A mainland Chinese court has quietly apologized and withdrawn a nine-year-old girl from a blacklist prohibiting her from consumption following the child’s failure to repay the debt of her murderer father.

The judicial U-turn this week was made just 20 days after Zhengzhou Jinshui People’s Court in Henan province last month slapped the ban on the young girl, barring her from high-end spending such as rides on China’s high-speed railway, leisure travel and hotel accommodation.

The local court was believed to have bowed to pressure arising from online criticism of its ban. Internet users said that the girl, likely the youngest debt defaulter placed under administration in China, could not possibly be made to bear the 550,000 yuan (US$84,000) debt of her father, who had been sentenced to the death penalty for two killings.

Xiaoqing, the child at the center of the storm, was born on May 21, 2011. That year, her father Chen Dong wanted to sell the family abode because of the heavy debts he had chalked up from gambling, but his wife and mother-in-law refused to give in. On the afternoon of Feb. 23, 2012, Chen killed the two women, dismembered their bodies and then fled with Xiaoqing four days later to his hometown in Changsha, Hunan province, where he passed 200,000 yuan to an elder brother and put the baby, still swaddled in cloth, under the latter’s care, claiming he was in the midst of a divorce.

Before running away, Chen had signed an agreement to sell the family house to a colleague, Wang Peng, and had received 550,000 yuan as deposit. Wang was to pay the remaining 136,300 yuan after the property transfer procedures were completed.

The elder brother’s suspicions were raised in early March 2012 when he received a letter of confession from Chen. He made a police report, and in November of the same year, the murderer was arrested in Guizhou province.

With one parent dead and the other on death row, Xiaoqing was taken under the wings of her maternal grandfather Wang Aiguo on court orders. When she turned three, a woman Chen Ruolan came forward to adopt her, helping to relieve the financial burden on the elderly Wang, now 72.

Meanwhile, the house buyer Wang Peng was pursuing one civil lawsuit after another to sort out his property purchase. Following a judge’s rejection of his case to declare the sale contract legal and valid, Wang tried to get the courts to terminate the contract and order the return of his deposit of 550,000 yuan.

Wang listed Chen’s parents as the defendants. The old couple was worried about the legal troubles and signed an agreement to give the house to Xiaoqing as a gift.

In a series of judgements between June 28, 2019, and Oct. 29 this year, the Zhengzhou courts ruled that the contract was invalid and that Wang had to return the house to the family. At the same time, Xiaoqing was ordered to return the 550,000 yuan to Wang as Chen’s parents had given up their inheritance of the son’s property.

The young Xiaoqing obviously could not pay up, so the Zhengzhou Jinshui court on Nov. 25, 2020, listed her as a debt defaulter and put her on the blacklist that banned high-end consumption.

Human rights lawyer Ren Quanniu said the defaulter enforcement order should be restricting people who had the means, and not targeted at minors. Other members of the public also criticized the court’s ruling.

On Monday afternoon, the court lifted the consumption ban on Xiaoqing, followed by a quiet apology made on its official Weibo account at 1:49am on Tuesday.

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