Zhu Ling: Chinese woman at the center of 30 year-old unsolved poisoning case passes away

Nearly three decades after she first made headlines worldwide for being the victim of a highly sensational and unsolved poisoning case, Zhu Ling, who turned 50 just last month, has passed following a prolonged spell of illness. Her death came after decades of serious afflictions and disabilities caused by thallium poisoning, a tasteless, odourless and highly toxic substance. News of her death was spread via the Weibo account of her former alma mater, the Tsinghua University in Beijing whose post on the development saw thousands of sympathetic and some angry comments being posted by the Chinese social media users. 

The outpour of sentiment is a reflection of just how prominent the nearly 30-year-old unsolved case remains in the public memory, not just for the fact that the perpetrator was never caught and the victim suffered a terrible fate, but also because it has come to symbolise the seemingly prevalent inequality within Chinese society. 

In 1994, Zhu Ling, a third-year student with a major in chemistry, complained of various symptoms without any clear cause such as persistent stomach aches and hair loss. When she was initially hospitalised, doctors failed to catch on to the exact cause behind her symptoms. Later next year, when she was re-admitted with more serious symptoms, including partial facial paralysis, doctors were able to determine that Ling had been severely and repeatedly poisoned with thallium.

Authorities suspected her then classmate and roommate Sun Wei behind the poisoning as she “had easy access to the substance and the victim”. While Wei was investigated in 1997, the police eventually cleared her on grounds of inconclusive evidence. In the years that followed, the probe was dropped as Wei reportedly had a powerful and politically well-connected family, with active ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. 

Consequently, the case dropped out of public view for over a decade, until another university poisoning case in China –  this time in Shanghai – rekindled national interest in the Zhu Ling case, prompting some social media users to launch a petition campaign in the US. The campaign called on the White House to investigate and take action against Ling's former roommate Sun Wei who had, in the years since, started residing in America. 

The requested probe, however, failed to materialize, and Sun Wei continued to plead her innocence online, claiming in 2006 that her family had requested Chinese authorities to re-open the case and find the truth. Zhu Ling, the victim of the unsolved poisoning case who survived the ordeal, suffered both mental and physical damage from the poisoning which consigned her to remain under her parent's care for the rest of her life. 

Zhu Ling's family has long opined that Sun Wei targeted her with thallium out of a sense of jealousy, and the fact that she was able to allegedly get away with her actions using family connections has only ‘added fuel to the fire’.

Yaqiu Wang, research director for China at the non-profit Freedom House, told CNN: “The main reason that Zhu’s case evokes so much public anger and sympathy is because many people in China see a piece of themselves in Zhu: They have suffered injustice of some sort, but there is never a fair, independent or transparent investigation by the authorities.”