"Cruel Killing, Brutal Killing, Kill the Beast”: Investigating the 2014
McDonald’s “Cult Murder” in Zhaoyuan
Massimo Introvigne
Center for Studies on New Religions
maxintrovigne@gmail.com
In 2017, CESNUR’s managing director, Massimo Introvigne, was invited to participate in a dialogue in
China’s Henan province in June, followed by a conference in Hong Kong in September, involving
Chinese law enforcement officers, leaders of China’s official “anti-xie jiao” association, Chinese
academics, and some Western scholars. The dialogue was about the notion of xie jiao (an expression
difficult to translate, and not exactly equivalent to the English “cult”) and one particular group classified
in China as xie jiao, the Church of Almighty God, also known as Eastern Lightning. That Church is
controversial, even beyond China, in particular for having being accused of perpetrating a horrific crime
in 2014 in a McDonald’s diner in Zhaoyuan, where a female client was mercilessly beaten to death.
Introvigne had access to a number of documents about the murder, and heard the opinions of both
Chinese officers and scholars hostile to the Church of Almighty God, and of members of the same Church
who escaped to South Korea and the U.S. This resulted in the first scholarly investigation of the
McDonald’s murder, whose preliminary conclusions are presented in these research notes.
ABSTRACT: On May 28, 2014, what became known as the stereotypical “cult murder” in China was
perpetrated in Zhaoyuan. Six “missionaries” entered a McDonald’s diner for preaching and ended up
killing a customer who had refused to give them her phone number. Chinese authorities attributed the
crime to the Church of Almighty God (Eastern Lightning), against which a campaign of repression was
already going on. A study of the available documents about the case, including documents published by
Chinese official sources, supports a different conclusion. The assassins were members of a small
movement that used the name “Almighty God” to designate its two female leaders but was not part of,
nor connected with, the Church of Almighty God. The article discusses how a small religious movement
went from the deification of its leaders to violence and murder.
KEYWORDS: McDonald’s Murders in Zhaoyuan, Church of Almighty God, Eastern Lightning, Xie
Jiao, New Religious Movements in China.
The Journal of CESNUR, Volume 1, Issue 1, September—October 2017, pages 61—73.
© 2017 by CESNUR. All rights reserved.
www.cesnur.net | DOI: 10.26338/tjoc.2017.1.1.6
Massimo Introvigne
62 $ The Journal of CESNUR | 1/1 (2017) 61—73
Introduction
On May 28, 2014, one of the most horrific murders in the story of new
religious movements was perpetrated in a McDonald’s diner in Zhaoyuan, in the
Chinese province of Shandong. Six “missionaries” entered the diner preaching
their religion and asked clients to leave their phone numbers for further contacts.
Wu Shuoyan (1977-2014), a sales assistant working in a nearby clothing store,
refused to give her number. She was declared an “evil spirit” and beaten to death
with a mop handle (Dunn 2015b, 204).
At the time of the murder, the Chinese government was engaged in a campaign
for eradicating the Church of Almighty God, or Eastern Lightning, a new
religious movement born in China in 1991, whose “priest” is Zhao Weishan (b.
1951), which teaches that Jesus Christ has returned to Earth as the Almighty
God. Although the movement never mentions her name nor any bibliographic
details, and cautions that any information supplied by outside sources may be
wrong, most scholars believe it identifies the incarnated Almighty God with a
Chinese woman, Yang Xiangbin (b. 1973: Dunn 2015a, 2015b). For a number
of reasons, together with Falun Gong, the Church of Almighty God came to
incarnate for the Chinese authorities the quintessential xie jiao (邪教) (Dunn
2015b, 21–23), an expression often translated as “evil cult,” but which was used
in China since the mid-Ming period with the meaning of “heterodox teachings”
or “criminal religious sect” (ter Haar 1992).
Chinese police and media quickly attributed the murder to the Church of
Almighty God, and this accusation is still routinely repeated by international
media. As evidence for the accusation, Chinese media mentioned that, one day
after the murder, the police claimed to have found material of the Church of
Almighty God in the home of the main defendant, Zhang Lidong (1959–2015)
(Chen 2014), including the book The Scroll Opened by the Lamb (Phoenix
Satellite TV 2014). After another two days, an interview with Zhang Lidong was
aired by CCTV, China’s state television. He stated that he was jobless and that he
had killed Wu because she was an “evil spirit” (邪灵). Asked what his religion was,
Zhang answered: “Almighty God” (全能神) (CCTV 2014).
The Church of Almighty God insists that its literature was probably planted in
Zhang’s home by the police itself, but the question does not appear to be crucial.
Although statistics are impossible, due to Chinese repression that compels the
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