the Monster Killer: Murder, Migration, and Making of Modern China

The Monster Killer: Murder, Migration, and the Making of Modern ChinaIn the early years of the twenty-first century, a man on a bicycle moved through the farming villages of central China and killed sixty-seven people. Yang Xinhai - China's most prolific serial killer - operated across four provinces for three years while provincial police departments failed to share information, rural communities went unwarned by a state committed to the appearance of stability, and the social conditions that had produced him remained unexamined and unaddressed.The Monster Killer is not simply a true crime narrative. It is a work of historical reckoning that uses one catastrophic criminal career as a lens through which to examine the transformation of Chinese society at the turn of the millennium: the great internal migration of one hundred and fifty million people, the hukou system that made migrants legal non-persons in their own country, the labor camp apparatus that deepened criminal formation rather than interrupting it, and the institutional failures of a state that suppressed public warnings in the name of stability while sixty-seven families went to sleep unwarned.Drawing on criminology, sociology, mathematics, and the traditions of literary historical narrative, Cahir Casey asks the question that animates the best historical true crime writing: how does a human being become capable of this? The answer he finds implicates not just one man, but an entire society at its most vulnerable moment of transformation.