In 2016, she went to a liberal arts college in Minnesota to study literature, while also practicing piano two and half hours a day. Liu’s waist-length cut is an act of rebellion. Liu said, was strict and quick to scold or punish her physically. Her father was a businessman, and her mother, Ms. Liu grew up in Beijing, introverted and intense, the only child of an affluent family. By the summer of 2018, when he traveled to Minnesota, he was worth an estimated $7.5 billion. Liu only got more famous in 2015, when he married a 21-year-old student and internet celebrity named Zhang Zetian. Liu became an entrepreneurial icon, known for putting on a helmet and JD.com’s red uniform to personally make deliveries on a three-wheeled electric bike one day a year. He founded JD.com in the early days of Chinese e-commerce, and turned the company into a logistics colossus. Born in a village in the eastern province of Jiangsu, he likes to recount how his family was able to afford meat only once or twice a year, and how he went to college with $70 raised by his fellow villagers. Self-made tech tycoons are widely admired celebrities.Īmong this class of billionaires, Mr. The workings of government and the private lives of national leaders are off-limits to the news media. Sexual harassment and assault are widespread in China, and elites face little scrutiny. Liu’s case is attracting so much attention because she is accusing one of the country’s most powerful men of behavior that has long been ignored. My friend, an accomplished career woman and busy mother, replied that she had indeed read it - all 149 pages, in English, overnight, purely out of curiosity. In July, the morning after the Minneapolis police released a report on the case, I got into a debate with a friend, and I suggested that she might want to read the document first before jumping to conclusions. Liu has become a figure as polarizing as President Trump. A hashtag about a pretrial hearing in September has logged 110 million views.įollowers of the case quickly translate legal documents into Chinese and add subtitles to police audio and video. Liu filed against a Chinese blogger, has 130 million views. Another, which concerns a defamation lawsuit Mr. Liu was getting divorced, has 170 million views. One, which has to do with a denial that Mr. But even less popular hashtags regarding the case get an astonishing amount of attention. Many of the most active hashtags related to the case, including #RichardLiulawsuit and #RichardLiusexualassault, have been disabled on Weibo. Now imagine this, and worse, at scale, for months and months. These are just a few of the 8,500 comments on a single Weibo post, which was retweeted 14,000 times and liked by 95,000 users. Liu was the actual victim, writing, “Look at the woman’s build, I absolutely believe that Liu Qiangdong was raped.” “Looks like the woman set up the whole thing.” And one suggested that Mr. “It was obvious that they disagreed on the price,” added a third. “The woman looks disgusting,” commented another. “The woman is a slut,” one commenter said. On Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, her case has been one of the most popular topics of the last two years. Liu, which has been vast and often vicious. It’s an understandable concern, given the social-media attention directed at Ms. Liu of rape in a Minnesota civil court, seeking more than $50,000 in damages. Liu are not related.) He insisted that the sex was consensual, and prosecutors declined to charge him. The executive, known as Liu Qiangdong in China and Richard Liu in the English-speaking world, was arrested by Minneapolis police and released within 24 hours. Liu, a student at the University of Minnesota, alleged that the billionaire founder of one of China’s largest companies, JD.com, followed her back to her apartment and raped her. She invited me upstairs, and began an intense conversation that continued for 18 straight hours. She doesn’t look glamorous, exactly, but for a 21-year-old college junior, she is dressed smartly.īut on a morning in early August, she greeted me in a loosefitting checkered dress. She wears striking waist-length hair and a long, dark knit dress. She seems unsure about how to get to her apartment. They get in and out of several elevators. In the video, she wanders the halls of a mazelike building, with a man trailing along. She was one of the most talked about and mysterious women in China, and I thought I knew what she looked like. Like tens of millions of other Chinese, I had watched and rewatched surveillance video of her in this very building. For an entire year, photos of her had blanketed the Chinese internet. MINNEAPOLIS - When Liu Jingyao introduced herself, in the lobby of her apartment building, I didn’t recognize her.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |