Yao Yao Jiang: What happened to Liu Fangfei after the Spring Festival Gala? Why did she become the most ill-fated host at CCTV?

This video reviews the life experiences of former CCTV Spring Festival Gala host Liu Fangfei. She was once investigated for her involvement in the bribery case of Wang Yi, former Vice President of the China Development Bank, and later married Hong Kong businessman Liu Xiyong. However, Liu Xiyong died in 2017 after being tortured during interrogation in Yanbian, Jilin; nine prosecutors involved in the case were later sentenced. After experiencing her husband's mysterious death, disputes over inheritance and debts, and her departure from CCTV, Liu Fangfei has now turned to producing and hosting the cultural program "Fangfei's Journey of Civilization."

Video link:

Full text:

Hello everyone, I am Yao Yao Jiang, who loves to think and values logic. Today is the Western Halloween. On the streets of New York tonight, there will be many monsters and ghosts appearing. I'm going to join in the fun, and here, I wish you all a Happy Halloween! On the morning of September 7, 2018, a woman sat in the public gallery of the Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate People's Court. She was wearing a white dress with a black coat over it, holding a portrait in her arms. According to those present at the time, the nine defendants were brought in one by one, and every time one entered, she would stand up and hold the portrait high. This woman is Liu Fangfei, who has hosted the CCTV Spring Festival Gala three times. The man in the portrait is her husband, Liu Xiyong. A year and a half earlier, he had been interrogated for four days by these nine prosecutors in Yanbian, Jilin, and died in the interrogation chair. This is not the first time Liu Fangfei has been dragged into a case because of a man. Eight years ago, she had also loved another man who was sentenced to death with a reprieve. How could a woman who once stood on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala have such a bitter fate? The story begins with a little girl from Changchun.

Compatriots in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, compatriots in the Xiamen Special Administrative Region, greetings to our compatriots in Taiwan, overseas Chinese, and all sons and daughters of the Chinese nation around the world. On October 10, 1977, Liu Fangfei was born in Tongliao, Inner Mongolia. Later, her family moved to Changchun, Jilin, where she grew up. According to widespread accounts, Liu Fangfei came from an intellectual family; both her grandfather and father were professors of Japanese literature, and students frequently visited their home to discuss poetry and literature. Fittingly, Liu Fangfei herself chose to study Japanese, enrolling in the Japanese Department of the School of Foreign Languages at Jilin University. In Changchun during the 1990s, studying Japanese was a very steady path; after graduation, one could enter Japanese-funded enterprises or work as a translator, ensuring a comfortable life. Yet Liu Fangfei did not take this path—she wanted to work in television. In 1999, upon graduating from university, she entered the News Center of Liaoning TV. Two years later, her big opportunity arrived. In 2001, CCTV hosted a national television program host competition. At that time, for young hosts at local stations wanting to enter CCTV, this was practically the only door, and people from all over the country rushed to register. Twenty-four-year-old Liu Fangfei also went, winning the Excellence Award and the Audience Recommendation Award. Based on these two awards, Liu Fangfei entered the CCTV Social Education Center, hosting "Exploration and Discovery," where she talked about archaeology, history, and how dynasties rose and fell. A host for such programs could not try to steal the spotlight; they needed composure and an scholarly aura, and Liu Fangfei fit the bill. She looked dignified, spoke at a steady pace, and standing in front of the camera, she had the air of a scholar. In 2004, she transferred to the International Department of the CCTV Arts Center, hosting "International Arts" and "Film Club." Unlike other programs, the Arts Center was the liveliest place in CCTV because the Spring Festival Gala was produced there. Soon, Liu Fangfei stood on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. In 2006, 2007, and 2008, she served as a host for the CCTV Spring Festival Gala for three consecutive years. In those years, on New Year's Eve, hundreds of millions of people across the country watched television, and those few people on stage were the most-watched faces of the entire year. Audiences grouped Liu Fangfei together with Zhou Tao and Dong Qing, calling them the Three Golden Flowers of CCTV, and some said she would be Zhou Tao's successor. The people of Changchun regarded Liu Fangfei as the pride of their hometown. She became a member of the All-China Youth Federation, Vice Chairman of the Jilin Provincial Youth Federation, and later a member of the Jilin Provincial Committee of the CPPCC. A girl who came out of Changchun, relied on her own efforts to enter CCTV, and stepped by step made it to the Spring Festival Gala. At this time, Liu Fangfei was around thirty years old, and from all appearances, she had everything.

Yet precisely during those years when her career was sailing smoothly, she fell in love with a man. This man was Wang益 (Wang Yi), twenty-one years her senior and the vice president of the China Development Bank. Wang Yi was from Yunnan, of Bai ethnicity, and from an ordinary family. In 1978, the second year after the resumption of the gaokao, she entered the History Department of Peking University, studying all the way through graduate school. After graduation, she entered the General Office of the Central Advisory Commission. The Central Advisory Commission was established at the 12th National Congress of the CCP in 1982, with Deng Xiaoping serving as chairman, later followed by Chen Yun. Nominally, it allowed the veteran generation of the founding era to step down from frontline positions and serve as advisors to the center, but these veterans usually did not completely retire; major affairs of the party and the state were still consulted with them, and most of the time, they still had the final say. In 1987, Hu Yaobang resigned as General Secretary, and the CCP...

Older people played a major role on the scene. A young man who had just graduated entered the station and dealt with the people around these veterans every day, which was equivalent to standing at the very core of power right from the start. At the age of 29, Wang Yi became a secretary for the CCP, a position he held for 7 years. In 1992, Chinese ministries and commissions were abolished, and 36-year-old Wang Yi became the deputy director of the office of the State Council Securities Commission. At that time, China's stock market was just starting out, and the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges had only been open for a few years, with many rules yet to be established. After working at the securities commission for less than a year, he went to Hainan to do business while retaining his official post. More than two years later, his business failed, and he returned to Beijing. In November 1995, 39-year-old Wang Yi served as the vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, in charge of stock issuance and funds. In that era, whether a company could go public depended on passing through the CSRC's checkpoint, and the vice chairman in charge of issuance held the key to that very checkpoint. According to a later report by China Business Journal, Wang Yi was eloquent and arrogant in personality. Once, an economist said at a meeting that what Wang Yi analyzed was only the primary market, and Wang Yi immediately threw a tantrum, saying that regarding industry rules for securities, no one understood them better than he did. In February 1999, Wang Yi left the CSRC and was transferred to the China Development Bank as vice president. The CDB specialized in issuing loans for major national projects, such as building highways and power stations, and the money all came from here. The signature of a vice president involved loans of hundreds of millions or even billions of yuan, determining whether they could be approved. Reports said that he was not very happy at the CDB and was often depressed. Wang Yi later divorced his wife, and after the divorce, he and Liu Fangfei got together. How did the two of them meet? There is a claim online that they met at an event in 2002, but no reliable source can be found for this. What can be confirmed is that they truly loved each other for a time, reaching the point of discussing marriage. An insider revealed that the two of them had been together for several years, and Liu Fangfei was Wang Yi's official girlfriend. They even went back to Wang Yi's hometown in Yunnan together to see the historical sites there. Colleagues at CCTV later recalled that the two had genuine feelings for each other, but this marriage ultimately did not happen. According to Liu Fangfei's later testimony, Wang Yi's family disagreed, while online rumors were more specific, saying that Wang Yi's son was the most strongly opposed. Around 2006, the two broke up. That year, Liu Fangfei stood on the CCTV New Year's Gala stage for the first time, reaching the peak of her career, while her relationship ended at this very time. There was also one incident at the time of the breakup: Liu Fangfei bought a house in Beijing and had to pay a mortgage of more than 10,000 yuan every month. Wang Yi had a Hong Kong businessman named Li Tao provide 2 million yuan to pay off her mortgage. Reports said that Wang Yi might have done this because he felt guilty towards her, and Liu Fangfei accepted the money. After the breakup, the two never contacted each other again. Liu Fangfei could not have imagined at that time that 4 years later, this sum of 2 million yuan would be written into a criminal judgment.

Liu Fangfei's name was first linked to this matter in the spring of 2008. On April 29 of that year, Wei Dong, the boss of the Yongjin Group, died unexpectedly at his home in Beijing. Wei Dong was known in the stock market as the last of the big players, and his death caused a great stir in the financial circles. Shortly after Wei Dong's death, a post appeared online claiming that his death was related to a corruption case involving a president of the China Development Bank. The post alleged that Wei Dong had introduced female celebrities to this president as a form of disguised bribery, and that Liu Fangfei had been introduced to the president by Liang Yongbin. Consequently, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) began an investigation into Liu Fangfei. However, this post provided no evidence; it just spread rapidly. At that time, Liu Fangfei had just finished hosting her third CCTV Spring Festival Gala and was thirty years old. She posted a statement on her blog, writing: 'I have been raised with strict discipline since childhood. Since then, whether in my studies, work, or daily life, I have upheld the basic principles of being a person and have never been involved in any immoral emotional entanglements.' She also stated that her income was sufficient to support herself and that she had no extravagant desire for money. In the same year, someone else made an issue of her attending a gathering, and she had to come out again to explain that it was a gathering of friends for a disaster relief gala. More than a month later, Wang Yi, the vice president of the China Development Bank, really did get into trouble. In June 2008, Wang Yi was taken away by a special investigation team of the CCDI and subsequently placed under 'shuanggui'. 'Shuanggui' is an investigative measure within the CCP, requiring the person under investigation to confess their problems at a specified time and place. Once a cadre is placed under 'shuanggui', it basically means they are in trouble. In January 2009, Wang Yi was arrested on suspicion of bribery, and a month later, he was expelled from the Party and dismissed from his public office. On March 30, 2010, Wang Yi's case went to trial at the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court. Wang Yi did not hire a lawyer and pleaded guilty in court. He said these matters were true, stating: 'This was me using my direct power and influence beyond my power to seek benefits for others, and I also received benefits.' In the court, the testimony read out included the names of two female celebrities. One was Zhao Wei. The briber, Li Tao, said that when he opened a department store in Shenzhen, Wang Yi brought Zhao Wei to the opening ceremony, and Li Tao gave Zhao Wei 300,000 yuan as an appearance fee. Zhao Wei's agent immediately responded that they did not know Wang Yi at all, nor did they know any Li Tao, and that it was just an ordinary commercial activity. This Li Tao was the Hong Kong businessman who had paid off the mortgage for Liu Fangfei back then. He had contracted a highway project in Hunan and obtained bank loans through Wang Yi, giving Wang Yi a total of 5.38 million yuan over time. When Wang Yi took his children to the United States for the Chinese New Year, Li Tao gave the children 'lucky money' of 10,000 US dollars at once. By this time, it was clear where those 2 million yuan came from. Liu Fangfei did not appear in court; at the request of the prosecution, she only wrote a written testimony. In her testimony, she admitted that she had indeed dated Wang Yi and also acknowledged receiving the 2 million yuan. A detail was also mentioned in court: after Wang Yi was investigated, he asked Liu Fangfei to return the 2 million yuan to Li Tao, plus an additional 40,000 yuan in interest. Liu Fangfei complied with all of this and returned the money in full. Liu Fangfei's testimony matched Li Tao's, and the prosecution relied on these two testimonies to determine that the 2 million yuan was a bribe received by Wang Yi. The day after the trial began, Liu Fangfei's name appeared in the headlines of major websites. The post from two years ago was dug up again. Facing reporters, she said nothing. The International Department of the CCTV Art Center told reporters that Liu Fangfei was working as usual and that the three programs she hosted were not affected. Veteran host Zhao Zhongxiang also stood up and said that his colleagues would stand by her side. On April 15, 2010, the first-instance verdict was announced. The court determined that Wang Yi had accepted bribes totaling 11.96 million yuan and sentenced him to death with a two-year reprieve. The bribes recognized in the verdict included the 2 million yuan used to pay off Liu Fangfei's mortgage. In this case, Liu Fangfei was only a witness and was not held accountable for any responsibility. However, online, many people did not see it that way. She was called a 'gold digger' and said to have climbed the ladder by relying on corrupt officials. When she was with Wang Yi, Wang Yi's case had not yet been exposed. It was only two years after they broke up that Wang Yi got into trouble, but those who scolded her did not care about that; they only remembered one thing: that she had once dated a corrupt official. From 2009 onwards, Liu Fangfei's name never appeared on the list of Spring Festival Gala hosts again. She remained at CCTV and continued to host programs, but she left that most prominent position. The year Wang Yi was sentenced, Liu Fangfei was thirty-two years old. She probably thought this page had finally been turned.

According to rumors circulating online, in 2012, Liu Fangfei met a Hong Kong businessman at a banquet. Having experienced the Wang Yi affair, she was initially cautious, but the other party was very patient and accompanied her for more than two years. Around 2014, the two got married. As for how they specifically met, there are several versions online, such as charity events or being introduced by friends, but none have a reliable source. This man's name is Liu Xing, and his English name is Steven. Coincidentally, he is about the same age as Wang Yi and also more than twenty years older than Liu Fangfei.

Liu Xiyong's ancestral home is Fuzhou, Fujian. He later became a permanent resident of Hong Kong and made his fortune in the clothing business in the mainland during his early years. According to circulating accounts, in the late 1970s, he was among the first batch of mainland students to study abroad at his own expense, and he even went to Harvard University in the United States for further studies. In 1995, he spent HK$1.9 billion to buy the Junyi Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong.

Tsim Sha Tsui is the busiest place in Kowloon, where shopping malls, hotels, and tourists are all crowded together. The Junyi Hotel has 21 floors with 546 guest rooms, and there is also an underground shopping mall. Liu Xiyong held this hotel through a company called Yisheng Enterprise and managed it himself. He had a certain weight in the Hong Kong business community and was a close friend of Nina Wang, the chairwoman of the Chinachem Group. Nina Wang was once the richest woman in Asia, and her husband, Teddy Wang, was kidnapped twice, never returning after the second time. Later, Nina Wang fought a sensational inheritance lawsuit against her father-in-law in Hong Kong. According to reports from the South China Morning Post, Liu Xiyong also contributed to this lawsuit, and he had dealings with the mainland officialdom as well. According to a column article by Radio Free Asia, in the late 1990s, when Zhu Xiaohua, the chairman of the Everbright Group, was involved in a case,

Liu Xiyong was implicated and was held in disguised detention by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection for a period of time before being released. For this matter, we only have one source and have not found any other corroboration. After Liu Fangfei married Liu Xiyong, she lived a stable life for a few years; she was still a CCTV host and a member of the Jilin Provincial Committee of the CPPCC. As early as 2012, she launched a public welfare project called the "Fangfei Green Handkerchief Plan," encouraging everyone to use handkerchiefs instead of paper towels to cut down fewer trees. She has been doing this small thing for more than ten years. However, the man she married ran into trouble in his business. In April 2013, a company called Baochuan Chuangfu lent Liu Xiyong some

HK$500 million for a term of one year. When the year was up, Liu Xiyong had not paid it back in full. In the autumn of 2015, the trouble was brought to the surface. On November 5, 2015, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) of Hong Kong issued an announcement charging Liu Xiyong, the owner of the Junyi Hotel, with three counts of fraud. The ICAC stated that from February to April 2010, Liu Xiyong borrowed money from Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (Asia) Limited in three installments—this is a subsidiary of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in Hong Kong. The three loans were for HK$20 million, HK$80 million, and HK$100 million, totaling HK$200 million.

Liu told the bank that this money was only used to renovate the hotel and had already been paid to an architectural design company, but the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) believed these were all lies. There was another sentence in the announcement: this case was uncovered after the ICAC received a corruption complaint. So who filed the complaint? The announcement did not say. Liu Xirong paid HKD 100,000 in bail to be released, waiting in court in Hong Kong. The bail conditions did not prohibit him from leaving Hong Kong, so he continued his business. The debt-collecting security guard Chuangfu later stated in court that in May 2016, they were still able to contact Liu Xiyong and his secretary, and then this person disappeared. According to a column article by Radio Free Asia, in September 2016, Liu Xiyong flew from Hong Kong to Beijing and was taken away by mainland police immediately upon landing at the airport, after which his whereabouts became unknown. There were also reports that the time of his disappearance was November 2016. The author of that column also speculated that the people who took Liu away at the airport were subordinates of Sun Lijun, who was with the Ministry of Public Security at the time. Sun Lijun later became the Vice Minister of Public Security and was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in 2022 for crimes including accepting bribes. Whether there is any connection between these two events remains without any public evidence to this day. A permanent resident of Hong Kong was taken away in Beijing, and the Hong Kong government has no jurisdiction over mainland law enforcement. Which department took him away? For what reason? Where is he detained? There is no official statement whatsoever. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, his fraud case was still waiting for him to return for trial, but he did not return, and the court issued an arrest warrant. In the eyes of many Hong Kong people, Liu Xiyong became a businessman who jumped bail and fled. According to subsequent reports, Liu Xiyong was first detained in Beijing and then transferred to Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province in March 2017. Yanbian is in the easternmost part of Jilin, separated from North Korea only by the Tumen River. Why did a Hong Kong businessman have to be escorted to the China-North Korea border to stand trial? According to that column article, this case was assigned by the Supreme People's Procuratorate to the Yanbian Procuratorate for handling. In judicial terms, this is called designated jurisdiction, where a higher-level procuratorate can hand over a case to a place that originally has no jurisdiction over it. So why Yanbian of all places? To this day, no one has been able to explain clearly. Liu Fangfei grew up in Jilin and was even a member of the Jilin Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Her husband was escorted to her hometown of Jilin, and the column author believed this may not have had any direct connection to her. The charge given to Liu by the Yanbian Procuratorate was suspected bribery. So, who did Liu bribe? And how much money did he bribe? Because there is no public information, the Hong Kong South China Morning Post later quoted a legal professional as saying that no one knows why Liu was arrested and why he was tried. From the time Liu Xiyong was taken away in Beijing to March 2017, several months passed. During these months, did Liu Fangfei know where her husband was? Who else had she looked for? She herself has never publicly stated. We only know that at that time she was still working at CCTV. On March 15, 2017, the Yanbian Procuratorate established a nine-member special task force to take over Liu Xiyong's case. However, four days later, Liu Xiyong died.

What happened in the four days before Liu's death? It was later written into the procuratorate's indictment. The British Financial Times has seen this indictment, and the following details all come from the Financial Times report. After taking over, the special task force subjected Liu Xiyong to residential surveillance at a designated location. This name sounds very mild; according to the law, residential surveillance is originally a lighter measure than detention, meaning the person does not have to enter a detention center, but a designated location is a completely different matter. The person is not at home, but taken to a place chosen by the handling authorities, which could be a hotel, a training center, or even a specially renovated house. The Criminal Procedure Law specifically stipulates that this place cannot be a detention center or a specialized handling venue, and that is precisely where the trouble lies. Detention centers have stationed prosecutors, surveillance, and interrogation registrations. There are records of when a person is taken out for interrogation and when they are brought back, and lawyers can also visit and family members can send items. But once at a designated location, all of these are completely gone. The person is in the hands of the handling personnel from morning to night, watching them, interrogating them, and deciding...

The same group of people handled how long he was there, while supervision was carried out by the very procuratorate that made the decision. Even if video recording equipment was installed in the room, it was controlled by the handling personnel. The law stipulates that family members must be notified within 24 hours, but for cases involving particularly major bribery, a lawyer still has to obtain permission from the handling authorities before they can see the person. The reality is that many people stay inside for months, with family members not knowing where they are, and lawyers even less able to see them. Some domestic legal scholars have referred to this method as

Super-custody means conditions even harsher than being locked in a detention center. Lawyers have specifically noted that such places are regulatory blind spots, objectively creating conditions for illegal case-handling and torture by framing, and making it very difficult to find objective evidence to reconstruct events if something happens inside. The 2012 revision of the Criminal Procedure Law included special provisions for residential surveillance at a designated location, which took effect in 2013. Safeguard Defenders, a human rights organization headquartered in Madrid, Spain, has long tracked this system. One of its founders, the Swede Peter Dahlin, was locked up this way in Beijing for over twenty days in 2016. According to the organization's statistics, from 2013 to 2021, at least 57,000 people were locked up in this manner, with some unable to see a lawyer for up to six months. Liu Xing was locked up in precisely such a place.

Liu Xing was blindfolded and tied to an interrogation chair with his legs raised high. To make him confess quickly, the seminary personnel used tape to cover his mouth, used keys to test his resolve, and used a toilet plunger to jab at his mouth and nose. Over four days, he was only allowed to return to his room to rest for two hours; for the rest of the time, he remained tied to that chair, and the interrogations were often conducted round-the-clock. In the early morning of March 19, 2017, the head of the special investigation team, prosecutor Xu Xuzhe, felt that Liu Xing was not answering questions directly. He grabbed Liu's hands, which were cuffed behind his back, and pulled upward with force, causing Liu's body to go limp and him to lose consciousness. Doctors from the interrogation center rushed over to perform emergency rescue efforts, but were unable to save him. The autopsy report stated that his sternum and ribs were fractured in seven places, and the cause of death was asphyxiation caused by factors such as pressure on the mouth and nose. The indictment also mentioned another detail: after he died, these prosecutors wanted to destroy all the video footage from the interrogation room. That year, Liu Xiyong was sixty years old, and the mainland did not announce his death. In April 2017, a court in Hong Kong held a hearing on his fraud case, and the defense seat was empty, which was when the news began to spread in Hong Kong. On April 21, Hong Kong's Apple Daily confirmed that Liu Xing had died in the mainland. Prior to that, on April 9, Liu Fangfei wrote the following on Weibo: "Have you ever had the feeling of hurting so much you couldn't breathe? Have you ever had the feeling of hurting so much you couldn't breathe and yet couldn't speak? Does it hurt at the moment your heart stops? Or do people whose hearts are still beating hurt more?" The next day, on April 10, she wrote another passage: "Hair turning white overnight in a single streak, only to realize there is no black and white in this world; often like white clouds providing rescue, only to see that the common people have their own clarity and turbidity." That year, Liu Fangfei was thirty-nine years old, and her friends later told the outside world that Liu Fangfei had seen her husband's remains and that her husband had been subjected to extremely cruel beatings before his death. The mainland issued a death certificate to Hong Kong, stating that Liu Xiyou had died on March 19, 2017, in Jilin Province, even though Yanji is the capital of Yanbian Prefecture. At the end of May, Liu Fangfei went to the Hong Kong High Court to apply to be a temporary estate administrator to handle her husband's funeral and property. A letter from the law firm was read in court, stating that Liu may have been murdered in the mainland by the people guarding him. Her husband was gone; would the people who beat him to death face punishment? She waited another year and a half.

In September 2018, the nine Yanbian prosecutors were put in the defendant's seat, though the case was not handled in Jilin Province, but transferred to Tianjin. On September 4, Liu Fangfei posted a Weibo about the trial, which, according to overseas media reports, was later deleted by Sina. On September 5, she reposted the Baidu Baike entry on the public trial, accompanied by a sentence: "Come, come, keep up with the situation, and be a law-abiding citizen." On September 6, her Weibo check-in location was set to Tianjin, and she wrote another passage: "The version of me you liked is actually something I never achieved until you left; only then did I understand what kind of life I should live, and only then did I truly become the version of me you liked best. At this moment, your price was your life, and my price is eternal pain. Written for you." The next morning, the Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate People's Court held a hearing. According to reports, during the hearing, Liu Fangfei posted another Weibo to inform everyone that her family member's criminal case was being publicly tried at the Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate Court.

In this Weibo post, he wrote a phrase often used by officials: "Strive to make the people feel fairness and justice in every judicial case." On that very same day, the propaganda department issued an order to various media outlets, which was later made public by China Digital Times. The original text read: "The case of the death of Liu Fangfei's husband, Liu Xiyong, due to torture in custody, will be heard in Tianjin today. Do not aggregate. Do not report. Do not comment. Do not repost." "Do not aggregate" was a directive specifically for news websites and news apps, which usually scrape reports from various sources and group them under a single topic. "Do not aggregate" meant they were forbidden from collecting such scattered news together, forbidden from creating a topic, and forbidden from letting it trend on search lists. Even if one or two pieces of information leaked out, they would not form a coherent narrative, and no one would notice. Therefore, almost no one in China knew that such a trial had taken place in Tianjin that day. All nine defendants were from Yanbian, Jilin. Eight were charged with torture to extract a confession, with two of them also charged with intentional injury. The remaining person was the deputy chief prosecutor in charge of the special investigation team, who was charged with dereliction of duty. Liu Fangfei sat in the public gallery, wearing a white dress and a black coat, holding her husband's portrait in her arms. According to a post by a Hong Kong media professional at the time, whenever none of the defendants were brought into the courtroom, she would stand up and hold the portrait high. A person in the gallery later said that after hearing the witnesses describe what happened before her husband's death, Liu Fangfei covered her face and cried for a long time. According to reports, she did not accept these charges; she believed it was murder and should have been treated as intentional homicide. The Criminal Law stipulates that if someone is beaten to death during torture to extract a confession, it can be charged as intentional homicide. The difference between intentional injury and intentional homicide lies in the fact that legal professionals did not recognize that these people had the intent to kill, so they charged them with intentional injury. The legal implication is that they only wanted to force him to confess and were too heavy-handed, resulting in his death. Liu Fangfei did not accept this explanation.

On October 23, 2018, the court delivered its verdict. The verdict was also not publicly reported, and the sentences mentioned by overseas media were not entirely consistent. According to the South China Morning Post, the team leader, Xu Xuezhe, was convicted of intentional injury and sentenced to 15 years in prison; Radio Free Asia stated it was 13 years. Another prosecutor, Zhou Qingyun, was convicted of intentional injury and sentenced to 11 years. The other six were convicted of torture to extract a confession and sentenced to terms ranging from 15 months to 3 years. Liu Bozhong, the deputy chief prosecutor of the Yanbian Procuratorate who led the special investigation team, was sentenced to 4 years for dereliction of duty. Such a result is rare in China. Nine prosecutors were sentenced for torture to extract a confession, which was equivalent to the state admitting that Liu Xiyong was beaten to death during the interrogation process. However, this verdict only answered one question: how did Liu Xiyong die? It still did not answer several other questions: why was Liu arrested in the first place? Who was he suspected of bribing? Why was a Hong Kong businessman sent to Yanbian for trial? Who made such a decision? To this day, there has been no official explanation for these questions. There are many rumors overseas about Liu Xiyong's background, saying he was a money manager for high-ranking officials and that his case involved some big figures who had already retired. We have not found any evidence for these claims. The only thing we can be sure of is that Liu Fangfei lost her husband and watched with her own eyes as the people who beat him to death were sentenced, but she never received an explanation as to why her husband was taken away in the first place.

Her husband was gone, but the matter was not over. After Liu Xiyong died, he left behind not only a hotel but also debt after debt. Liu Fangfei applied to the Hong Kong court to appoint an estate administrator, and a week later, Baoan Chuangfu also found the court. This company, Baoan Chuangfu, lent Liu Xiyong HK$500 million in 2013, and by the time of his death, more than HK$46.8 million had not been repaid. On June 5, 2017, Baoan stated in the Hong Kong High Court that it would continue to pursue this debt and listed Liu Fangfei as a defendant. At that time, her husband had only been dead for a little over two months. A year earlier, she was the wife of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman, but now she had become a defendant in a debt collection lawsuit in Hong Kong. It was not just this company that came knocking. According to reports, among the creditors pursuing Liu Xiyong's estate was a Macau gaming company, which was demanding HK$380 million. The most valuable asset Liu Xiyong had was the Junyi Hotel. The hotel entered a receivership process, which meant that the Liu family was no longer in charge of the hotel; it was managed by a receiver, and after it was sold, the money would be used to pay off the debts. In 2019, the receiver put the Junyi Hotel up for sale with an asking price of HK$6 billion. In early October, Hong Kong financial media reported that a buyer had offered HK$4.8 billion. The final transaction price reported by overseas media was HK$4.3 billion. We could not verify these two figures and can only say that the transaction price was over HK$4 billion, significantly lower than the asking price. The company that bought the hotel was called Yueming Holdings. Hong Kong media found that one of the directors of this company also served as a director at state-owned companies such as China Cinda, and the major shareholder of China Cinda is the Chinese Ministry of Finance. Consequently, some people overseas said that the hotel left behind by Liu Xiyong eventually fell into the hands of the Chinese Ministry of Finance. Of course, this is just an inference, and we can only confirm this connection through the identity of the director.

Liu Xinrong bought this hotel in 1995 and operated it himself for over twenty years. In the two years that followed, the hotel changed owners. The fraud case in Hong Kong dragged on until October 6, 2020, when the Hong Kong District Court held another hearing for the case. The defendant had long since passed away, but the case remained unresolved. The prosecution presented a copy of the death certificate issued in the mainland to apply for the case to be closed. The judge approved it, revoked the arrest warrant for Liu Xingrong, and ordered the HK$100,000 bail to be returned to the administrator of his estate. The prosecution also stated in court that the bail conditions did not prohibit Liu from leaving Hong Kong, that his trip to the mainland was legal, and that his failure to return was not of his own volition, so it could not be treated as jumping bail. This statement effectively cleared Liu of the charge of jumping bail. However, by the time these words were spoken, he had already been gone for three and a half years. From being charged by the ICAC to the conclusion of this case, nearly five years had passed. In these five years, Liu Xingrong went from being a hotel owner to a defendant, and finally to a death certificate. Liu Fangfei experienced every single event during these five years.

During these years, Liu Fangfei remained at CCTV. On June 28, 2020, a netizen asked her on Weibo if she had left CCTV, and she replied: "No, just taking a break." Three years later, in October 2023, CCTV updated its list of hosts, and her name was missing from the list for the Chinese International Channel, which immediately spread online. On October 19, she posted another Weibo: "Yes, in June I left CCTV, where I had worked for 21 years. I am grateful for the CCTV stage and for the kind love of the audience." In the 21 years prior, she went from "Exploration and Discovery" all the way to the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. In the 14 years that followed, she experienced the Wang Yi case and the death of her husband, yet she never left, though she never returned to the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. In this Weibo post, she said she would continue to do cultural work, continue her "Fangfei's Journey of Civilization," and continue the "Green Handkerchief Project" she had persisted with for 11 years. She kept her word. In November 2024, the program she planned, "Fangfei's Journey of Civilization: Visiting Ancient Architecture in Shanxi," began airing. "A history of Shanxi is a history of Chinese civilization. 'Fangfei's Journey of Civilization' visits ancient Chinese architecture. Our second season has been wonderfully presented to everyone. Over these two episodes, I led everyone to explore many ancient buildings in Shanxi, taking the audience to see the ancient temples, pagodas, and stages of Shanxi one by one. The second season will be online in October 2025."

However, some things that had nothing to do with her still managed to attach themselves to her. In July 2025, Shi Yongxin, the abbot of Shaolin Temple, was investigated. A photo of Liu Fangfei and Shi Yongxin was dug up online, and some people used it to make an issue, claiming that Liu Fangfei and Shi Yongxin had an unusual relationship. In fact, that photo was taken many years ago when she went to Shaolin Temple to film a program. Liu Fangfei responded: "It was a program for the station, work-related. After the interview, people from different departments took photos, that's all." On December 22, 2025, she invited a guest named Rong Panglong to a special live broadcast of "Fangfei's Journey of Civilization," who claimed to be a descendant of the Jiangnan collector Lai Junchen and talked a lot about his family history. The very next day, Lai Junchen's great-granddaughter, Shu Ding, published a statement in Yazhou Zhoukan saying that Rong had no relationship with the Lai family. At that time, Shu Ding was in the middle of a lawsuit over 137 artifacts her father had donated to the Nanjing Museum in 1959, which many people across the country were following. Liu Fangfei admitted her mistake. On December 25, she rushed to Suzhou overnight to apologize to Shu Ding in person: "I came to Suzhou specifically with a sincere heart, though I was indeed a bit nervous. After explaining the situation, Auntie Pang was kind and forgiving, which eased my tension. I bowed before Lai Junchen's portrait." Liu Fangfei is forty-nine years old this year, unmarried and without children. On Qingming Festival, she wrote on Weibo: "Qingming meets between the spring light and longing." On the Ghost Festival, she wrote again: "Have you ever dreamed of your deceased loved ones? Another Ghost Festival to remember the past and miss the departed." She did not say who these two Weibo posts were written for. Looking back at these twenty-plus years, Liu Fangfei has never been held criminally liable for anything. When Wang Yi was on trial, she was a witness; when Liu Xingrong's case went to court, she was a family member sitting in the gallery holding his portrait; the debts left by her husband led to her being sued in court. Of the two men she loved, one was sentenced to death with a reprieve, and the other died in an interrogation chair. Half of her suffering came from the suddenness of these two blows, and the other half was that she never received the full truth. Who exactly did Wang Yi take money from, and how much? The verdict was written clearly, but why was Liu Xingrong taken away? To this day, no one can tell her. On October 19, Liu Fangfei posted another Weibo, starting her journey to visit ancient Chinese architecture. A few hours after setting off for Shanxi, she posted another, saying that the next day she would do a live broadcast on ancient architecture with the production team in Changzi County, Shanxi. She may never get an explanation for her husband's affairs, but she has not stopped. Forty-nine-year-old Liu Fangfei is still visiting those old houses from hundreds of years ago one by one, telling the historical stories to everyone. Alright, today we are going to talk about this.

If you found this episode valuable, please like it.

Hit the notification bell, share, and welcome to subscribe to this channel. Friends who are able to can also join as members to support our small channel.

I am the sprite of children's logic exams, see you in the next episode!