Life sentence

A young man from Anhui province has spent some of the best years of his life in jail. But it is not because he is a crimimal mastermind. Instead it’s because he hates his wife and would rather be locked up than live with her.

That’s according to the Qianjiang Evening News, which reports that the 30 year-old Wu has just been jailed for a fourth time in a decade. Last month he stole an electric bike, after despairing that neither his own mother or father nor his wife’s parents would agree to his getting a divorce.

His parents sound like overbearing types. They forced the former mariner to date his wife in 2005. Not liking her, he committed a crime so he could escape their matchmaking. Released from jail in 2009, the man assumed that her parents would not want their daughter to marry an ex-con. But they still wanted the ceremony to go ahead, so he committed another crime to avoid a wedding. In 2013 when he was released from prison again, he was sure that he could lead a single life, but both sets of parents were insistent and he was forced to marry her. In the hope that his father-in-law would finally grasp that he was an unreliable sort, he offended again, expecting divorce proceedings when he got out. When that plan didn’t work either, he stole the bike, seeing a return to jail as the better option. Wu later sent the bike’s owner Rmb1,000 by way of apology, Qianjiang Evening News says. This illustrated he hadn’t stolen it because he needed the cash, the newspaper thought, but simply to get away from his family.

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