A man named She Xianglin served eleven years for the murder of his estranged wife—until she returned one day to visit her family. It turned out that she had moved to another province and remarried; the defendant, who had been tortured for ten days and ten nights into a false confession, was released in 2005. A study of Chinese attitudes published in the journal Science in 2013 found that young Chinese men and women were, in the researchers’ words, “less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals.”
