Murder and Machinations: The Lin Qi Case

It is not a movie, but it could soon become one. The murder of Lin Qi, the Chinese billionaire who had the idea to bring the Chinese science fiction saga "The Three-Body Problem" now airing on Netflix, seems like the plot of a mystery novel. The man, who had the rights to the novel and had struck a deal with Netflix for the television adaptation in September 2020, died a few months later under dramatic circumstances. He was 39 years old, and the Shanghai police discovered that he had been poisoned by an executive of his video game company, the multinational Yoozoo Games. The killer, Xu Yao, was a respected lawyer who had assisted Lin in the negotiation, but hated his president, felt underappreciated, marginalized, and humiliated by the billionaire. To take revenge, the lawyer devised his plan on the "dark web," turned his office into a chemical lab, selected and purchased a series of highly toxic substances through e-commerce: he mixed them and tested them on dogs and cats. After the tests, he turned the lethal potion into pills and bottled it. Then he pretended to want to reconcile with President Lin, and to seal the peace, he gifted him the bottle, assuring him that it was a probiotic product. The billionaire tried it, felt sick, was hospitalized in December 2020, and died within ten days. According to these reconstructions, the killer mixed and tested a hundred lethal substances in an improvised laboratory, just like the protagonist of the American series "Breaking Bad," of which Xu is a big fan. The motive: jealousy According to the conviction, the motive was a dispute over the management of the company. The media specify that the dispute would have been linked precisely to the rights of the trilogy, to turn it into a sort of cultural franchise. However, the rights had been purchased in 2009 by a pair of Chinese entrepreneurs, with whom Lin had unsuccessfully tried to collaborate in previous years for the film adaptation. In 2017, he turned to Xu, a famous lawyer who studied in France and the United States, with a decade of experience as a legal counsel for Chinese corporations, who managed to obtain the rights and the following year was appointed head of a subsidiary company of Yoozoo, called The Three-Body Universe, with the task of developing the Three-Body IP. But at this point, the relationship between the two cracked, and Lin, dissatisfied with Xu's results, began to marginalize the lawyer by entrusting the most important projects to another executive, Zhao Jilong, who would also have been a victim of poisoning by Xu, who had injected mercury into the water bottles, whiskey, and coffee capsules in Zhao's office. Zhao survived but with a mercury concentration in his body 10 times higher than safety levels. Xu also saw his salary reduced from 20 million yuan ($2.7 million) a year to 5 million, and when Netflix announced the project for the series in September 2020, his name did not appear among the executive producers, while Lin put Zhao's name next to his. And perhaps this was the final straw that pushed Xu to carry out his murderous plan. The sentence In China, the death penalty is in force, and with evidence of premeditation and ferocity in the execution of the crime, the court had no doubts: the lawyer Xu was sentenced to the capital punishment on March 22. Coincidentally, the day before, March 21, Netflix aired the first episode of "The Three-Body Problem," and in the opening credits, the deceased billionaire Lin Qi is mentioned as "executive producer."