This is the transcript of episode 07 of my podcast Talking directly (议正言辞). Listen on Xiaoyuzhou or Apple Podcast . The episode is in Chinese; this transcript has been translated into English.
In episode 2, we told the story of Xu Yuanqing’s revenge case in the Tang dynasty. At the time, that case set off a great debate over rites versus law that occupied the entire legal world for decades. In the end, the debate reached no definitive conclusion; the court chose a compromise resolution, leaving the underlying rites-versus-law question unsettled.
More than a thousand years later, in the twentieth century, that core question was still not fully resolved—when a person kills for the sake of “filial piety,” what exactly is the law supposed to do? In today’s episode, we fast-forward to 1935 to look at what was called “the strangest case of the Republic”—Shi Jianqiao’s assassination of Sun Chuanfang.
Three Shots in the Buddhist Hall
On the afternoon of November 13, 1935, in Tianjin, a Buddhist lay-practitioners’ hall called Jushilin was holding a sutra-chanting service. Sun Chuanfang, the warlord of the Zhili clique, sat in the front row in a monk’s robe, eyes closed, packed in among the other devotees, his head bowed as he listened to the chanting.
Among the devotees was a woman. Making the excuse that the brazier in front was too hot, she rose and moved to Sun Chuanfang’s right rear.
Then she drew a Browning pistol, aimed it at the back of Sun’s head, and fired a single shot. Sun died on the spot. But not yet satisfied, she fired two more.
The hall erupted into chaos.
What followed was the most dramatic moment of the whole case. The assassin did not flee. Instead she announced in a loud voice:
“My name is Shi Jianqiao. I have avenged my father. I killed Sun Chuanfang. One person acts, one person answers for it—I will never implicate anyone else!”
Then she pulled out the leaflets she had prepared in advance and printed herself, A Letter to My Countrymen, and scattered them across the hall like snowflakes. The leaflets stated plainly that she had killed Sun Chuanfang to avenge her father; now that her great vendetta was fulfilled, she would surrender of her own accord and submit to the law.
The devotees present all fled, and no one helped her call the police—she even wanted to go and turn herself in. In the end it was the hall’s gatekeeper who heard the shots and fetched a patrolman from nearby. Shi Jianqiao voluntarily handed over the pistol and the three remaining bullets, and went with the police to the Tianjin police station to surrender.
The case caused a sensation across the country. A warlord killed, the assassin a woman, the motive revenge for a father—this hit nearly every hot button of the press of the day, and public opinion fell almost entirely on the side of the assassin, Shi Jianqiao. For the Tianjin District Court charged with trying the case, it was without question a hot potato.
A Ten-Year Road to Revenge
It was precisely for this reason that the name Shi Jianqiao—a name with a distinctly chivalrous ring—was written into the history of Chinese law.
The origin of the whole case goes back another ten years, to 1925. This was the time of the Zhili-Fengtian War, with warlords of every stripe locked in a free-for-all. Shi Jianqiao—she did not yet go by that name; she was called Shi Gulan—had a father named Shi Congbin. To be precise, he was her adoptive father. He was a division commander under the Fengtian warlord Zhang Zongchang and served as deputy military commissioner of Anhui. In October 1925, when Sun Chuanfang of the Zhili clique went to war with the Fengtian clique, Shi Congbin was ordered into the field. But he advanced too far alone, with no reinforcements behind him, and near Guzhen in Anhui he was captured by Sun Chuanfang’s troops.
Here we should note some background. Amid all the warlord fighting there was a certain code, an unwritten rule—that prisoners were not to be killed, especially high-ranking generals. Today I capture your man, tomorrow you capture mine; spare a life, and there will be good terms between us later. This was a tacit rule the warlords had honored for years.
But Sun Chuanfang did not honor it.
He had Shi Congbin bound with wire, decapitated, and his head displayed at the Bengbu railway station. The body was left exposed for days, the head hung up for all to see. Worse still—the family was strictly forbidden to collect the body.
Shi Gulan was twenty at the time. For her, that her father had been so brutally killed and defiled, and that she was not even allowed to recover his remains—what kind of hatred was that?
But Shi Gulan was no ordinary woman. She came from an official’s family; her biological father, Shi Congyun, was a martyr of the Luanzhou Uprising during the 1911 Revolution, and every one of these father figures was a person of real standing. A woman from such a family carries in her bones a fierceness that is hard for us to imagine.
When No One Can Be Relied On, You Rely on Yourself
Even so, in that era, the obstacles facing a woman who wanted to take revenge with her own hands were enormous. At first Shi Gulan did not choose to act herself. She tried two paths, and both left her heart cold.
The first path: she went to her cousin, Shi Zhongcheng. This was a man Shi Congbin had personally taken in, raised, and groomed; you could say that without Shi Congbin there would have been no official career for him. When Shi Gulan came to him, he agreed readily enough. But as his rank climbed and he became garrison commander of Yantai, he began making excuses—in plain terms, a man greedy for wealth and rank who would not take the risk. In her fury, Shi Gulan broke off all ties with him as siblings.
The second path was a fellow provincial, a lieutenant-colonel named Shi Jinggong. This man sought out Shi Gulan on his own, saying he deeply sympathized with the Shi family’s plight and was willing to help her take revenge. In that era, for a man to say such a thing to a woman, the meaning was clear. Shi Gulan, by then nearly at the end of her rope, even broke the traditional taboo of “one husband for life,” married Shi Jinggong, and bore him two children.
And the result? As Shi Jinggong’s career flourished, he grew more and more afraid of death, and in the end he went back on his word entirely—forbidding Shi Gulan ever to speak the word “revenge” again.
It was then that Shi Gulan wrote a few lines of verse. Let me read them aloud:
Sparing not my life, to avenge my father— / year after year unavenged, the grief wears on. / With a foolish heart I begged others for aid; / in the end I must step forward myself.
In the end, relying on anyone was useless. She could rely only on herself.
Changing Her Name
And so Shi Gulan did something with great ceremony.
She changed her name. “Gulan,” in Shi Gulan, means “orchid in an empty valley”—a very traditional, gentle woman’s name. She changed it to “Shi Jianqiao,” drawn from the lines “raising my head to gaze at the bright moon, drawing my sword toward the blue sky.”
For a woman to change her own name into a “code name for revenge”—this showed she had already made up her mind. This had to be done, and she was already prepared to pay any price for it.
She wrote a farewell letter to her husband, her children, and her youngest sister, and, taking her two sons, went to Tianjin.
Closing In, Step by Step
Once in Tianjin, Shi Jianqiao began a months-long pursuit. How did she find Sun Chuanfang?
In the spring of 1933, while accompanying her son to school, she ran into a servant of Sun Chuanfang’s young daughter at the gate of a private primary school, and thus learned the Sun family’s address.
In June 1935, in Taiyuan, Shanxi, she bought a Browning pistol and matching ammunition.
In the autumn of 1935, she saw the Sun family again at the opening ceremony of a middle school in Shanghai; this time she memorized the license plate of the Sun family’s black sedan—1093. She then went to cinemas in Tianjin and, from the radio, learned to recognize Sun Chuanfang’s voice and face.
On the day before the Double Tenth of 1935—the anniversary of Shi Congbin’s death—she went to the Guanyin Temple to burn paper offerings and chant sutras for her father. There, she happened to overhear that Sun Chuanfang often went to chant sutras at a place in Tianjin called Jushilin.
Shi Jianqiao then disguised herself as a “devotee” and, through the introduction of a woman lay practitioner, joined Jushilin. She went twice, observing Sun Chuanfang’s seat during the service until she knew it clearly. In the meantime, she bought a mimeograph machine, cut the stencils herself and printed alone, producing multiple copies of the A Letter to My Countrymen leaflet. On each leaflet, beside the signature “the avenging daughter Shi Jianqiao,” she left a print of her own thumb.
This was Tianjin in 1935. Outside, a world in chaos; at home, hatred. She was doing a thing she knew would change the course of her whole life. What came next you have already heard: in that Buddhist hall, Shi Jianqiao shot Sun Chuanfang dead in public and was taken away on the spot by the patrolman.
Rites and Law: A Problem Harder than the Tang Dynasty’s
With the story at this point, we come to the very heart of the case—the trial.
The theme of this episode is the “clash of rites and law.” The Xu Yuanqing revenge case we discussed in episode 2 took place in the Tang dynasty. In the Tang, the relationship between rites and law was essentially one of “the unity of rites and law”—in the Old Book of Tang, in a memorial, Zhang Yue wrote that “virtue and rites are the foundation of governance, punishment and law its instruments.” The law itself served to uphold Confucian ethics, so when someone avenged a father, the judge faced not an either-or choice but the question of how to strike a balance within a single value system.
But by 1935, the situation was entirely different.
Beginning with the legal reforms of the late Qing, China’s legal system underwent a thorough Westernization. By the 1930s, the Nationalist government in Nanjing had promulgated the Six Codes—the constitution, civil law, criminal law, commercial law, the code of civil procedure, and the code of criminal procedure—a vast and intricate framework of supreme law. This system was built on the foundation of modern state theory. That is to say, in a modern society the state alone holds a monopoly on the power to punish. Any private redress, any private vengeance, any blood feud is, in the logic of modern rule of law, absolutely forbidden.
This produced a fundamental contradiction. In China, at least since the Han dynasty, “one does not live under the same sky as the killer of one’s father” had been an ethical creed engraved in the bone. The Book of Rites says, “For the enemy of one’s father, one does not live under the same sky.” To avenge a father was not a choice but a duty. A person who did not avenge his father was, in social ethics, unfit to be called a person.
But modern criminal law says that killing is killing; however good the motive, it is merely a factor to be considered at the sentencing stage, and can never serve as grounds for acquittal.
This is where the true tension of the Shi Jianqiao case lies—it is not merely a question of guilt or innocence, but a collision between traditional ethics and modern law, between two utterly different sets of ideas.
Three Statutes, One Point of Contention
Let us look concretely at the three articles of the 1935 Criminal Code of the Republic of China that bear on this case.
First, Article 271, paragraph 1: “Whoever kills a person shall be punished with death, life imprisonment, or imprisonment for not less than ten years.” This is the conviction. Shi Jianqiao fired three shots and Sun Chuanfang died on the spot; the facts were beyond dispute, with no argument to be had.
Second, Article 62—the provision on mitigation for voluntary surrender: “Whoever surrenders for a crime not yet discovered and submits to trial shall have his punishment reduced.” In the criminal law of the time this was a “mandatory reduction”—so long as surrender was found, the sentence had to be reduced. And here a point of contention arose: Shi Jianqiao had intended to surrender voluntarily before the killing, but she was seized by the patrolman the gatekeeper had summoned before she could even place the call to the police. Did this count as “surrender” in the legal sense?
Third, Article 59—the provision on discretionary mitigation: “Where the circumstances of a crime are such as to merit compassion, the punishment may be discretionarily reduced.” This was a “may reduce”—not mandatory, but left to the judge’s discretion. This was the one crack in the case through which the traditional ethic of “filial devotion” could be slipped into the modern legal framework.
Three statutes, one point of contention. Next we look at how the Republic’s three tiers of courts understood this logic.
Three Tiers, Three Trials
First, the Tianjin District Court, at first instance, handed down its verdict on December 16, 1935—ten years’ imprisonment.
In this verdict, the judge accepted “surrender” but refused “discretionary mitigation.”
The judge held in the opinion that Shi Jianqiao did not flee after the killing but turned herself in, which accorded with the spirit of surrender, and so reduced the sentence under Article 62. The statutory minimum for homicide was ten years, and surrender was a mandatory-reduction provision, so following the statutory minimum, the court imposed ten years—already the lightest punishment the legal framework allowed.
But at the same time the judge refused to apply Article 59. The reasoning: the court had already used the surrender provision to reduce the sentence to the minimum, but to formally acknowledge in law that “avenging one’s father” could serve as grounds for mitigation—modern criminal law could not open that door.
This was the first instance’s balance: procedurally it credited the sincerity of your conduct; substantively it refused to credit the rightness of your reason.
Neither prosecution nor defense was satisfied with the verdict. The defense thought it too heavy, the prosecution too light. Both sides appealed.
Next, the Hebei High Court, at second instance, handed down its verdict on February 11, 1936—seven years’ imprisonment.
For the whole of Chinese legal philosophy this verdict is a remarkable specimen. The appellate judge did something quite “sophisticated.”
He first corrected the first instance’s finding of “surrender.” He said that under Article 62, one premise for finding surrender is a “crime not yet discovered,” an element expressly required by the criminal law. Shi Jianqiao had committed the act in broad daylight; the fact of the crime and the identity of the offender were known to the public the very instant the shot was fired—this was not a “crime not yet discovered,” and so could not count as surrender. Article 62 did not apply.
Procedurally, he tightened the interpretation of surrender and preserved the rigor of the statute.
And then? He turned around and applied Article 59 instead. His wording was that Shi Jianqiao’s “biological father died a terrible death; she avenged what touched her to the quick; moved by filial devotion, she is truly deserving of compassion.”
In other words: I will not give you a procedural pass, but on the merits I openly acknowledge that avenging one’s father, by the traditional ethics of the Chinese, is “truly deserving of compassion.” In the end I reduce your sentence from ten years to seven, not because procedure favors you, but because in the motive of your act there is a moral weight worthy of our serious regard.
This was the appellate judge’s cleverness: let procedure be procedure and sentiment be sentiment; keep the two lines distinct.
Finally, the Supreme Court in Nanjing, at third instance, ruled on August 1, 1936—the appeal was dismissed and the second instance’s verdict of seven years upheld.
The Supreme Court’s stance was perfectly clear: the second instance’s application of the law was sound, its legal reasoning beyond reproach, and its weighing of the circumstances forgivable. Seven years’ imprisonment was the final word on the case.
Here the judicial process came to an end. Three tiers, three logics, arriving at last on a seemingly compromise number—seven years—that reached a certain subtle balance.
But the story was not over.
A Precedent: The Zheng Jicheng Case
The reason the Shi Jianqiao case became “the strangest case of the Republic” lies, to a large degree, not in how the courts handled it, but in what happened after the courts had ruled.
Let us look outside the courtroom.
First, there was a very important “precedent.” In 1932, three years before the Shi case, a man named Zheng Jicheng shot dead the Fengtian warlord and Shandong military governor Zhang Zongchang on the spot at the Jinan railway station. Zheng Jicheng’s stepfather, Zheng Jinsheng, had been killed by Zhang Zongchang. After firing, Zheng Jicheng surrendered on the spot. That case, too, caused a nationwide sensation, and society launched a vast “movement to redress the wrong.” In the end, under the forceful intervention of Feng Yuxiang, Han Fuju, and others, Zheng Jicheng served only about a week before being pardoned by the Nationalist government.
The pardon in the “Zheng Jicheng case” established, in the social psyche, a key point—that “the state does recognize filial revenge.” So the moment the Shi case arose, public opinion immediately began drawing comparisons: since you could pardon Zheng Jicheng, on what grounds do you refuse to pardon Shi Jianqiao?
Public Opinion, Politics, and a Pawn
The second factor was the amplification of the media. In the 1930s, China’s urban newspaper industry was in a golden age. The Xin Tianjin Bao and Da Gong Bao of Tianjin and the Shen Bao of Shanghai all ran “extras” the very day the Shi case occurred. The copies of A Letter to My Countrymen Shi Jianqiao had printed in advance, and the poem she wrote beginning “Sparing not my life, to avenge my father,” were printed again and again in the papers.
The media crafted for her the image of a “Republican-era swordswoman.” A frail woman who endured in silence for ten years and cast aside wealth, rank, and family happiness, all to fulfill a single word: “filial piety.” In the Chinese society of the time, this narrative had enormous force.
Even more moving was her conduct in prison. After being jailed, Shi Jianqiao found that fellow women inmates had no cotton clothes for the winter because they were poor, so she paid out of her own pocket to buy them cotton garments. Once the papers reported this, another halo settled over her—this was a person who acted not for herself but for others.
The third factor, and the most crucial, was political.
Shi Jianqiao’s adoptive father, Shi Congbin, had been an old subordinate of Feng Yuxiang’s in the Central Plains War. More importantly, her biological father, Shi Congyun, was one of the principal instigators of the Luanzhou Uprising in the 1911 Revolution. And who was the other principal instigator of the Luanzhou Uprising? Feng Yuxiang.
And what was the relationship between Feng Yuxiang and Sun Chuanfang? During the warlord melee, Sun Chuanfang had defeated Feng Yuxiang’s Northwest Army, and among those defeated was Feng Yuxiang’s sworn brother Zheng Jinsheng. So the moment Feng Yuxiang heard of Shi Jianqiao’s deed, he sprang into action. He joined with Yu Youren, Zhang Ji, Song Zheyuan, and other Republican elder statesmen in a joint petition for a pardon.
Some prominent women within the Nationalist Party, such as Zhang Mojun, were also at work, jointly petitioning the central authorities for a general amnesty.
On September 25, 1936, Ju Zheng, president of the Judicial Yuan, personally chaired a Yuan session and brought up Shi Jianqiao’s pardon as a provisional motion, resolving on the spot to petition the Nationalist government for a special pardon.
Behind the Pardon Order
On October 14, 1936, Lin Sen, chairman of the Nationalist government, signed the pardon order.
The text of the order read like this:
“Shi Jianqiao, because her father Shi Congbin was in earlier years done to death by Sun Chuanfang, was moved to avenge her father, and so killed Sun in a Buddhist hall, thereupon at once surrendering to the court… Considering her act of killing, it does indeed violate the criminal law; yet inasmuch as a single woman, stirred by filial devotion, cast aside all thought of self, she is hereby specially pardoned, as a token of compassion.”
This passage conveyed two signals. First, “considering her act of killing, it does indeed violate the criminal law”—I acknowledge that you broke the law, and the majesty of modern criminal law must be upheld. Second, “inasmuch as a single woman, stirred by filial devotion, cast aside all thought of self”—but you acted out of filial devotion, and this I understand, forgive, and pardon.
This pardon order was issued under Article 68 of the Provisional Constitution of the Political Tutelage Period of the Republic of China. In that era, the head of state’s power of pardon was a kind of sovereign exception—it rode above ordinary judicial procedure and could, after the law had exhausted every means, deliver one final “rule-by-man verdict.”
But we cannot see only the “rule by man.” Behind this pardon, the political purpose is worth pondering.
After Sun Chuanfang fell from power and retired, he had all along been colluding with the Japanese, seeking to instigate North China autonomy. For the Nationalist government in Nanjing, Sun Chuanfang was in any case a “political hazard” that needed to be removed. Shi Jianqiao’s single shot, in a sense, solved a problem for Chiang Kai-shek’s government.
Besides, what year was 1936? The footsteps of Japan’s invasion of China were drawing ever closer, and North China was tottering. At such a juncture, Chiang Kai-shek needed to win over every force he could. By pardoning Shi Jianqiao, he handed a great political favor to Feng Yuxiang, Song Zheyuan, and other figures of the Northwest Army and the regional power-holders.
So a pardon order, ostensibly a matter of “filial piety,” was in reality a move in a grand game of political chess.
Afterward
Shi Jianqiao actually spent nine months and ten days in prison.
After her release, her life was no less remarkable. When the War of Resistance broke out, she divorced her husband and threw herself into the fight against Japan. She served as head of the Women’s Association for Resistance Support and of the Suzhou Refugee Association, and launched a campaign to raise funds to buy warplanes. She led the way by donating her own jewelry of many years, and she mobilized Feng Yuxiang’s brothers to raise funds together, with Feng personally going into the homes of wealthy merchants and gentry to make his case. In the end they truly raised enough to buy a fighter plane. She was called “the leader of the plane-fundraising campaign.”
After the victory in the War of Resistance, in 1946, with the support of Feng Yuxiang, Yu Youren, and others, she founded a private “Congyun Primary School” in Suzhou—“Congyun” being the name of her biological father, Shi Congyun. It was devoted to taking in children of impoverished families and orphans of fallen soldiers. During this time she came into contact with Dong Biwu, Zhou Enlai, and other senior figures of the Communist Party, and her thinking gradually leaned left.
After the founding of the People’s Republic, she was elected chair of the executive committee of the Suzhou Women’s Federation; in 1957 she became a specially invited member of the Beijing People’s Political Consultative Conference. She died of illness on August 27, 1979, at the age of seventy-four.
Coda
With the story at this point, we return to the theme of this episode: the clash of rites and law.
The Xu Yuanqing case and the Shi Jianqiao case were separated by more than a thousand years, yet their core question was one and the same: when a person kills for the sake of “filial piety,” what is the law to do?
The Tang dynasty’s choice was “the unity of rites and law,” reconciling the matter within a single, unified value system. And the choice of the Republic’s three tiers of courts? As I see it, they ran into a problem harder than the Tang’s—the legal system had already modernized; sentiment and law were no longer of the same source, and law and ethics no longer flowed from one wellspring. Within this framework, what the judges could do was, in the crevices of statutory law, use technical provisions like “surrender” and “discretionary mitigation” to give traditional ethical ideas a small place to rest.
You could call this “cutting the foot to fit the shoe,” or you could call it “dancing in chains”—but however you judge it, at the purely technical level of law, the three tiers of courts performed an exceptionally exquisite operation.
And then the pardon order came. By way of the “sovereign exception,” politics accomplished what the law could not—and did not want to—do: it gave revenge a safe and dignified ending.
Whether this was a failure of the rule of law or a triumph of humanity, different people will give different answers. But at least one thing is certain: from Xu Yuanqing to Shi Jianqiao, from “rites above law” to “a compromise between sentiment and law,” China’s legal minds have never truly let go of the problem of “filial piety and revenge.”