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Eugenia Lean, Public Passions. The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, 290 pp.
On 13 November 1935, a young woman slipped into a Buddhist temple in Tianjin and fired several shots at a peaceable 50year-old man kneeling in front of the altar. Turning towards the witnesses who were beginning to run away, the young woman threw down her weapon and began to explain her act aloud, while distributing a mimeographed document. Her name was Shi Jianqiao, the daughter of Shi Congbin, who ten years earlier had been the officer commanding the units in Shandong on behalf of the Zhili clique led by the warlord Zhang Zuolin. In October 1925, during the second war between the Zhili and Fengtian cliques, Shi Congbin had been captured by Sun Chuanfang, one of the leaders of the Fengtian clique, who had had him summarily decapitated and his head mounted on a pike. It was this Sun Chuanfang, now retired and a convert to Buddhism, whom Shi Jianqiao had just assassinated, thus exacting vengeance for her father's death and the profanation of his remains.
This news story immediately received considerable coverage, both because of the personality of the victim - Sun Chuanfang embodied the worst outrages of the warlords: fierce repression of workers' strikes in Shanghai, opium trafficking, collaboration with the Japanese - and the motive for the murder: avenging one's father was a crime in the eyes of the law, but a duty according to Confucian morality. This dilemma inflamed public opinion, and articles in the press were soon supplemented by serial novels, plays, and even a film, all during the proceedings of a court case full of sudden new developments, with the Tianjin District Court, the Hebei...