From 2020 to 2024, a group of Chinese men in Germany systematically drugged, raped, and filmed Chinese women through the Telegram group "German Old Driver Driving School." Starting in 2026, the main culprits were successively sentenced to heavy penalties in Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin. This collection includes the case details, trials, and the reflections and self-help actions it triggered in the Chinese community.
CCTV cited data from the Ministry of Public Security stating that the number of criminal cases nationwide decreased by 16.1% year-on-year from January to May. However, the phenomenon of multiple regions investing financially in expanding detention centers and prisons has led to external doubts about the real public security situation.
On July 8, 2026, Li Jing, a victim of the case in which Chinese student Zhou Tong drugged and raped women while secretly filming them in Germany, spoke out publicly in an exclusive interview with BBC Chinese, recounting the ordeal and her psychological trauma, and calling for an end to the expectation that victims remain silent.
Between 2020 and 2024, a transnational criminal gang composed primarily of highly educated Chinese men residing in Germany and the Netherlands, established a secret group called 'German Old Driver's School' on the encrypted social platform Telegram own. They used female identities on social software such as WeChat and Xiaohongshu to post fake rental or help-seeking information to lure newly arrived Chinese female students and young women to private residences, secretly administering date rape drugs (such as GHB/GBL, sedatives, etc.) to commit sexual assault, and used slang like 'car', 'refueling', and 'dead pig' within the group to brag and communicate, recording and disseminating sexual violence imagery. In February 2026, the Frankfurt District Court issued a first-instance judgment against the main perpetrator Zhang Dapeng (who was an IT supervisor of a car company before the case), finding him guilty of 22 charges including attempted murder and especially severe rape, sentencing him to 14 years of imprisonment and additional preventive detention (security supervision). Other accomplices Jiang Zhongyi was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in Munich, Zhou Tong was sentenced to 5 years and 9 months in Berlin, and Shao Zhiting, who provided drug formula guidance, was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment in July. This case, due to its heinous criminal methods and targeting of specific groups, caused a shock to the overseas Chinese community and directly pushed the German Federal Cabinet to pass a bill increasing the penalties for date rape crimes.
In 2025, Hong Kong recorded a total of 89,137 criminal cases, 50% more than the 59,225 cases in 2019. Among them, 43,212 were fraud cases, accounting for half, with victims defrauded of HK$8.1 billion. Fraud cases have multiplied fivefold from fewer than 10,000 in 2019.
Data shows that in 2024, the annual number of criminal cases filed by Chinese police (Public Security) exceeded 10 million, a sharp increase compared to 2000, with the majority of short-sentence cases involving various "pocket crimes."