by Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Damn! Must have taken forever to make that-- it hit every spot in Beijing that I've ever sought out, and then some. You'd think for a 7-minute song they could have aimed for less repetition, but this is, remember, a people who listen to and can sing all the songs of ABBA and The Carpenters without understanding a word, so it's perhaps understandable.

But I disagree about CCTV just a bit-- they've come very, very far in the last 15 years, and NBC has no excuse. Seriously, some of the commentary should be banned for posing health hazards to anyone listening. NBC coverage just stinks, whereas CCTV is trying to put out as much coverage as it can. Sometimes they have boring minutes of people standing and waiting, but is that worse than NBC's Games to Commercials ratio, which seems to be 1:15 or so?

--DuckworkerMike

(To reply, click here.)

The west has to wake up and understand that the world is now moving faster than the west expects or accepts. It is easy to go on spreading woolly idealistic conceptual jargon about the right kind of democracy and freedom. At the end of the day, are all people happy in the west and USA? Barring Scandinavian, Nordic and Dutch Europe the rest of the region is a mixed bag of discontent and discord. In the US the average quality of life is so varying it intrigues sometimes how there can be such a boast about US being a developed nation.

Freedom to talk is not license to only condemn and criticize. Whatever be the form of government the progress China has made is undeniable and visible. An average Chinese like any other average national expresses dismay and concern over policies and this is universal. The poor in US with no participation in the machinery of governing will be as disappointed and annoyed as any Chinese. Only difference is your media makes a business of everything including good and bad news. I will challenge the media to give reports on events of human condition whether local or international without pedaling products and services on the airways. The media should accept the professional responsibility of providing true and accurate reports about events and not use the opportunity to make exposes and start beating the chest.

Yes, Beijing is growing and it has pains. Did not New York suffer this after the great depression? I think people lived more miserable lives then and we only have pictures of their past. So please learn to admire what is good after hard work and effort and don't go on playing the lone man blocking the tank card. It is history and much has changed in sociology since then.

--subrashankar

(To reply, click here.)

A real criticism that could be made, but seems to be ignored, is this paradox between the "dynamic" booming development China and the "tendency to either modernize or tear down old structures". This is strange because part of the whole fangwen presentation of China is to show foreigners their great history -- their temples, and more temples. But along with this big emphasis on a grand history are these re-modeled, modern versions of their old buildings. How about writing about that inconsistency instead of just the "giant soulless block"...

--ArkhamEscapee

(To reply, click here.)

I am old enough to remember how the media treated China in the seventies. There was a simplistic fascination bordering on romanticism towards China, even with Mao, and the Red Guards. But as China developed, and becomes more successful, we have become more critical. To me, the June 4 incident paled in comparison to the tens of millions victimized during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, but where was the western media at that time? Also, isn't it offensive to see Mao's picture still prominently displayed at the Tian AnMen Square? Much more so for the Chinese people. That's akin to seeing Hitler's picture in Berlin and Stalin's in Moscow. Yet we see American network anchors broadcast in front of this symbol of evil. I have not heard the western media discuss the reason why it's still there. perhaps removing the picture will take away part of the unconscious resentment that the western media feels about China.

--jdfjdf

(To reply, click here.)

The whole 'meanness' of the media against China that the author mentions is really not about fairness. It's about competition. If they are going to compete with us for limited resources, we have to start by labeling them as some form of enemy. It's not about sharing resources, it's about making sure some upstart doesn't get a piece that should be rightfully yours.

--mallardsballadd

(To reply, click here.)

We hold China up to the same scrutiny with which we view ourselves. This motivation is sufficiently legitimate and, what's more, can easily be proven to be symmetrical in the way that China's coverage of "the West" is not. Should anyone doubt this fact, he'd only have to peruse China's risible and deluded reports on "Human Rights Abuses" in the United States, wherein press-freedom infractions are cited *from American media sources*. The genocide of Native Americans, the failure of America's heath care system which the author points to---these subjects receive exhaustive analysis in American discourse. The West ought to report on China as intrepidly as the West reports on itself. And the ultimate passive-aggressive implementation of the term "bashing", which deflects legitimate criticism as merely a "hate crime" is preposterous. If our criticisms appear to "Chinese eyes" excessive, much of this is due to the excessive praise they grant themselves in their domestic media. Try to excuse us if we momentarily disrupt your self-worship.

--AristophanicBirdsForGovernment

(To reply, click here.)

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