It didn't take long for Chinese netizens to get on the case of the brutal Virginia Tech murder. Almost immediately, forum members human flesh searched the killer, Zhu Haiyang, and sussed out his university scores, his QQ number and - most importantly - his blog. While nobody can know for sure why he decapitated 22-year-old Yang Xin in the middle of a public cafe, there are now a few more guesses as to what caused an otherwise affable and studious PhD student to snap.
Did the economy cause the Virginia Tech murder?
Chinese grad student murdered at Virginia Tech
On Wednesday night, a Virginia Tech (维吉尼亚理工大学) graduate student from Beijing was decapitated in a cafe on the campus of the university. Yang Xin, 22-years-old, was starting her first semester as an accounting graduate student. She had only been on the campus for 13 days.
Hey Shanghai, we are TWO!
So while we're nursing our hangovers from last night's party and trying to get the damn Beatles songs out of our minds, it dawned on us that not so long ago, we wrote our very first entry here on Shanghaiist, and since then, two years have passed! In the meanwhile, the poor bloggers at Shanghaiist have been so busy trying to keep you entertained and supplementing our meagre writer salaries by peddling strange stuff on the internet that it seems we forgot to celebrate our first birthday!
And so the Virginia Tech killer wasn't from China after all
For most of the day yesterday, we here at Shanghaiist were wondering if we should post anything about the horrific mass shooting at Virginia Tech, a university in the United States. On the surface, the answer should have been an easy "no" — Blacksburg, Virginia, is nowhere near Shanghai. But news started to trickle in about the suspected killer: He was Asian, possibly Chinese. And then, yesterday morning, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed posted a story labeled "exclusive" that started out like this:
Today's Links: Murderers, McD's and squid snacks
Photo by sheniferous found via the Shanghaiist Contribute page.

