Wang’s father, aunt, and grandmother did not respond to requests for comment. A person answering a phone number listed for their attorney’s law firm told The Associated Press to wait for comment, saying they were swamped with interview requests. A number for the principal of the boy’s school rang unanswered, as did numbers for relatives of two of the suspects.The victim and the suspects are all under the age of 14. Media reports said they were “left-behind” children, a phrase used to describe kids in the countryside often cared for by grandparents because their parents work in faraway cities.As details of the tragedy emerged last weekend, it renewed concern over the social and psychological welfare of such children, their exposure to violent content online and the ability of the country’s social services to care for them. Posts and videos from Wang’s relatives garnered millions of views and thousands of comments.”The attention paid to the mental health of minors in the countryside is too little,” said one commenter on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. “I think this sort of thing could happen again.”Zhang Dongshuo, a defense attorney in Beijing unaffiliated with the case, said that Wang’s death is the latest in a series of juvenile murder cases in China that have sparked debate on how old a child should be before being held responsible for a crime.”Generally speaking, these kinds of cases involving minors are rare,” Zhang said. “But recently more and more of these cases have been reported by the media, and it’s been triggering discussion in Chinese society over revising the age of criminal responsibility.”In 2019, a 13-year-old boy who confessed to sexually assaulting and murdering a 10-year-old girl avoided criminal charges because Chinese law at the time stipulated that only those over the age of 14 could be held criminally liable. Two years later, the the age of criminal responsibility was lowered to 12, but the government mandated that prosecution only take place if approved by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s highest prosecuting authority.
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