Tang Lung-fai says he believed his girlfriend Fok Sin-yee was not human because she had never borne his child. He is now using that belief to argue he should not be convicted of her murder.
Content warning: This article contains descriptions of physical violence, intimate partner violence and femicide.
Fok Sin-yee was 38 years old. She worked as a real estate agent. She lived with her partner, Tang Lung-fai, at a private campsite he ran called Plumcamp in the village of Mui Tsz Lam, in the New Territories. In April 2022, her naked body was found there. She had bruises across her body, drag marks on her skin, knife wounds, blood on her forehead. Tang had called the police himself, three times between 6.13 am and 6.30 am, and told them he had killed her.
Her neighbours had known something was wrong for a while. The village head’s wife told reporters she had barely seen Fok in the months before her death. When she asked why Fok had stopped coming around, the answer she got was: “It’s not easy for someone to kill me.” She had been seen with a swollen face before she died, which she explained away as a skin condition.
This week, Tang’s murder trial opened at Hong Kong’s High Court. He admits causing her death. What he denies is that he intended to kill her, and the argument his defence is running is this: he believed Fok Sin-yee was an alien. Not fully human. The violence that killed her, the argument goes, came from a quarrel over whether she was a person at all.
The prosecution’s account is that an argument on the evening of 13 April escalated through the night and into the early hours of 14 April, during which Tang inflicted the injuries that killed her. Police also found cannabis and crystal meth at the scene. Tang’s reasoning for his belief that Fok was not human? She had not borne his child.
Her failure to produce his offspring, in his telling, was evidence of her non-humanity. This is the logic being presented to a jury of seven people at Hong Kong’s High Court as a basis for reduced culpability.
Research published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence has documented how dehumanisation functions inside intimate partner violence: how denying a partner’s full humanity enables control, justifies harm, and makes violence feel, to the perpetrator, like something other than what it is. The same psychological process that allows a man to treat a woman as property, as object, as lesser, is the process being formalised and submitted in that courtroom as a legal argument. What makes this case worth paying attention to beyond the headline is precisely that: the defence is the logical endpoint of a process that begins long before any violence, in the slow erosion of a woman’s humanity in the eyes of the person who is supposed to love her.
And it is being made explicit in a context where it matters enormously. Hong Kong has one of the lowest overall homicide rates in the world. It also has, paradoxically, one of the highest female homicide rates globally. Family violence accounts for 25% of all homicides in the city, and two-thirds of those victims are women. A 2022 survey by the Hong Kong Women’s Coalition of Equal Opportunities found that more than a quarter of respondents had experienced intimate partner violence, with nearly 90% of perpetrators being men. UN Women estimates that at least 17,400 women across Asia were killed by an intimate partner or family member in 2024 alone.
Fok Sin-yee was one woman inside that data. A woman who told a neighbour she was afraid of being killed. A woman whose swollen face was explained away. A woman whose partner, by his own admission, ended her life, and who is now asking a court to accept that because he had decided she was not human, his culpability should be reduced.
Keep an eye on The New Feminist as this trial develops.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, contact the National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247 or visit Women’s Aid. In Hong Kong, contact the Against Domestic Violence hotline on 182 182.