A university student spent 5 years planning a random attack on the Taipei Metro.
He carried it out in 2 minutes.
Four people died, 24 were injured, and 2 years later, a man went out to buy a knife on a Monday morning. He said he was inspired by the first one. The victim was 4 years old.
This is the dark side of Taiwan.
May 21st, 2014 – 4:25 PM
Cheng Chieh boarded the Taipei Metro. It was a normal Wednesday rush hour. The car was packed with people heading home after work or class—families, students, office workers.
Cheng Chieh was 21 years old. He was a second-year university student at Tunghai University in Taichung. That day, he had no classes, and he had been waiting for this moment for years.
He pulled out a 12-inch fruit knife and started stabbing the passengers around him. What happened over the next 2 minutes was the most violent attack the Taipei Metro had seen since it began operations in 1996.
Cheng Chieh moved through the car with a speed and coldness that survivors would later describe as something that didn’t seem human. He wasn’t looking for anyone specific. He had no issue with any of the passengers around him. He attacked at random—wherever he could, however he could.
By the time the train reached Jiangzicui Station—the longest stretch between any two stations in the entire network, about 3 to 5 minutes—passengers at the back of the car tried to create a barrier using umbrellas to keep distance from the attacker. Others tried to talk to him to discourage him.
It didn’t work.
When the train finally stopped at the station, a group of passengers managed to physically restrain him. Metro security arrived seconds later.
Cheng Chieh was subdued on the platform, still holding the knife.
Four people were dead, 24 were injured.
The first thing Cheng Chieh said when police arrived wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t an explanation. It was a request. He said he wanted the death penalty.
During the interrogation that followed, investigators started to understand they weren’t dealing with an impulsive outburst of violence. What Cheng Chieh described was something he had been planning for years with a calmness that chilled the officers taking his statement.
He said he had wanted to do something big since he was a child. That the desire to kill people at random had started when he was 16—still in high school—and had never gone away. That he had spent years waiting for the right moment. That he had originally planned the attack for after his university graduation, but that day he had no classes and he was tired of waiting.
A day without classes. That was the reason it was May 21st, 2014, and not some other day.
He also said that if his own parents had been on that train, he would have attacked them, too.
What emerged during the investigation was the portrait of a young man who had kept that obsession completely hidden for years.
His university classmates described him as introverted but not troubling. His professors had no complaints. No recorded incidents. No visible warning signs. From the outside, he was just another student at a university of more than 20,000 people.
But on his social media, shortly before the attack, he had posted something that nobody had taken seriously:
“I want to do something big.”
It was a signal. Nobody saw it.
His father, when he heard about the attack, did something extraordinary and devastating at the same time. He went in front of television cameras and knelt publicly. He asked forgiveness from the victims and their families, and he said his son deserved to die—that the crime he had committed was unforgivable.
A father kneeling on television, asking that his own son be executed. That was also Taiwan that day.
The Trial
The trial was relatively quick by the standards of any judicial system.
The defense tried to argue that Cheng Chieh had mental health issues that should be considered as mitigating factors. The psychiatric experts who evaluated him reached a different conclusion: He was fully aware of his actions. He understood what he had done. He understood the consequences. There was no condition that exempted him from criminal responsibility.
The Taiwan High Court sentenced him to death in March 2015. The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence in April 2016.
And then, something happened that generated its own controversy.
The execution was carried out just 18 days after the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence—an unusually short time frame by the standards of any judicial system in the world. His lawyers were still preparing an extraordinary appeal when they received news that Cheng Chieh had already been executed.
On May 10th, 2016—exactly 2 years after the attack—Cheng Chieh was executed at the Taipei Detention Center. He was 23 years old. He was sedated and shot, following Taiwan’s standard execution protocol.
The Ministry of Justice said the sentence had been necessary because of the severity of the crime and public demands to uphold social justice. His lawyers said the process had been rushed.
Both things can be true at the same time.
The Legacy
The Cheng Chieh attack changed Taiwan in concrete and measurable ways.
In the 10 days following the attack, ridership on the Taipei Metro dropped by nearly 1 million passengers. Almost a million people who normally use the Metro stopped doing so—even if temporarily—because the sense of safety that system had represented for nearly two decades had been destroyed in 2 minutes.
The Taiwanese government increased security personnel in the cars, installed more cameras, revised emergency response protocols, and opened a debate about the death penalty that Taiwan still hasn’t closed.
Because the execution of Cheng Chieh—fast, before his lawyers could complete their appeals—was also a signal of how much public pressure can be exerted on the judicial system in moments of collective outrage.
But the darkest legacy of the Cheng Chieh case isn’t the debate about the death penalty.
It’s what happened afterward.
The Copycat
Two years after his execution, a man in Taipei studied the Cheng Chieh case carefully. He read the reports. He analyzed the attack, and he made a decision that connects the Cheng Chieh case directly to the case we’re about to cover.
And in December 2025, 11 years after the original attack, Cheng Wen carried out a copycat attack on the streets of Taipei. Police found records on his tablet showing searches about Cheng Chieh going back to October of that year. He had been researching the 2014 attack for months to plan his own.
Cheng Chieh had wanted to do something big. His legacy was inspiring others to try the same.
Cheng Chieh had also inspired someone much earlier.
Wang Ching-yu told police he had been motivated by the metro attack. He said, “Watching someone do something like that—attack at random in a public space, capture the attention of an entire country—had pushed him to act.”
Our Next Case
Our next case happened almost two years after the metro attack. On an open street, in broad daylight. And the victim was 4 years old.
There’s something more about the Cheng Chieh case worth developing—something almost no Western account of it mentions with enough depth: the scale of the systemic failure that allowed him to reach that point without anyone intervening.
His classmates at Tunghai University issued a statement when they heard about the attack that surprised many people. They said Cheng was part of their family, and that they still loved him as such. It was an attempt to humanize him in a moment when all of Taiwan wanted the opposite.
They received massive criticism for that statement, but they were also saying something true: nobody in that institution—with daily access to that young man—had detected anything.
How is it possible that someone carries for 5 years the desire to kill people at random, from age 16 to 21, without any detection system identifying them? Without any teacher, classmate, or family member noticing something worrying enough to act on?
That question has no simple answer. But Taiwan faced it directly after the attack, and it generated changes in mental health protocols in educational institutions that are still being evaluated today.
What was clear is that the Facebook post—“I want to do something big”—published shortly before the attack, was completely ignored. It was a public signal. Visible. Available to anyone who looked at his profile. And nobody acted on it.
In the age of social media, when someone announces their intent to cause harm, who has the responsibility to listen? Friends? Platforms? The state?
Taiwan still doesn’t have a satisfying answer to that. And every new case that occurs asks the same question again.
March 28th, 2016 – 11:00 AM
In the Neihu neighborhood in northern Taipei, a woman was walking down Huanshan Road with her 4-year-old daughter. The little girl was riding a small bike a few steps ahead of her mother. They were on their way to meet her grandfather and two siblings for lunch.
It was a normal Monday morning.
The little girl’s name was Liu Yi-chieh. Her family called her Xiao Deng Pao—in Chinese, that means Little Light Bulb.
She never made it to lunch.
Wang Ching-yu was 33 years old that day. He was unemployed. He had a prior record for drug-related offenses and had twice sought treatment for mental illness after violent episodes with his own family.
That morning, he left his house and went to buy a kitchen knife. Then, he walked through the Neihu neighborhood. When he saw Liu Yi-chieh on her bike, he approached from behind. He grabbed her and decapitated her in seconds—in front of her mother, in front of the passersby on the street.
Liu Yi-chieh’s mother was less than a meter away when it happened. There was nothing she could do.
The screams drew neighbors and bystanders who held Wang Ching-yu down until police arrived. It all happened in a matter of seconds.
The Aftermath
The news spread across Taiwan within hours and generated one of the most intense waves of collective outrage the country had seen in years.
Thousands of people went to the scene of the attack to leave flowers and toys outside the police station where Wang was being held.
A crowd gathered demanding justice.
When police tried to transfer him to continue the interrogation, the crowd attacked him—some carrying baseball bats. Police had to bring him back inside to protect him.
“Have you no conscience?” they shouted. “Kill him.”
That level of collective rage said something about how Taiwan processed this crime. It wasn’t just the horror of the act itself—it was the complete randomness of it. Liu Yi-chieh had done nothing. She didn’t know Wang Ching-yu. There was no relationship, no context, no logic that could explain why it had been her.
She was a little girl on a bike on a normal Taipei street at 11:00 on a Monday morning.
The Interrogation
During the interrogation, Wang Ching-yu said things that investigators found difficult to process.
He said he didn’t know the victim, that he had chosen her at random. And according to police reports cited by Taiwanese media, he said that since 2006—10 years before the attack—he had had the fantasy that killing a person from China’s Sichuan province would help him carry on his ancestral line. A belief with no rational basis, tied to a personal cosmology that the psychiatrist who later evaluated him would classify as part of his mental health issues.
He also said he had been inspired by Cheng Chieh’s metro attack in 2014—that that case had given him the idea. That seeing someone be able to do something like that—attack at random in a public space, capture the attention of an entire country—had pushed him to act.
One crime inspiring another. The same copycat logic that appears in other countries in other contexts, but that in Taiwan became permanently linked to these two cases that happened less than two years apart.
The Legal Proceedings
The legal proceedings around the Wang Ching-yu case were long and generated their own controversy.
Prosecutors asked for the death penalty. They argued the crime had been extremely cold-blooded and calculated—that Wang had gone out that morning specifically to buy the weapon, and that the magnitude of the horror left no room for mitigating factors.
The defense—and eventually several courts—reached a different conclusion. The psychiatric reports presented during the trial established that Wang had a mental handicap, a condition that affected his judgment and impulse control.
The judge at the Shilin District Court determined in May 2017 that this condition was enough to rule out the death penalty and sentenced him to life in prison instead.
The decision triggered a new wave of public outrage. Hundreds of people took to the streets wearing black stickers that read, “The death penalty is necessary.” Legislators from different parties declared the sentence insufficient.
The mother of Liu Yi-chieh—whose voice had been surprisingly calm and reflective throughout the process, asking that the case be used to improve the mental health system rather than just seeking revenge—said she would continue looking for the real cause of the crime.
The Taiwan Supreme Court confirmed the life sentence in April 2020. Wang Ching-yu remains alive in prison.
A Mother’s Response
There’s something about the response of Liu Yi-chieh’s mother that Taiwan is still processing.
Instead of calling for execution, instead of becoming the voice of outrage that the country wanted to hear, she chose to talk about systems, about mental health, about prevention. She said she wanted to understand what had gone wrong for Wang Ching-yu to reach that point without anyone intervening in time.
That stance generated both admiration and criticism.
Some interpreted it as a sign of extraordinary strength.
Others saw it as a denial of the grief that deserved to be expressed differently.
But regardless of how it’s interpreted, her response put her finger on something real. Wang Ching-yu had been treated for mental health issues. He had a history of violence. There were prior warning signs. And still, that Monday morning in 2016, he left his house, went to buy a knife, and nobody stopped him.
What would have had to happen differently for Liu Yi-chieh to make it to lunch with her grandfather that day?
Taiwan doesn’t have a complete answer to that question. But the mother of the Little Light Bulb has spent years trying to find one.
The Connection
The Wang Ching-yu case is also inevitably the Cheng Chieh case.
Two random attacks.
Two victims chosen without any criteria.
Two men who said they wanted to do something big—one on Facebook, the other during police interrogation.
And a direct connection: Wang Ching-yu cited Cheng Chieh as his inspiration.
That raises a question with no comfortable answer: What responsibility does massive media coverage of a crime carry when that coverage can turn it into a blueprint for the next one?
Cheng Chieh was news across all of Asia. His name became widely known. His case was analyzed, debated, covered in detail on television, on social media, in newspapers. And that visibility—that notoriety—was exactly what Wang Ching-yu said he had been looking for when he went out onto the street that March 28th, 2016.
There’s no simple solution to that dilemma. Silencing crimes is not the answer. But how they’re told, what gets emphasized, which images are shown and which aren’t—those decisions matter. And cases like these are a concrete reminder of why they matter.
One More Detail
There’s one more detail about the Wang Ching-yu case worth mentioning, because it connects to a broader conversation Taiwan had to face during that period.
In less than 2 years, Taiwan had experienced two high-profile random attacks: Cheng Chieh on the metro in May 2014, and Wang Ching-yu on the street in March 2016.
And between those two, in August 2015, there was another. A man attacked and killed an 8-year-old girl in the bathroom of her school in Taipei.
Three random attacks in less than 2 years. Three victims with no connection to their attackers. A society that prided itself on having one of the lowest violent crime rates in Asia suddenly processing the reality that that pride had limits it hadn’t anticipated.
The institutional response was to increase surveillance in public spaces, review mental health treatment protocols, and debate once again about the death penalty.
But there was also something harder to quantify: a loss of the feeling that everyday spaces were safe. The metro. The street. A school bathroom.
For many Taiwanese people, those three cases in that short period were the kind of event that changes how you move through the world—how you feel stepping down into a metro station, how you react when your child rides ahead of you on a bike.
Liu Yi-chieh, the Little Light Bulb, was 4 years old. She was on her way to have lunch with her grandfather.
And the fact that her mother found, in the most unimaginable grief, a voice to talk about systems and prevention rather than just revenge—is perhaps the most extraordinary part of this entire story.
That was Taiwan.
Two attacks. Two men. Two moments where random violence paralyzed one of the safest societies in Asia.
One crime that inspired another.
And a 4-year-old girl on her way to have lunch with her grandfather—who never made it there.
Here is the transcript reformatted for maximum readability, with every original English word preserved without alterations.
A university student spent [music] 5 years planning a random attack on the Taipei Metro. He carried it out in 2 minutes. Four people died, 24 were injured, and 2 years later, a man went out to buy a knife on a Monday morning. He said he was inspired by the first one. The victim was 4 years old. This is the dark side of Taiwan.
The Taipei Metro Attack
On May 21st, 2014, at 4:25 in the afternoon, Cheng Chieh boarded the Taipei Metro. It was a normal Wednesday rush hour. The car was packed with people heading home after work or class, families, students, office workers. Cheng Chieh was 21 years old. He was a second-year university student at Tunghai University in Taichung. That day, he had no classes, and he had been waiting for this moment for years. He pulled out a 12-in fruit knife and started stabbing the passengers around him.
What happened over the next 2 minutes was the most violent attack the Taipei Metro had seen since it began operations in 1996. Cheng Chieh moved through the car with a speed and coldness that survivors would later describe as something that didn’t seem human. He wasn’t looking for anyone specific. He had no issue with any of the passengers around him. He attacked at random, wherever he could, however he could.
By the time the train reached Jiangzicui Station, the longest stretch between any two stations in the entire network, about 3 to 5 minutes, passengers at the back of the car tried to create a barrier using umbrellas to keep distance from the attacker. Others tried to talk to him to discourage him. It didn’t work. When the train finally stopped at the station, a group of passengers managed to physically restrain him. Metro security arrived seconds later.
[snorts]
Cheng Chieh was subdued on the platform still holding the knife. Four people were [music] dead, 24 were injured.
The first thing Cheng Chieh said when police arrived wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t an explanation. It was a request. He said he wanted the death penalty.
Investigation and Warning Signs
During the interrogation that followed, investigators started to understand they weren’t dealing with an impulsive outburst of violence. What Cheng Chieh described was something he had been planning for years with a calmness that chilled the officers taking his statement.
He said he had wanted to do something big since he was a child.
The desire to kill people at random had started when he was 16, still in high school, and had never gone away.
He had spent years waiting for the right moment.
He had originally planned the attack for after his university graduation, but that day he had no classes and he was tired of waiting. A day without classes, >> [music] >> that was the reason it was May 21st, 2014 and not some other day.
He also said that if his own parents had been on that train, he would have attacked them, too.
What emerged during the investigation was the [music] portrait of a young man who had kept that obsession completely hidden for years. His >> [music] >> university classmates described him as introverted but not troubling. His professors had no complaints, no recorded incidents, no visible warning signs.
[music]
From the outside, he was just another student at a university of more than 20,000 people, but on his social media, shortly before the attack, he had posted something that nobody had taken seriously: “I want to do something big.” It was a signal. Nobody saw it.
His father, when he heard about the attack, did something extraordinary and devastating at the same time. He went in front of television cameras and knelt publicly. He asked forgiveness from the victims and their families and he said his son deserved to die, that the crime he had committed was unforgivable. A father kneeling on television asking that his own son be executed, that was also Taiwan that day.
Judicial Process and Execution
The trial was relatively quick by the standards of any judicial system. The defense tried to argue that Cheng Chieh had mental health issues that should be considered as mitigating factors. The psychiatric experts who evaluated him reached a different conclusion:
He was fully aware of his actions.
He understood what he had done.
He understood the consequences.
There was no condition that exempted him from criminal responsibility.
The Taiwan High Court sentenced him to death in March 2015. The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence in April 2016.
And then, something happened that generated its own controversy. The execution was carried out just 18 days after the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence. An unusually short time frame by the standards of any judicial system in the world. His lawyers were still preparing an extraordinary appeal when they received news that Cheng Chieh had already been executed. On May 10th, 2016, exactly 2 years after the attack, Cheng Chieh was executed at the Taipei Detention Center. [music] He was 23 years old. He was sedated and shot, following Taiwan’s standard execution protocol.
The Ministry of Justice said the sentence had been necessary because of the severity of the crime and public demands to uphold social justice. His lawyers said the process had been rushed. Both things can be true at the same time.
Impact and Aftermath
The Cheng Chieh attack changed Taiwan in concrete and measurable ways:
In the 10 days following the attack, ridership on the Taipei Metro dropped by nearly 1 million passengers. Almost a million people who normally use the Metro stopped doing so, even if temporarily, because the sense of safety that system had represented for nearly two decades had been destroyed in 2 minutes.
The Taiwanese government increased security personnel in the cars, >> [music] >> installed more cameras, revised emergency response protocols, and opened a debate about the death penalty that Taiwan still hasn’t closed.
Because the execution of Cheng Chieh, fast, before his lawyers could complete their appeals, was also a signal of how much public pressure can be exerted on the judicial system in moments of collective outrage.
But, the darkest legacy of the Cheng Chieh case isn’t the debate about the death penalty. It’s what happened afterward. Two years after his execution, a man in Taipei studied the Cheng Chieh case carefully. He read the reports. He analyzed the attack, and he made a decision that connects the Cheng Chieh case directly to the case we’re about to cover.
And in December 2025, 11 years after the original attack, Cheng Wen carried out a copycat attack on the streets of Taipei. Police found records on his tablet showing searches about Cheng Chieh going back to October of that year. He had been researching the 2014 attack for months to plan his own. Cheng Chieh had wanted to do something big. His legacy was inspiring others to try the same.
Cheng Chieh had also inspired someone much earlier. Wang Ching-yu told police he had been motivated by the metro attack. He said, “Watching someone do something like that, attack at random in a public space, capture the attention of an entire country had pushed him to act.”
Our next case happened almost two years after the metro attack. On an open street, in broad daylight, and the victim was 4 years old.
Systemic Failures and Questions
There’s something more about the Cheng Chieh case worth developing, and that almost no Western account of it mentions with enough depth: the scale of the systemic failure that allowed him to reach that point without anyone intervening.
His classmates at Tunghai University issued a statement when they heard about the attack that surprised many people. They said Cheng was part of their family, and that they still loved him as such. It was an attempt to humanize him in a moment when all of Taiwan wanted the opposite. They received massive criticism for that statement, but they were also saying something true—that nobody in that institution, with daily access to that young man, had detected anything.
How is it possible that someone carries for 5 years the desire to kill people at random, from age 16 to 21, without any detection system identifying them, without any teacher, classmate, or family member noticing something worrying enough to act on? That question has no simple answer, but Taiwan faced it directly after the attack, and it generated changes in mental health protocols in educational institutions that are still being evaluated today.
What was clear is that the Facebook post, “I want to do something big”, published shortly before the attack, was completely ignored. It was a public signal, visible, available to anyone who looked at his profile, and nobody acted on it. In the age of social media, when someone announces their intent to cause harm, who has the responsibility to listen? Friends? Platforms? The state? Taiwan still doesn’t have a satisfying answer to that, and every new case that occurs asks the same question again.
The Neihu Attack (Xiao Deng Pao Case)
In the previous case, we talked about a young man who spent years planning a random attack on the Taipei Metro, about how his case generated massive protests, debate about the death penalty, and concrete changes in public transportation security protocols. But, the darkest legacy of Cheng Chieh wasn’t any of those changes. It was that he inspired someone else.
Our next case happened almost 2 years after the metro attack, on an open street, in broad daylight, and the victim was 4 years old.
On March 28th, 2016, it was 11:00 in the morning in the Neihu neighborhood in northern Taipei. A woman was walking down Huanshan Road with her 4-year-old daughter. The little girl was riding a small bike a few steps ahead of her mother. They were on their way to meet her grandfather and two siblings for lunch. It was a normal Monday morning. The little girl’s name was Liu Yi-chieh. Her family called her Xiao Deng Pao. In Chinese, that means little light bulb. She never made it to lunch.
Wang Ching-yu was 33 years old that day. He was unemployed. He had a prior record for drug-related offenses and had twice sought treatment for mental illness after violent episodes with his own family. That morning, he left his house and went to buy a kitchen knife. Then, he walked through the Neihu neighborhood.
When he saw Liu Yiji on her bike, he approached from behind. He grabbed her and decapitated her in seconds [music] in front of her mother, in front of the passersby on the street. Liu Yiji’s mother was less than a meter away when it happened. There was nothing she could do.
Public Outrage and Motive
The screams drew neighbors and bystanders who held Wang Ching-yu down until police arrived. It all happened in a matter of seconds. The news spread across Taiwan within hours and generated one of the most intense waves of collective outrage the country had seen in [music] years.
Thousands of people went to the scene of the attack to leave flowers and toys outside the police station where Wang was being held. A crowd gathered demanding justice. When police tried to transfer him to continue the interrogation, the crowd attacked him. Some were carrying baseball bats. [music] Police had to bring him back inside to protect him. “Have you no conscience?” they shouted. “Kill him.”
That level of collective rage said something about how Taiwan processed this crime. It wasn’t just the horror of the act itself, it was the complete randomness of it. Liu Yiji had done nothing. She didn’t know Wang Ching-yu. There was no relationship, no context, no logic that could explain why it had been her. She was a little girl on a bike on a normal Taipei street at 11:00 on a Monday morning.
During the interrogation, Wang Ching-yu said things that investigators found difficult to process:
He said he didn’t know the victim, that he had chosen her at random.
According to police reports cited by Taiwanese media, he said that since 2006, 10 years before the attack, he had had the fantasy that killing a person from China’s Sichuan province would help him carry on his ancestral line—a belief with no rational basis tied to a personal cosmology that the psychiatrist who later evaluated him would classify as part of his mental health issues.
He also said he had been inspired by Cheng Chieh’s metro attack in 2014, that that case had given him the idea that seeing someone be able to do something like that, attack at random in a public space, capture the attention of an entire country had pushed him to act.
One crime inspiring another. The same copycat logic that appears in other countries in other contexts, but that in Taiwan became permanently linked to these two cases that happened less than two years apart.
Legal Proceedings and the Mother’s Response
The legal proceedings around the Wang Ching-yu case were long and generated their own controversy. Prosecutors asked for the death penalty. They argued the crime had been extremely cold-blooded and calculated, that Wang had gone out that morning specifically to buy the weapon and that the magnitude of the horror left no room for mitigating factors.
The defense, and eventually several courts, reached a different conclusion:
The psychiatric reports presented during the trial established that Wang had a mental handicap, a condition that affected his judgment and impulse control.
The judge at the Shilin District Court determined in May 2017 that this condition was enough to rule out the death penalty and sentenced him to life in prison instead.
The decision triggered a new wave of public outrage. Hundreds of people took to the streets wearing black stickers that read, “The death penalty is necessary.” Legislators from different parties declared the sentence insufficient.
The mother of Liu Yi-chieh, whose voice had been surprisingly calm and reflective throughout the process, asking that the case be used to improve the mental health system rather than just seeking revenge, said she would continue looking for the real cause of the crime. The Taiwan Supreme Court confirmed the life sentence in April 2020. Wang Ching-yu remains alive in prison.
There’s something about the response of Liu Yi-chieh’s mother that Taiwan is still processing. Instead of calling for execution, instead of becoming the voice of outrage that the country wanted to hear, she chose to talk about systems, about mental health, about prevention. She said she wanted to understand what had gone wrong for Wang Ching-yu to reach that point without anyone intervening in time.
That stance generated both admiration and criticism. Some interpreted it as a sign of extraordinary strength. Others saw it as a denial of the grief that deserved to be expressed differently. But regardless of how it’s interpreted, her response put her finger on something real. Wang Ching-yu had been treated for mental health issues. He had a history of violence. There were prior warning signs. And still, that Monday morning in 2016, he left his house, went to buy a knife, and nobody stopped him. What would have had to happen differently for Liu Yi-chih to make it to lunch with her grandfather that day? Taiwan doesn’t have a complete answer to that question, but the mother of the little light bulb has spent years trying to find one.
Media Responsibility and Broader Impact
The Wang Ching-yu case is also inevitably the Cheng Chieh case. Two random attacks. Two victims chosen without any criteria. Two men who said they wanted to do something big—one on Facebook, the other during police interrogation. And a direct connection: Wang Ching-yu cited Cheng Chieh as his inspiration.
That raises a question with no comfortable answer: What responsibility does massive media coverage of a crime carry when that coverage can turn it into a blueprint for the next one?
Cheng Chieh was news across all of Asia. His name became widely known. His case was analyzed, debated, covered in detail on television, on social media, in newspapers. And that visibility, that notoriety, was exactly what Wang Ching-yu said he had been looking for when he went out onto the street that March 28th, 2016. There’s no simple solution to that dilemma. Silencing crimes is not the answer. But how they’re told, what gets emphasized, which images are shown and which aren’t—those decisions matter. And cases like these are a concrete reminder of why they matter.
There’s one more detail about the Wang Ching Yu case worth mentioning because it connects to a broader conversation Taiwan had to face during that period. In less than 2 years, Taiwan had experienced two high-profile random attacks:
Cheng Chieh on the metro in May 2014
Wang Ching Yu on the street in March 2016
And between those two, in August 2015, there was another: A man attacked and killed an 8-year-old girl in the bathroom of her school in Taipei.
Three random attacks in less than 2 years, three victims with no connection to their attackers. A society that prided itself on having one of the lowest violent crime rates in Asia suddenly processing the reality that that pride had limits it hadn’t anticipated.
The institutional response was to increase surveillance in public spaces, review mental health treatment protocols, and debate once again about the death penalty. But, there was also something harder to quantify: a loss of the feeling that everyday spaces were safe—the metro, the street, a school bathroom. For many Taiwanese people, those three cases in that short period were the kind of event that changes how you move through the world, how you feel stepping down into a metro station, how you react when your child rides ahead of you on a bike.
Conclusion
Liu Yi-jie, the little light bulb, was 4 years old. She was on her way to have lunch with her grandfather, and the fact that her mother found, in the most unimaginable grief, a voice to talk about systems and prevention rather than just revenge, is perhaps the most extraordinary part of this entire story.
That was Taiwan. Two attacks. Two men. Two moments where random violence paralyzed one of the safest societies in Asia. One crime that inspired another. And a 4-year-old girl on her way to have lunch with her grandfather who never made it there.
Which country should I feature in my next video? Let me know in the comments. See you guysWhich country should I feature in my next video? Let me know in the comments. See you guys.