How “Many Mouths Melt Metal”：Ten Yuan, Ninety Thousand Signatures, One Death

By Yan, Jointing.Media, 2026-10-22

Pic: Pencil Tree | by Maddy

In October 2026, in Yibin（宜宾市）, Sichuan（四川省）, Hu Ermei（胡二妹）, a 33-year-old street vendor selling deep-fried skewers, was hit by “warning” posts published across multiple platforms by a customer—over the customer’s complaint that a 10-yuan order of fried vegetables had not included extra potatoes. In the days that followed, a flood of negative reviews and abuse poured in. On October 9, she left a suicide note and jumped into a river. “The warning video was the last straw,” the note read. She had two minor children. At the time of writing, police were still investigating, and no one had been held accountable.

Hu Ermei is not the first person to be killed by online mobbing. Before her, three cases had already run the full chain—from mobbing to death to a legal response—and the form that legal response took determines how we should understand the contemporary meaning of zhongkou shuojin (众口铄金)—literally “many mouths melt metal,” but more precisely: when enough people repeat something, it can melt even metal—that is, mass repetition can turn falsehood into accepted truth—together with jihui xiaogu (积毁销骨, “accumulated slander dissolves bone”).

I. Three Cases, Three Kinds of Legal Response

The Liu Xuezhou（刘学州） case

In January 2022, Liu Xuezhou, a 15-year-old boy searching for his biological parents, took his own life by ingesting drugs in Sanya. Before his death, he had been subjected to large-scale mobbing over accusations that he had “demanded property from his biological parents,” and in his suicide note he responded to each accusation point by point. In June 2025, the Beijing Internet Court, in a first-instance ruling, found that two self-media influencers (大V), “Truth-Teller Brother” (真话哥，a handle using the familiar suffix 哥 “brother”) and “Warmhearted Sister” (暖心姐姐), had committed reputation infringement, and ordered them to apologize and pay a total of 57,000 yuan in compensation for emotional distress and legal costs. The defendants’ statements were found to have fabricated false information—that Liu had “asked his biological parents to buy him a house” and had “abandoned his adoptive parents”—which led to Liu being attacked in a wave of online violence.

Nature of the legal response: civil compensation. No one bore criminal liability for the death.

The Zheng Linghua（郑灵华） case

On January 23, 2023, Zheng Linghua, a 23-year-old woman from Hangzhou, died. Six months earlier, she had dyed her hair pink and taken her graduate-school admission letter to visit her grandfather in his hospital bed. After the photo was stolen and misrepresented, she endured months of abuse and rumor-mongering. In a CCTV report, a netizen who had attacked her, surnamed Wang, said: “Her death is still somewhat regrettable—after all, life comes before everything else. The causal relationship of the matter has nothing directly to do with me; I just left a comment.”

Nature of the legal response: no one was held accountable. A single comment rarely meets the threshold for the crimes of insult and defamation under Chinese criminal law, and “cumulative” violence cannot, in legal terms, be attributed to any individual.

The case of Ms. Li in Shaanxi（陕西）

In 2024, Ms. Li’s daughter went missing, and ten days later her body was found in the Han River. After Ms. Li posted missing-person information online, a netizen surnamed Li subjected her to sustained abuse and defamation, accusing her of having “killed her own daughter” and of being an “eternal whore.” On July 1, 2024, Ms. Li attempted suicide by taking medication and survived after emergency treatment. The abusive videos posted by the netizen surnamed Li had more than 93,000 views, and the defamatory videos more than 23,000. The court found the netizen surnamed Li guilty of the crimes of insult and defamation under Chinese criminal law and sentenced him to one year and six months in prison; it also found that “Ms. Li’s suicide attempt by medication on July 1, 2024, her transport to hospital for emergency treatment, and the medical expenses and other related losses arising therefrom were causally linked to the criminal conduct of the netizen surnamed Li.” The second-instance court upheld the original judgment.

Nature of the legal response: criminal accountability—but the finding of causation was limited to medical expenses and related losses, not the full causal chain leading to death.

Placed side by side, the three cases trace a clear progression: civil compensation (Liu Xuezhou) → no accountability (Zheng Linghua) → criminal accountability (Ms. Li). The causal chain between verbal violence and death was not formally recognized by the legal system until 2026, and then only in the limited form of a criminal judgment. The Hu Ermei case remains at the same structural stage as the Zheng Linghua case: someone died, and no one is responsible.

II. Ruan Lingyu（阮玲玉）: “Gossip Is a Fearful Thing,” Manufactured

On March 8, 1935, the film star Ruan Lingyu took sleeping pills and died in her Shanghai apartment. For more than half a century afterward, the prevailing narrative was this: the tabloids besieged her, public opinion killed her, and her suicide note left four characters—renyan kewei (人言可畏, “gossip is a fearful thing”)—a slogan that may itself have been manufactured.

That narrative may itself be a forgery. According to a 2001 report in Xinmin Evening News（《新民晚报》）, the veteran Shanghai writer Shen Ji discovered Ruan Lingyu’s real suicide note in Siming Commercial Journal（《思明商学报》）, a Shanghai tabloid of the Republican era. The real note accused Tang Jishan of beating and betraying her: “If you had not beaten me that night, and beaten me again tonight, I probably would not have done this.” The circulated “gossip is a fearful thing” version is said to have been forged by Liang Saishan at Tang Jishan’s instruction, in order to shift the blame for a death by abuse onto society.

The operation of verbal violence includes not only the attack itself but also control over the right to explain the victim after death. Even Ruan Lingyu’s explanation of “why she died” was forged and exploited. The mechanism by which a label replaces a person is already fully present here: she was reduced by the tabloids to a “slut,” reduced by Tang Jishan to a symbol of “death caused by public opinion,” and the specific person—a woman trying to break free from a violent relationship—disappeared.

In contemporary cases, this mechanism repeats in different forms: Hu Ermei was reduced to “a profiteer who can’t take criticism,” Liu Xuezhou to “a scheming parent-seeker,” Zheng Linghua to “an improper woman with pink hair,” Ms. Li to “the murderer of her daughter.” The function of a label is to eliminate the possibility of empathy. Once a person is no longer a specific person, attacking them no longer requires hesitation.

III. Dismantling the Killing Mechanism at Three Levels

Level one: the dilution of responsibility in cumulative violence.

Xu Wenhai, an associate professor at the Law School of East China Normal University, analyzed in a column for Guancha that online violence is characterized by “cumulativity” (聚量性): a single comment is negligible, but the accumulation of a group produces a lethal effect; legal accountability, however, takes individual statements as its unit, producing the paradox that the harm is enormous yet no one is responsible.

A single “warning post” in the Hu Ermei case may not in itself constitute infringement; the customer could even say, “I was merely sharing a genuine consumer experience.” But the aggregate effect of copycat negative reviews and abusive direct messages killed her. The Zheng Linghua case is the same: the people who abused her numbered in the thousands, and those who could be pursued were very few.

After Japanese wrestler Hana Kimura died by suicide in May 2020 following online mobbing, two men continued to leave abusive comments on her Twitter account after her death; in the end, only those two men were prosecuted, and each was fined 9,000 yen (about 534 yuan). This stands in stark contrast to the one-year-six-month sentence for the perpetrator in Ms. Li’s case. Difficulty of accountability is a shared predicament, but the intensity of legal systems’ responses to “speech that kills” varies enormously.

The case of Jason Arday in the UK shows another form: when the perpetrator is a media institution with institutional power rather than an anonymous netizen, the difficulty of accountability lies not in “finding the person” but in “finding the person and yet finding it hard to prove the report unlawful.” Public pressure, however, took a different route. As of the evening of August 17, 2026, more than 90,000 people had signed a joint petition demanding an immediate public inquiry into the media’s coverage of Arday. The petition stated that Arday died from the media’s “relentless harassment” and that “racism was at the core of the narrative.”

At a deeper level, “cumulativity” means this: when a single comment is too small to require responsibility and the aggregate effect is lethal yet no one is responsible, language has completed a kind of violence that the law has not yet named—it leaves no wound that can be held to account, yet it changes the entire speech environment in which the victim lives.

Level two: the trap of self-justification (自证) and institutional silence.

In her suicide note, Hu Ermei explained the portion sizes one by one; in his suicide note, Liu Xuezhou responded point by point to the accusation of “demanding property”; Zheng Linghua once left messages to her attackers one by one demanding apologies. Each act of self-justification became new material for attack—”explaining is whitewashing,” “apologizing is a guilty conscience.” The closing of the channel for self-justification is the key step by which verbal violence completes its “execution.”

The limited breakthrough in Ms. Li’s case in Shaanxi is that the court, through a criminal judgment, acknowledged the existence of a causal chain—though only at the level of medical expenses and related losses. But one judgment cannot change the structure: in the vast majority of mobbing cases, victims collapse before the law intervenes.

Level three: the trans-era continuity of labels.

From the tabloid siege of Ruan Lingyu to the media storm around Arday, from Hu Ermei’s “warning post” to Ms. Li’s “daughter-killer accusation,” the form of the label changes, but its function never has: to compress a person into a symbol that can be attacked, and then wait for the symbol to shatter under cumulative attack.

IV. Institutional Responses: China and the World

China: legislative progress and structural dilemmas.

On July 29, 2026, the Anti-Cyberbullying Law of the People’s Republic of China (Draft for Public Comment) was released for public comment. It has seven chapters and sixty articles, with feedback due by August 28. The draft requires platforms to establish mechanisms for monitoring and identifying online violence and functions for rapid evidence collection; it provides that parties may apply to a basic-level court for a personality-right infringement injunction (a civil remedy under China’s Civil Code); it provides for heavier punishment in accordance with law for those who organize, plan, or incite online violence; and it provides that victims may bring a private prosecution (self-initiated prosecution, as distinct from public prosecution). Online violence is defined as activity that “concentrates or continues” to infringe lawful rights and interests—a quantitative feature that strips out isolated incidents and points precisely at “cumulative” violence.

Xu Wenhai’s diagnosis reveals a deeper contradiction: the business model of “traffic equals revenue” on platforms is in structural conflict with the governance of online violence; the threshold for criminal liability for the crimes of insult and defamation is high, and evidence-gathering in private prosecutions is difficult, so most mobbing conduct exists in a state where “laws exist but are hard to enforce.” The institutional prototype of a shift from “end-point punishment” to “front-end prevention” has appeared, but the problem of attributing responsibility for “cumulative” harm has not yet been fundamentally resolved at the level of statutory text.

Globalization: the same machine, different brake pads.

After the Hana Kimura case, Japan amended its criminal law in 2022, raising the statutory penalty for the crime of insult from “a fine of not more than 10,000 yen or detention of not more than 30 days” to “a fine of not more than 300,000 yen or imprisonment of not more than one year,” and extending the statute of limitations for prosecution from one year to three. But in the Kimura case itself, only two people were prosecuted and each fined 9,000 yen—the law before the amendment could not even hold “abuse during life” to account, and could only catch the extreme circumstance of “continued abuse after death.” Even after the amendment, the penalty remains far below the severity that a death warrants; the path of “raising the cost of violating the law” has a ceiling.

China’s Ms. Li case points to the finding of causation; Japan’s Kimura case points to criminal legislation; the UK’s Arday case points to media ethics and public accountability. Each country is repairing a different part of the machine, but no country has fixed the whole machine.

Conclusion

“Many mouths melt metal; accumulated slander dissolves bone” comes from the Biographies of Zhang Yi in the Records of the Grand Historian. More than two thousand years later, the precision of this sentence has not diminished. What has changed is the medium; what has not changed is the structure: labeling → cumulative attack → blocking self-justification → waiting for collapse.

The Hu Ermei case has as yet no legal response. The Ms. Li case is a minor breakthrough, but it occurred in a particular courtroom, in a particular jurisdiction, and the acknowledgment of causation was strictly confined to the technical formulation of medical expenses and related losses. The perpetrators are scattered behind screens around the world, while the victim’s self-justification and pursuit of accountability are trapped within national borders.

Until the “many mouths” truly learn to take responsibility—whether in China, Japan, or the UK—the story of “melting metal” will continue.

Yan is a virtual reporter for Jointing.Media (JM) based on LLM technology. Its content is automatically generated by the LLM and published after manual review.

中文原文

Translated by Deepseek

Edited by Jas