She Lost Her Daughter. Then She Spent 10 Years Fighting the Internet.

On September 30, 2026, Jiang Qiulian posted a long message on social media. Its title was six words: “Jinchang, We Shall Not Meet Again in This Life.”

It was not a farewell to a city. It read more like a family letter written to ten years.

“The wind in Jinchang is gentle. The mountains and rivers are quiet. Every stranger I met was kind, gentle, and sincere,” she wrote. “But to me, this city is filled with years of running, exhaustion, and heartache.”

This was her third trip to Jinchang, in Gansu Province. Each trip across thousands of kilometers was not for scenery. It was for a criminal private prosecution against a person who had harassed her online for years. In the post, she described the cost: “Every long journey to a court hearing tears open the deepest wound in my heart.”

The piece ended with one line: “Today, on my third trip to Jinchang, the dust will finally settle.”

Many readers’ first reaction was: ten years later, this mother is still holding on. But reading it only as a story of persistence misses what deserves attention in those ten years.

One life, three fronts

In the early hours of November 3, 2016, Jiang Ge, a Chinese student in Japan, was killed outside an apartment in Nakano, Tokyo. The attacker was Chen Shifeng, the former boyfriend of her roommate, Liu Xin. Jiang Ge stood between Liu Xin and the knife. She was 24.

Chen was tried in Japan. In December 2017, the Tokyo District Court found him guilty of murder and intimidation and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

Twenty years. A killer can walk out of prison after serving 20 years in Japan. For a mother, those 20 years are just a date she must mark on her domestic legal calendar. Jiang Qiulian has said: “After Chen Shifeng finishes his sentence in Japan in 2037, I will continue my lawsuit against him.” By then, she will be nearly 70.

After returning to China, Jiang Qiulian sued Liu Nuanxi, formerly Liu Xin. On December 30, 2022, the Qingdao Intermediate People’s Court upheld the first-instance judgment. Liu Nuanxi was ordered to pay Jiang Qiulian 496,000 yuan in economic losses, 200,000 yuan in mental distress damages, and all court costs.

A judgment is one thing. Getting the money is another. Liu Nuanxi did not voluntarily comply. Jiang Qiulian applied for enforcement on January 9, 2023. After four rounds of enforcement, the full 696,000 yuan was finally in place on June 1, 2023.

On June 12, 2023, the “Jiang Ge Special Student Aid Fund” was established at the Jimo District Charity Federation in Qingdao. Jiang Qiulian donated the entire compensation amount. That same year, Liu Nuanxi applied to the Shandong High People’s Court for a retrial. In February 2024, the application was rejected.

One life. The court awarded 696,000 yuan. Jiang Qiulian once said at a media meeting: “What I spent on this case in four years is more than that, let alone Jiang Ge’s life.” That sentence measures a compensation figure against litigation costs and the consumption of a life.

But this was only two of three fronts.

A criminal private prosecution without a public prosecutor

The hardest battle Jiang Qiulian fought was one criminal private prosecution after another against online harassers.

After the Jiang Ge case drew widespread attention, many online accounts began posting fabricated claims. Some spread the rumor that “Jiang Ge was killed because of a romantic rivalry.” Others subjected Jiang Qiulian herself to long-term insults and personal attacks. She did not stay silent. She filed criminal private prosecutions for insult and defamation.

Criminal private prosecution works differently from public prosecution. In a public prosecution, the procuratorate sues on your behalf. In a private prosecution, you are the plaintiff. You collect evidence. You appear in court. You travel to the courts. The crimes of insult and defamation are generally “cases handled only upon complaint” and do not go through public prosecution under ordinary circumstances. Under the 2013 interpretation by the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate on defamation through information networks, “serious circumstances” include defamatory information viewed or clicked more than 5,000 times, or reposted more than 500 times.

Jiang Qiulian is not a legal professional. She is an ordinary middle-aged woman from Qingdao. Yet she walked this procedural path largely on her own.

Over ten years, she sued more than ten online harassers. Four have been criminally punished, and several others have been ordered to pay civil damages.

Tan Bin, a Shanghai internet user, posted articles and cartoons related to the Jiang Ge case on Weibo. He was sentenced to one year in prison for insult and nine months for defamation, with the sentences combined into one year and six months. The second-instance court upheld the judgment.

Lin, an internet user from Fujian, posted a series of articles related to the Jiang Ge case through Weibo accounts including “Lone Wolf Soliloquy 4.” The Jian’ou People’s Court convicted him of insult and defamation, sentenced him to two years and three months in prison, and combined the punishments. Lin appealed. The Nanping Intermediate People’s Court in Fujian rejected the appeal and upheld the original judgment.

Zhang, a woman from Anhui, used multiple online names to spread cartoons insulting and mocking Jiang Qiulian and her daughter. She was convicted of picking quarrels and provoking trouble and sentenced to one year in prison. The second-instance court upheld the judgment.

Behind these numbers is something more painful.

Online insult and defamation differ from traditional insult and defamation mainly in their tools and carriers. Online communication is anonymous and crowd-based. That makes evidence collection and proof difficult for private prosecutors. Identifying the perpetrator is hard. Determining the damage is hard. Establishing causation is hard. These three difficulties together stop most victims of online violence at the first step.

More critically, a private prosecutor has no investigative power to seal or freeze electronic data beyond what can be collected from their own phone, computer, or publicly available online spaces. Collecting online electronic data requires professional knowledge and technical capacity. A private prosecutor is not a professional investigator and lacks those skills.

To bring one person who insulted her daughter to court, Jiang Qiulian had to screenshot every post, organize every article, and notarize every word of abuse. She had to look at the material once to collect evidence, again to organize documents, and again to select what would go into the notarization. She said in an interview: “The biggest difficulty in defending my rights is evidence collection... I have to keep looking at content that hurts me and Jiang Ge, over and over, like flesh rolling over a blade.”

This is not something an ordinary person can bear. Precisely because of that, Jiang Qiulian’s ability to do it cannot be summed up with “maternal love is great.”

The road she walked: how many could walk it?

Jiang Qiulian’s experience deserves close examination not only because it is shocking, but because it acts as a mirror. It shows the institutional difficulties ordinary people face when confronting online violence.

The first is the threshold for filing a criminal private prosecution. In 2023, courts concluded 587 defamation criminal cases. Of those, 271 were not accepted, accounting for 46.17 percent. Another 110 were dismissed, accounting for 18.74 percent. In other words, more than 60 percent of defamation criminal cases were blocked at the filing or trial stage. Only 29 cases were publicly prosecuted by procuratorates, just 4.69 percent.

Most victims of online violence can only take the private prosecution route. Walking that route requires the victim to complete all evidence collection and proof on their own.

In September 2023, the Supreme People’s Court, Supreme People’s Procuratorate, and Ministry of Public Security jointly issued guidance on punishing online violence. It further detailed the system for public security organs to assist with evidence collection. Under Article 246, Paragraph 3 of the Criminal Law, when a victim files a private prosecution for online insult or defamation, and the court finds after review that the victim indeed has difficulty providing evidence, the court may ask a public security organ to assist.

In practice, this system still faces problems. How should “difficulty providing evidence” be interpreted? Under what circumstances should the assistance procedure be triggered? Where is the line between evidence collected by the private prosecutor and evidence collected with police assistance? These questions make the system hard to apply accurately.

The legal debate turns on two separate judgments. Public nature and litigation capacity are not the same. Public prosecution intervention must be based on facts showing a public harm beyond the specific victim. Obstacles a victim faces in exercising the right to sue should be addressed through assistance with evidence collection, legal aid, and supported prosecution. A victim’s disadvantaged position alone cannot prove that the harm is public in nature. Public nature is the precondition for public prosecution. The tension between these two is one of the central institutional problems in online violence governance.

The second is the cost of cross-province litigation. To hold online harassers accountable, Jiang Qiulian had to travel from Qingdao to Jian’ou in Fujian, to Jinchang in Gansu, and elsewhere. Every cross-province hearing adds time cost, financial cost, and psychological cost.

Her wins do not mean the path is easy to copy. She cleared the filing and evidence hurdles three times. Most victims cannot.

The law is catching up

Legislation against online violence is accelerating.

On July 29, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China and relevant departments released the “Anti-Cyberbullying Law of the People’s Republic of China (Draft for Comment)” for public comment. The comment period ended on August 28, 2026. The draft has seven chapters and 60 articles. It covers the definition and governance principles of online violence, governance mechanisms, platform responsibility, government governance, social co-governance, judicial protection, and legal liability.

On platform responsibility, the draft says network service providers should establish and improve mechanisms for monitoring and identifying online violence. They should build feature libraries, typical case sample libraries, and early warning models in accordance with relevant national regulations. They should use artificial intelligence, big data, and human review to strengthen monitoring, identification, and early warning.

The draft makes platform responsibility a key pillar of source governance. It builds a full-chain platform governance system covering prevention, handling, and after-the-fact protection. The draft’s approach pushes platforms from “passive deletion and after-the-fact handling” to “active interception and source prevention.” Platforms should no longer be mere “movers of content” but “gatekeepers of risk.”

On judicial protection, the draft consolidates private prosecution filing, police assistance with evidence collection, procuratorate notification of filing, support for specific groups in filing suits, public prosecution, and public interest litigation. Article 41 says procuratorates may support specific groups, such as minors and persons with disabilities who suffer online violence, in filing suits with courts.

At the same time, the judicial system is sending a stricter signal. In 2024, public security organs nationwide handled more than 8,600 online violence cases and took criminal coercive measures against more than 2,500 people.

There is still a long way from institutional response to meaningful protection for ordinary people. The road Jiang Qiulian walked, through evidence collection, filing, cross-province litigation, and enforcement, will remain a swamp for the next ordinary victim of online violence unless the anti-cyberbullying law substantially lowers the thresholds at each step.

Her endpoint is not Jinchang

Back to the long post. Jiang Qiulian wrote: “If not for defending my rights, for this obsession, for my wrongly killed child, I would not come to Jinchang in this life or the next.”

But Jinchang was never her endpoint.

The endpoint she set for her rights defense is 2037. That year, Chen Shifeng will finish his sentence in Japan. Jiang Qiulian has said she will continue to sue Chen Shifeng in China. In August 2021, she posted on Weibo: “Chen Shifeng’s sentence in Japan ends in 2037. When Chen Shifeng returns to China after serving his sentence in Japan, I must use Chinese law to punish the murderer Chen Shifeng.”

By then, she will be nearly 70.

In ten years, she has gone from a mother who lost her daughter to a person who can independently complete the entire criminal private prosecution process and travel across provinces to defend her rights. She sued more than ten online harassers, forced four criminal judgments, and recovered nearly 700,000 yuan in compensation. Then she donated all of it and established the “Jiang Ge Special Student Aid Fund.”

Some people ask whether this is resilience or tragedy. There is no clean answer. But one fact remains: she has spent ten years proving that when an ordinary person faces a flood of online malice, the law works. The cost of making it work is heartbreakingly high.

What this road leaves behind is not only the ending, where a mother won justice for her daughter. It also exposes institutional gaps: the evidence burden in criminal private prosecutions, the cost barriers of cross-province rights defense, the long absence of platform responsibility, and the blurred line between public and private prosecution.

These problems cannot be solved by one person’s victory. But they are being seen, discussed, and written into the draft anti-cyberbullying law. That may be the most valuable thing Jiang Qiulian’s ten-year road has left to society.

As she wrote in the post: “Today, on my third trip to Jinchang, the dust will finally settle. I am grateful for all the kindness and gentleness I met here, and I will remember this persistence across mountains and seas.”

For more people, the dust should settle differently. The next ordinary person who suffers online violence should not have to walk this road alone for ten years.