Yaoyao Jiang: Hui Jian Exposed Telecom Fraud内幕 and Was Silenced — Who Is the “Major”? Why Was the Truth Hidden for Two Years?

This episode unravels the full story behind the kidnapping and murder of internet strategist and anti-fraud blogger Hui Jian, who was targeted by a mysterious overseas "Major" who paid 1 million yuan to have him abducted in Guangdong after Hui Jian posted an article on his WeChat official account reporting Liu Ren, the president of the Anhui Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia. Through court rulings and media investigations, the program reveals how the truth was covered up for two years following Hui Jian's murder, as well as the complex political considerations and the context of US-China competition behind the joint China-Cambodia crackdown on the Prince Group and key figures in telecommunications fraud like Liu Ren.

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Hello everyone, I am Yao Yao Jiang, who loves to think and values logic.

In August 2024, a WeChat official account named "Hui Jian" publicly reported Liu Ren, the president of the Anhui Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia, alleging that he was involved in loan sharking, operating telecommunications fraud parks, and was responsible for deaths. A few months later, the account stopped updating, the articles were wiped out, and the person behind the account disappeared without a trace. Rumors in the circle suggested that Hui Jian had been arrested by the police for extortion. On October 27, 2026, a ruling from the Guangdong Provincial High People's Court was exposed, and people finally learned that Hui Jian had died on a desolate mountain in Jiangxi as early as November 2024. It was not the police who took him away, but a group of people who had collected a 1 million yuan bounty. The person he reported was an overseas member of the Anhui Provincial Committee of the CPPCC, who frequently hosted official domestic inspection delegations. Beijing police had opened a case against the Prince Group he was involved with as early as 2020, but they waited until the United States took action before beginning to close the net. As for the person who paid to take Hui Jian's life, he called himself "Major" online, and to this day, he remains nameless. Who is he? Today, I will clarify the ins and outs of this tragedy and see who exactly is responsible for Hui Jian's death.

Hui Jian, whose real name is Wu Kai, is originally from Anhui. In 2010, he registered Shenzhen Huijian Network Technology Co., Ltd. in Shenzhen. His parents passed away early, and he had no other relatives, living a solitary life in Guangdong for a long time. Wu Kai first became known to netizens nationwide in 2012. At 1:00 PM on October 28 of that year, he posted a message on Sina Weibo claiming that Wang Shi of Vanke had divorced for the sake of a young actress who had attended the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. This Weibo post was quickly reposted more than 1,800 times, whereas his usual posts typically received only twenty or thirty reposts. Over the next two or three days, he continued to post messages claiming that Ren Zhiqiang and Pan Shiyi also had extramarital affairs. Afterward, he came forward himself to take credit, making public a proposal and naming the whole affair Operation Crushing Stone. According to the proposal, the goal was to ensure there would be no other focus on the internet within 10 days. In the end, because he used the wrong photo of someone else while exposing Ren Zhiqiang, the operation ended hastily. Global People magazine, under the People's Daily, interviewed him specifically; he was 38 years old that year. In his Weibo bio, he called himself an old internet rascal and a rogue tycoon of internet planning. When the reporter asked why he did these things, he said it was just for entertainment; when asked if he had profited from it, he said he gained nothing except for 20,000 more followers. He also claimed that every detail of what he exposed could be verified against the parties involved. Global People's assessment of him was not polite; the end of the article specifically mentioned that during the days of the interview, training advertisements were posted on Hui Jian's blog: 3,888 yuan for a beginner class, 18,888 yuan for an intermediate class, and 88,888 yuan for an advanced class, implying that while this person spoke of public welfare, he was doing business. Therefore, Wu Kai was not a manifestation of justice descended from heaven; he was combative, loved to show off, liked to target celebrities, and had indeed made public other people's private information without verification. Later, his focus shifted. In recent years, almost everything he has written on his official account has been about overseas telecommunications fraud: the parks in northern Myanmar, the parks in Cambodia, the young Chinese people deceived into going there, and the bosses behind the parks. His official account has accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers, and his video account is called Hui Jian Talks. On his personal homepage, he wrote a sentence: Although my position is humble, I dare not forget to worry about the country, even if no one knows me.

In the summer of 2024, he aimed all his firepower at one person: Liu Ren, President of the Cambodia Anhui Chamber of Commerce. On June 5, 2026, the 47-story Huangshan International Building next to the Parliament Avenue in Phnom Penh was surrounded by joint Chinese-Cambodian law enforcement officers; the owner of the building was Liu Ren. According to a report by Jiemian News, Liu Ren had already prepared to leave the country that day but was intercepted by people who had been deployed in advance before he could set off. In the footage leaked from the scene, he was escorted out of the building by several law enforcement officers, keeping his head down the whole way. After his private office was raided, Jiemian News obtained photos from the scene. The room had a Chinese-style layout, with a heavy mahogany desk placed in the middle. Behind it, a wall-to-wall bookcase was filled with trophies, certificates of honor, and gold-stamped books. On one side stood a gilded Maitreya Buddha, and a Chinese ink painting of galloping horses hung on the wall. In the corner, the fish tank containing an Arowana was still pumping oxygen as usual. Later, the calligraphy and paintings on the office wall were bought by a Chinese person in Cambodia for only a few dozen US dollars.

Liu Ren was born in 1977 in Shaba Village, Huangwan Town, Lingbi County, Suzhou, Anhui. Shaba Village is next to the Tuo River and has historically suffered from frequent flooding, making it difficult to get enough to eat from farming. There were five siblings in the Liu family; the two older sisters went out to seek their fortunes early, and Liu Ren did not finish school, following them out to do small business. Around 2000, a sister who was already doing small commodity trade in Cambodia called him over. The entrepreneurial story Liu Ren later told the public was as follows: he traveled back and forth between Yiwu, Zhejiang, and Phnom Penh, wholesaling toothpaste and daily chemical products, going door-to-door to promote them, and saving up his capital bit by bit. This story later appeared many times in interviews with domestic media. In June of this year, Jiemian News published a long investigation titled The Invisibility Cloak of Liu Ren, in which a Chinese businessman who arrived in Cambodia earlier than Liu Ren—whom Jiemian gave the pseudonym Chen Hong—told another version. Chen Hong said that Liu Ren's true first pot of gold came from the NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh. In the early 2000s, he entered this only legal casino in Phnom Penh and once monopolized the lending business in the VIP rooms, which meant lending money to gamblers. The rule was: regular customers could borrow large sums with a daily interest rate of about 5%; strangers holding only a passport could borrow at most 3,000 US dollars. Those who could not pay back would be sold directly into telecommunications fraud parks to pay off the debt, with one person selling for 10,000 to 150,000 US dollars. In 2012, Liu Ren established the Huibang International Investment Group and switched to real estate. At the end of 2014, he took the lead in establishing the Cambodia Anhui Chamber of Commerce and became its first president. The following few years were when his influence expanded the fastest. From 2017 to 2019, when the country was conducting the campaign to crack down on organized crime, a group of people from northern Anhui who had been involved in usury and fighting fled to Southeast Asia to avoid the limelight. Cambodia was loosely regulated, and with a fellow townsman boss in charge, these people flocked to Liu Ren. Chen Hong said that the Hui Gang under Liu Ren developed from a small loan-sharking group into a gang with hundreds of core members, engaging in lending, construction, parks, human smuggling, and money laundering. It was one of the few Chinese gangs in Cambodia capable of sitting on equal footing with local military and political forces.

In 2016, Liu Ren connected with Chen Zhi, the boss of the Prince Group. Headquartered in Phnom Penh, the Prince Group is one of Cambodia's largest business conglomerates, publicly claiming to operate in real estate, finance, and tourism, but was later designated by the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a transnational criminal organization. The relationship between Liu Ren and Chen Zhi was not a whistleblowing disclosure, but a public announcement by the Ministry of Public Security. In 2016, Chen Zhi directed Liu Ren and others to establish the Jinbei Group in Cambodia, operating multiple online gambling platforms specifically targeting gamblers within China. After 2020, the Jinbei Group operated telecom fraud compounds in Cambodia involving exceptionally massive amounts of money. A Chinese businessman who participated in rescuing trapped individuals in Cambodia told Jiemian News that the Jinbei compound, Mango compound, and Prince-affiliated compounds controlled by Liu Ren belong to the category of places in Cambodia where rescue is the most difficult. While ordinary compounds might allow seven or eight out of ten people to be rescued, these specific compounds allowed only one or two out of ten. The reason was that the protective umbrella behind these compounds was at an excessively high level, making it basically useless for family members to make formal police reports. Chen Hong said that Liu Ren rarely showed his face personally; a piece of land for a compound might belong to him, the buildings were constructed by his engineering team, and the connections were forged by him, securing a fixed ten percent cut of the profits while dirty and hard work was done by people underneath him. Many matters were handled by his younger brother Liu Peng, though insiders revealed that Liu Peng had no blood relation to him, and Liu Peng was not his real name, but rather someone who had committed crimes in China and fled to Cambodia. Because he hid so deeply, when the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned the Prince Group in October 2025, among the 146 targets listed were Chen Zhi and the Jinbei Group, but Liu Ren's name was missing.

On the other side, Liu Ren packaged himself as a standard patriotic overseas Chinese leader. Around 2010, when Shatian Village lacked funds for road construction, he donated 50,000 yuan at once. The village nursing home received supplies donated by him, and the elderly could receive red envelopes from him during festivals and New Year. He fully funded three batches totaling 160 Cambodian high school students to study abroad at Hefei University. In 2020, he appeared across multiple media outlets as a representative of Lancang-Mekong new overseas Chinese, dressed in a suit and tie, welcoming folks from his hometown to Cambodia for inspection and investment in front of the camera. The vice president of another Chinese chamber of commerce in Cambodia stated that chambers of commerce from Guangdong and Fujian held hometown gatherings spanning dozens of tables during festivals, whereas the Anhui Chamber of Commerce almost never held public activities, maintaining a tight-circle approach. Insiders joked privately that it didn't look like a chamber of commerce at all, but rather a private gang. Meanwhile, this chamber president held another identity back in China: Hong Kong's Sing Tao Daily reported that Liu Ren served as an overseas member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) for Anhui Province, repeatedly hosting official inspection delegations from various levels of Chinese government.

In August 2024, Huijian—whose real name was Wu Kai as mentioned earlier, and who later died in the barren mountains of Jiangxi—published a series of articles on his WeChat official account explicitly naming Liu Ren. The articles accused him of five major points: violent lending in casinos, beating a decoration boss to death, collecting protection fees from shops, operating telecom fraud compounds, and armed transnational crime. This was the first time Liu Ren was publicly reported, and the news quickly spread within the Chinese community in Cambodia, though local Chinese-language media remained basically silent. This batch of materials was not dug up by Wu Kai himself in Phnom Penh; Chen Hong told reporters that the evidence was gathered by a Cambodian businessman who fell out with Liu Ren due to a dog-eat-dog gang conflict and thus resolved to report him, later facing threats and being forced to leave Cambodia. At the time, a chat screenshot circulated online reflecting the sentiment within the Chinese community. Someone said in a group chat that currently only Huijian dared to expose Liu Ren on WeChat, while other media outlets in Cambodia did not dare to do so. They also claimed that Liu Ren had once fired a gun at the Huangshan Hotel while drunk, and routinely dragged people he kidnapped to the Huangshan Hotel to beat them, meaning he surely had human lives on his hands, only hindered by a lack of evidence. Someone suggested Wu Kai publish another piece to collect clues from the whole society, and another person replied: In Cambodia, who dares to provoke President Liu? Liu Ren's most prominent asset in Phnom Penh was the Huangshan International Building, located in the embassy district right next to the Cambodian Parliament building, just a few minutes' walk from NagaWorld Casino. A few days after Huijian's WeChat article was published, Liu Ren issued a stern statement in the name of the Cambodian Anhui Chamber of Commerce, denying the accusations point by point. He claimed these exposures were malicious rumors and groundless slander, threatening to pursue legal channels to hold the whistleblowers accountable. The final sentence of the statement was a promise: I will continue as always to treat people with integrity and loyal patriotism, and will never engage in illegal or criminal acts. This statement was intensively published by local Chinese-language media in Cambodia.

Aside from the official statement, there were private maneuvers as well. Another person familiar with Huijian told Jiemian News that Huijian had mentioned that Liu Ren's side approached him through an intermediary in China, offering him tens of thousands of yuan on the condition that he delete all the expository posts. Subsequently, Liu Ren's side filed a police report claiming Huijian engaged in extortion. Sending money through intermediaries first and then calling the police to claim extortion is a common tactic; once the money touches one's hands, evidence of extortion is established. Whether Huijian actually accepted this money, no materials currently exist to clarify. Friends who had known Huijian for many years revealed another matter to Jiemian News: during that period, Huijian was exposing Liu Ren alone. Over a month before Huijian was killed, people under Liu Ren inquired with Lao An—a friend in Cambodia—about where Huijian was living in China. Although this friend did not tell them, Huijian's detailed residential address in China, his recent photos, and his license plate number were ultimately tracked down.

In mid-October 2024, a Henan farmer named Zhao Bing saw a bounty task on Telegram, commonly known locally as "Airplane." The poster went by the online alias "Major," and the task was to kidnap a person for a reward of 300,000 RMB. Zhao Bing, a 25-year-old with a vocational school education, thought 300,000 RMB was a huge sum of money when he saw it, so he took the job. Both parties switched to another encrypted chat software, Yeechat, to communicate. The Major's demand was very clear: the target to be kidnapped was someone who frequently posted news about northern Myanmar telecom scams on a WeChat official account. Their task was to force out the mastermind behind the official account and then delete the articles. The Major handed over the personal information of this person to Zhao Bing, and this person was Huijian. Zhao Bing first called upon his fellow townsman Chen Jianhua and another person named Zhao Yangzhou, driving a small car and riding a motorcycle to scout out the areas in Dayawan, Huizhou, where Huijian frequently appeared. Then Zhao Bing and Chen Jianhua brought in four more people: Tao Tengfei, Liu Shuailing, Lü Hongliang, and Song Haijun. All four of these people were from Minquan County, Henan, with very low education levels, having only completed elementary school or vocational school. Once the manpower was gathered, Zhao Bing raised the price from 300,000 RMB to 1 million RMB with the Major. They also specially bought a car for backup and another mobile phone used solely for contacting regarding this matter.

In early November, the Major deployed another group of people on Telegram, led by a man named Cao Dong from Chengkou County, Chongqing. The Major divided the work between the two sides: Cao Dong was responsible for capturing the person, and Zhao Bing was responsible for the interrogation. Cao Dong's side also had their own team. He spent his own money to buy two cars: a white Honda and a white Odyssey. One was registered under the name of his subordinate Mu Junjie, and the other under the name of his subordinate Chen Yuting. He also recruited three other people: Tao Yougen from Chongqing, Xie Jinlong from Heilongjiang, and Yu Wenliang from Jilin. By this time, revolving around just Wu Kai, more than a dozen people from five provinces—Henan, Chongqing, Guangxi, Heilongjiang, and Jilin—had mobilized. Most of them had only attended elementary or middle school, and the two factions might not have known each other. The person who gathered them together was the same individual, who was overseas, and none of them had ever met him, knowing him only by his online alias, "Major."

Around 3 p.m. on Sunday, November 10, 2024, in Aotou Street, Dayawan Economic and Technological Development Zone, Huizhou, just as Huijian had parked his car and opened the trunk to get something, three men under Cao Dong, who were responsible for the kidnapping, walked up, claimed to be police officers, and forced Huijian into the white Odyssey. Seated with Zhao Bing, Huijian was tied up as soon as he got into the car. Around 4 p.m. that afternoon, at the Minquan County People's Hospital in Henan, over a thousand kilometers away, Chen Jianhua, under Zhao Bing, received a cash payment of 1 million RMB, which was sent by the Major through someone else. It is clear that delivering the goods upon receiving the payment was very efficient; just an hour after Huijian was taken away, the money had already arrived. Around 6 p.m., the car stopped on a hillside in Huidong County. Zhao Bing began to interrogate Huijian according to the Major's demands and used Huijian's mobile phone to delete the articles on his official account. Afterward, Huijian's mobile phone was handed over to a person named Xie Yihui, whom the Major had arranged to pick up the phone. The court ruling stated that he was at large and would be handled in a separate case. Next, Tao Tengfei, under Cao Dong, drove Zhao Bing and Wu Kai all the way north to Heyuan City, where they switched to another backup white Honda. Along the way, Zhao Bing buried Huijian's car keys in a flower bed in a square in Heyuan, sent the location to the Major, and the Major sent someone to handle Huijian's own car. Meanwhile, the interrogation of Huijian continued, but the Major was not satisfied. He believed that Huijian was not telling the truth and still had not confessed who his mastermind was, so the interrogation continued. Because the Major repeatedly reported that Huijian was lying and told Zhao Bing to beat Huijian, Zhao Bing repeatedly punched and kicked Huijian. This was a remote-controlled interrogation: the person doing the beating, Zhao Bing, was on a hillside in Guangdong, while the Major on the other end of the phone was directing Zhao Bing to beat Huijian. On the afternoon of November 11, Zhao Bing used the car sent by Cao Dong's side to take Huijian away from Guangdong, drove him into a mountain in Jiangxi, and led him into a patch of grass. Only Zhao Bing and Huijian were left on the mountain, and Zhao Bing delivered heavy blows to Huijian's head and neck. Huijian fell to the ground and lost consciousness. Zhao Bing took a photo and sent it to the Major. After dark, Zhao Bing pulled dead grass to cover Huijian's body, walked down the mountain, and was picked up by an accomplice. The two drove all the way back to Henan. Of the 1 million RMB, Zhao Bing divided 400,000 RMB, Chen Jianhua took 300,000 RMB, and the drivers Tao Tengfei, Song Haijun, and Lü Hongliang each received 100,000 RMB, exactly splitting the total. At noon on November 13, a villager discovered Huijian on the mountain. Subsequent forensic appraisal opinions concluded that he died of intracranial hemorrhage caused by head and facial injuries, and some experts opined that he had pre-existing hypertension, which contributed to a certain extent to his death and was considered a secondary cause. The fact that a person who had been tied up and beaten for two days had his own blood pressure counted among the causes of death is somewhat absurd in itself. Based on Global People magazine's estimation in 2012 that he was 38 years old, he was about 50 years old when he was murdered.

Huijian is dead, but this matter is not over. According to a report by Jiemian News, a few days after the murder, someone deliberately transferred 110,000 yuan into Huijian's Alipay account and then used a screenshot of this transfer to spread rumors across overseas online channels, concocting a narrative that Huijian had been taken away by the police for human trafficking, extortion, and tax evasion. Why spread such rumors online? One explanation is that Huijian had hundreds of thousands of followers, and if his account suddenly stopped updating for a long period, people would inevitably ask questions; the killers could fool everyone by framing the victim's disappearance as an arrest. This rumor was actually cut from the same cloth as the scene where Huijian was snatched in the parking lot. The three people who forced Huijian into the car claimed to be police officers; even if someone in the parking lot saw it, they would have assumed the police were taking someone away, which perfectly aligned with the online rumor that Huijian had been taken by the police. My deduction is that this cover story had already been planned before Wu Kai was taken away. This rumor was indeed effective, and it was consistent with the stance in Liu Ren's stern statement about holding the whistleblower legally accountable. To many, the arrest of an online promoter involved in extortion seemed logical, especially since Huijian had indeed been portrayed by state media in 2012 as someone who became famous through hype and ran overpriced training classes. How effective was it? There is an example: on June 30 of this year, more than three weeks after Liu Ren was caught, Jiemian News published that piece titled "Liu Ren's Invisibility Cloak." This investigation specifically mentioned that Huijian had reported Liu Ren, and the article also included a line stating that Jiemian News had contacted Huijian through multiple channels but received no response. The caption for the accompanying image read: "In 2024, Liu Ren was publicly reported for the first time; the whistleblower, Huijian, is currently out of contact." In other words, by this summer, even the media outlet that had done the deepest reporting on this topic in the country did not find Huijian's disappearance suspicious, because the extortion narrative had already been raised.

Within the state apparatus, however, this matter was never a secret. By mid-November 2024, public security organs had already arrested those who illegally detained Huijian, and by December 2025, these individuals had already been tried and sentenced. From the time Huijian died in November 2024 to today, when the outside world learned the truth, nearly two years had passed. During these two years, no one came forward to correct the claim that Huijian was arrested for extortion. On November 14, the day after Huijian was found, Zhao Bing and Tao Tengfei fled to Cao County, Shandong, with a woman named Guo Gege. Born in 1992 and a native of Tongguan, Shaanxi, Guo Gege was working in Cao County. Following Zhao Bing's instructions, she used someone else's ID card to rent an apartment for the two of them, and specifically went to the neighboring Dongming County to insert and then remove Zhao Bing and Tao Tengfei's SIM cards to create the false impression that the two had appeared in Dongming County. The three also hid together in Guo Gege's hometown in Shaanxi. None of these methods worked. Starting from November 14, the police successively made arrests in Hunan, Shenzhen, Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Minquan, Henan; some people also turned themselves in voluntarily. Chen Jianhua rented a car and hid around Shuyang, Jiangsu, but was eventually caught. On November 29, the last person, Lü Hongliang, surrendered. It took nineteen days from the time Huijian was forced into the car until the last domestic participant was brought to justice. Every person on this domestic chain was caught, but this chain extended to two ends overseas: one end was Xie Yihui, who took Huijian's mobile phone—as we mentioned, the court ruling states he is currently a fugitive—and the other end was the Major who issued the mission, provided the money, and remotely directed Zhao Bing to beat Huijian. During the second trial, Guo Gege's defense attorney argued that the facts of her harboring crime were unclear and the evidence insufficient. The court's opinion was that she had personally watched Chen Jianhua distribute large amounts of cash to Zhao Bing and Tao Tengfei, and had followed Zhao Bing's instructions to rent an apartment using someone else's ID and travel to another county to insert and remove SIM cards. In her own confession, she also stated multiple times that she felt something was wrong. A mentally mature adult should have known in such circumstances that the other party had committed a crime. The court held Guo Gege fully accountable, but to this day, it has not provided a name for the Major who placed the order from overseas.

On December 29, 2025, the Huizhou Intermediate People's Court issued its first-instance verdict. Zhao Bing was convicted of intentional injury and sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, with lifelong deprivation of political rights. Tao Tengfei, Song Haijun, and Lü Hongliang were convicted of intentional injury and sentenced to 8 years, 6 years and 6 months, and 5 years and 6 months, respectively. The remaining eight people were convicted of illegal detention, with sentences ranging from 1 year and 4 months to 2 years and 6 months. Guo Gege was convicted of harboring and sentenced to 1 year and 3 months.

Judging from these sentences, they were instigated by overseas individuals and received a total of 1 million yuan, not counting the money for the Honda and Odyssey vehicles. They treated human life like dirt, yet received such light sentences. Furthermore, that expert consultation opinion even counted Huijian's own hypertension as a secondary cause of death. According to Guangdong's sentencing rules, if the consequences of an injury are caused by multiple factors, the punishment can be mitigated. Whether the court reduced anyone's sentence because of this is not apparent from the excerpts of the ruling, but from then on, a new claim appeared in the case files: the person did not die entirely because of the beating; his own blood pressure was also to blame.

Among these individuals, the heaviest sentence was given to Zhao Bing, a suspended death sentence. However, considering the severity of his crime, it does not feel overly harsh. A detail here is that after the incident, Zhao Bing's mother, Li Hongzhi, raised 500,000 yuan and paid it to Wu Bingnan, the only relative of Hui Jian. This Wu Bingnan was an adopted son of Hui Jian's parents, meaning he had no blood relationship with Hui Jian. His son, Wu Zhengjie, was entrusted to accept the money and issued a criminal settlement agreement on December 18, 2025. The court of first instance did not recognize this settlement agreement, on the grounds that the signatory was not within the scope of close relatives stipulated by the Criminal Procedure Law. Hui Jian, who lost his life for this cause, had no relative in the legal sense after his death who could speak for him regarding forgiveness or lack thereof.

Zhao Bing, Tao Tengfei, Song Haijun, Cao Dong, Chen Yuting, Mu Junjie, and Guo Gege refused to accept the verdict and filed an appeal. During the second trial, Zhao Bing's defense counsel raised several points of doubt, discovering fresh scratch marks on the stones on the road at the scene, tire tracks nearby, and an Yibao mineral water bottle in the ditch on the west side of the road, which only contained Hui Jian's DNA. Coupled with the fact that the 'Major' had once told Zhao Bing that he had arranged for others to come and take over, the defense argued that it could not be ruled out that a third person had contact with Hui Jian after Zhao Bing left. Therefore, Zhao Bing only had the intent of detention and should be convicted of illegal detention resulting in death, with a sentence of more than 10 years in prison instead of the current suspended death sentence. If these doubts are true, they point to a more unsettling possibility: perhaps someone else had been on that mountain after Zhao Bing left.

The procuratorate disagreed. The prosecution believed that while Zhao Bing's initial purpose in accepting the overseas mission was indeed detention and interrogation, he repeatedly used violence far exceeding what was necessary for detention during the process. In particular, the blow to Wu Kai's head and neck on the mountaintop directly caused fatal craniocerebral injury. Moreover, he knew clearly that Wu Kai was already in a coma and in critical condition, yet he provided no rescue, instead covering him up and leaving him on the barren mountain, cutting off any possibility of his survival. Zhao Bing had an attitude of indifference toward the result of death. The prosecution also specifically emphasized that this was a deliberate cross-provincial violent crime derived from overseas telecommunications fraud, aimed at suppressing grassroots anti-fraud personnel.

The second-instance court did not accept those doubts, reasoning that Zhao Bing did not raise any objections when identifying the scene photos during the investigation stage, and the evidence in the case could not prove that a third party was involved in the harm. The court's characterization was that Zhao Bing's beating of the victim was to obtain the truth as the 'Major' believed, and was a lesson to the victim, not a means of detention, thus constituting the crime of intentional injury. Regarding the 500,000 yuan and the settlement agreement, the second-instance court went further: the victim was targeted for kidnapping and injury by an illegal organization because he continuously published articles on his official account exposing telecommunications fraud in northern Myanmar. This crime against anti-fraud personnel has serious social harm and should be punished strictly according to the law; it cannot be treated leniently just because money was paid and a settlement was reached.

On August 12, 2026, the Guangdong Provincial High People's Court made a second-instance ruling, rejecting all appeals and upholding the original verdict. In this ruling, the court explicitly referred to Hui Jian as an 'anti-fraud activist.' At this point, it had been one year and nine months since he was left on the barren mountain.

Now back to the question: who is the 'Major'? The court did not say. All that can be found in the ruling is what he did: posting a bounty on Telegram providing Wu Kai's address, photos, and license plate; providing 1 million yuan in cash to assign two groups of people to remotely determine whether Wu Kai was telling the truth; ordering the beating; receiving photos of Wu Kai after he was beaten unconscious; and arranging for people to take away the mobile phone and dispose of the vehicle. Putting these things together, here is my deduction: the 'Major' does not seem like someone who only issues orders from overseas. One hour after Hui Jian was taken away, 1 million yuan in cash was delivered to a hospital in Minquan County, Henan; the person who delivered the money was arranged by him. On the hillside in Huidong, Xie Yihui, sent by him, was waiting to take the mobile phone. Zhao Bing buried the car keys in a flower bed in Heyuan and sent the location to him, and Hui Jian's car was then disposed of by him. He had mastered Hui Jian's address, photos, and license plate in advance. That an anonymous person overseas could obtain the address and license plate of a Chinese citizen, could mobilize 1 million yuan in cash in Henan at any time, and could dispatch people to take over in Guangdong at any time, indicates that he has a network in China. Either someone sold him Hui Jian's personal information, or he already had his own people in the country. Who this network is, the ruling does not say a single word.

The ruling also did not write about the relationship between the 'Major' and Liu Ren. However, Jiemian News put several things together: during the period before his death, Hui Jian had only exposed Liu Ren, and the task the 'Major' gave Zhao Bing was precisely to force the person behind the official account to delete the articles. Before this, Liu Ren's side had asked someone to offer a price for him to delete the posts, and people under Liu Ren had also inquired about his address in China while in Cambodia. The story that circulated after his death—that he was arrested for extortion—was consistent with the stance in Liu Ren's statement about pursuing legal responsibility for the whistleblower.

Turning back to Liu Ren, according to Jiemian News, after Chen Zhi was captured, Liu Ren once left Cambodia, but thinking the spotlight had passed, he sneaked back to Phnom Penh, intending to quickly sell off the building and mines before fleeing. Arrested on June 5, he was handed over to the Chinese police by the Cambodian side on June 10. On June 17, the Ministry of Public Security issued an announcement stating that Liu Ren was a key backbone of the Chen Zhi criminal syndicate, and besides online gambling and telecom fraud, he was also suspected of serious violent crimes such as illegal detention and intentional injury. Whether the illegal detention and intentional injury listed by the Ministry of Public Security are related to the Huizhou case has not been explained in any way by the official authorities to this day.

Lao An, a long-time friend of Huijian—the very person who said that Liu Ren's subordinates had inquired about Huijian's address—told Jiemian News: now that Liu Ren is back, it proves that everything Huijian reported was true.

There is a noteworthy detail here. Between November 2024, a dozen or so people were all arrested within 19 days. Zhao Bing's mobile phone, the cash obtained by Chen Jianhua, and the chat records on YeeChat were all in the hands of the police. It was not difficult to figure out who Huijian's deleted set of articles was written about. However, before Liu Ren was escorted back to China, we could not find any public reports about this case, nor any official notices from the court or the police. According to overseas media reports, just days before his arrest, Liu Ren was still receiving domestic government and enterprise inspection delegations on the top floor of the Huangshan International Building in his capacity as the president of the Chamber of Commerce. It wasn't until four months after Liu Ren's arrest, when Jiemian News obtained the ruling document, that this matter entered the public eye.

In a case involving 14 defendants and one suspended death sentence, not a single piece of news was leaked from the filing of the case to the second instance for nearly two years. The official authorities gave no explanation for the reason. I believe the first reason is the system. Fewer and fewer documents are being published on China Judgments Online. According to Beijing News statistics, there were 19.2 million documents published online in 2020, dropping to 14.9 million in 2021, dropping to 10.4 million in 2022, and only 5.11 million by late December 2023. The official explanation is that risk reviews have been tightened since July 2021. A case involving an overseas telecom fraud syndicate is hard to pass through this review, so this ruling document was not found by the outside world on the judgments website, but obtained by Jiemian News through certain channels.

The second layer is Liu Ren's identity. As soon as this case is made public, people will immediately notice that during his lifetime Huijian only ever reported one person, and that was Liu Ren. Liu Ren is an overseas member of the Anhui Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, who has entertained domestic officials year-round and is a target for the United Front work to win over. Before Beijing decided to move against Liu Ren, making this case public would have been tantamount to saddling a United Front target with the suspicion of procuring a murder, and tantamount to admitting that domestic police could do nothing about him, because the clues regarding the major were overseas, and to investigate further would require Cambodia's cooperation, whereas at that time Liu Ren still had people protecting him in Phnom Penh.

The third layer is the timing. Liu Ren was arrested in June, and the Ministry of Public Security's announcement specifically stated that he was suspected of illegal detention and intentional injury. If the Huijian case and the Liu Ren case are indeed related, making the case details public before Liu Ren's arrival and the acquisition of his confession would only tip off those still at large.

The fourth layer is the narrative. A grassroots anti-fraud blogger who died domestically while facing an overseas bounty, if publicized in 2024, tells a story about a state that cannot protect whistleblowers. If publicized in October 2026, with Liu Ren already in a detention center, it becomes a story of the government achieving brilliant results in cracking down on telecom fraud. The same case made public two years later has an entirely different meaning.

Liu Ren did not fall alone; ahead of him were two other people. Chen Zhi, the boss of Prince Group, was born in Lianjiang, Fujian in 1987, acquired Cambodian nationality in 2014, was appointed as an advisor to the Cambodian Ministry of Interior in 2017 with the rank of deputy secretary of state, and in 2020 became a personal advisor to Hun Sen and received the title of Oknha. In fact, Beijing police had set their sights on this group very early on. In mid-2019, China and Cambodia established a joint law enforcement office. According to Chinese court judgments reviewed by Radio Free Asia, in May 2020 the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau established the 527 Special Investigation Team specifically to handle the Prince Group transnational online gambling criminal syndicate case. Over the next two or three years, courts in at least seven provinces sentenced a batch of low-level employees of the Prince Group and affiliated companies on charges of operating casinos and money laundering. A judgment from Henan directly wrote Jinbei Group as a subsidiary of Prince Group. Sichuan's Wangcang County Court estimated in 2022 that Prince Group had earned more than 5 billion RMB from illegal gambling since 2016. Jinbei Group was the company founded in 2016 by Chen Zhi, Liu Ren, and others, as later announced by the Ministry of Public Security.

However, in China, Prince Group itself and Chen Zhi have never been prosecuted. In the years following the establishment of the special investigation team, Liu Ren continued to serve as his chamber of commerce president, bearing the title of overseas political consultative committee member while hosting domestic inspection delegations batch after batch. The turning point happened in the United States.

In October 2025, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York indicted Chen Zhi on charges of wire fraud and money laundering, while confiscating approximately 1.27 million bitcoins under his control. Valued at about 15 billion U.S. dollars at the time, this was the largest virtual asset seizure in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice. Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Treasury designated the Prince Group as a transnational criminal organization and issued 146 sanctions targets. The UK froze his luxury mansion and office buildings in London, and Singapore froze 1.5 billion Singapore dollars in assets. About three months after the U.S. action, on January 7, 2026, Chen Zhi was escorted from Phnom Penh onto a flight bound for China. The following day, the Ministry of Public Security issued an announcement stating that Chen Zhi was sent back to China rather than the United States, which had indicted him. How he is tried in China, what is brought to light, and what is made public will be decided by Beijing.

On January 15, the Ministry of Public Security issued a notice urging fugitive members of the Chen Zhi Group to surrender themselves before February 15. On March 31, the King of Cambodia signed a decree revoking Li Xiong's Cambodian citizenship. The next day, on April 1, Li Xiong was escorted back to China. Li Xiong is the chairman of the Huione Group. In May 2025, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the U.S. Department of the Treasury determined that the Huione Group had laundered at least 4 billion U.S. dollars in illicit funds between August 2021 and January 2025. The Cambodian Ministry of Interior stated that the arrest of Li Xiong was made at the request of the Chinese side, and he was handed over on the same day. On June 5, it was Liu Ren's turn.

Putting the sequence of the capture of these three individuals together, the relationship between the telecom fraud syndicates and the Chinese Communist Party becomes very clear. These syndicates did not grow outside of Beijing's sight; Beijing's police established a special investigation case as early as 2020, and courts in seven provinces sentenced their low-level employees, with the judgments clearly stating the relationship between Jinbei and Prince. During the same period, Liu Ren, the founder of Jinbei, bearing the title of an overseas CPPCC member, was received as a United Front target and investment bridge for officials and businessmen coming from the mainland. For Beijing, overseas Chinese leaders are resources that need to be courted; as long as they do not touch political red lines, what they do in Cambodia can be overlooked for a while. What made Beijing determined to close the net on the top tier was the U.S. indictment, seizure, and sanctions.

Wu Kai did precisely what this system chose to overlook for a while. Huijian's life had many facets; he hyped Wang Shi's marital discord, ran exorbitant training courses, and was treated as a negative example by official media. Writing about what he did in his final years, it was a story of one person writing article after article to expose a telecom fraud boss who held a CPPCC member title, had hundreds of henchmen in Cambodia, and whom no media dared to touch. His parents died early, he never started a family, and for nearly two years after his disappearance, no one spoke up for him. The state apparatus finished handling the case internally, sentencing 14 people and assigning him the identity of an anti-fraud activist. The outside world learned of his death four months after the person he reported was put into a detention center. By then, his death could be written into the achievements of China-Cambodia law enforcement cooperation, becoming a footnote to the pledge that telecom fraud will not stop until it is completely eradicated.

An ordinary person who dares to touch someone whom even the state thinks twice about touching pays the price entirely by himself. The person who paid for his life still remains a virtual internet handle. That is all for today. If this episode is valuable to you, please give it a thumbs up.

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I am Yaoyaojiang, who loves thinking and values logic. See you in the next episode.