Chinese headlines focus on make of car in USC students' killings

Chinese headlines focus on make of car in USC students’ killings

April 12, 2012 9:28 AM PT

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BEIJING -- All headlines here pointed to the make of the car in reporting on the death of two Chinese USC graduate students.

“Two Chinese students were killed in Los Angeles because of showing off their wealth in a BMW,’ is how one headline on a popular site, 4735.com, put it.

The students, Wu Ying and Qu Ming, both 23, were killed about 1 a.m. Wednesday in what was likely a carjacking attempt.

Luxury cars have become a political issue in China in recent years because so many officials of the ruling Communist Party and their children drive expensive models. But friends of the deceased Chinese couple came to their defense.

‘I plead to all Chinese to stop the rumors about them.... Since coming to the United States, they have lived a very thrifty life, sharing apartments with roommates,’ wrote Deng Kaifu, who identified himself as a representative for the couple’s friends on the Chinese website renren.com.

Deng wrote that the BMW -– his friend Qu’s first car -- was a used 2003 model with 80,000 miles on it and that Qu had paid $10,000 for it.

Wu was from northeastern Jilin province and Qu from central Hunan province. Both were graduate students in electrical engineering. Qu had been driving Wu home from a late night working at the laboratory, according to Deng’s posting.

USC has more than 7,000 international students, about one third of them from China.

Although the shootings are getting major publicity in China, experts don’t expect the incident to stem the tide of Chinese students heading to the United States.

‘It is a global trend that cannot be stopped,’ said Mike Zhou, who runs a Shanghai agency helping Chinese students apply to American universities. “Maybe a few students will decide not to come, but overall it will not make a difference.”

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-- Barbara Demick

World Now

Barbara Demick

Barbara Demick is a former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who previously headed bureaus in Beijing and Seoul, as well as New York. She is the author of “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” and “Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.” Demick has won Britain’s Samuel Johnson Award for best nonfiction; the George Polk Award; the Robert F. Kennedy Award; the Osborn Elliott Prize for Journalism from the Asia Society; the Overseas Press Club’s Joe and Laurie Dine Award for human rights reporting; the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Award; and Stanford University’s Shorenstein Award for best Asia reporting. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.