China executes man convicted in poisoning of billionaire game tycoon Lin Qi

China has executed Xu Yao, the former Yoozoo Games associate convicted of poisoning billionaire founder Lin Qi in a case that blurred the line between corporate rivalry and global entertainment power. Lin’s death, tied to the company behind the rights to The Three-Body Problem trilogy, turned a business dispute into one of China’s most widely recognized criminal cases.

The case drew international attention because Lin Qi’s company controlled the film and television rights to Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, better known by the title of its first volume, The Three-Body Problem. In September 2020, Netflix announced it had been granted the rights by The Three-Body Universe and Yoozoo Group to make an English-language adaptation. The series, 3 Body Problem, later premiered on March 21, 2024. The trilogy has since been translated into more than 40 languages and helped fuel a wider Chinese sci-fi ecosystem of books, movies, games, magazines and exhibitions.

Court reporting said Xu poisoned Lin’s food in December 2020 after a dispute over how the business was being run, following his sidelining after he helped secure the Netflix deal. Lin, who was 39, died on December 25, 2020, 10 days after the poisoning. Several other Yoozoo employees were also made ill but recovered. Authorities said Xu used multiple delivery methods, disguising toxic substances as probiotic pills and hiding them in coffee capsules, water containers and whiskey bottles.

In March 2024, the Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Xu to death for homicide and gave him a separate six-year term for releasing hazardous substances. Reporting at the time described the case as both a murder prosecution and a punishment for a wider hazardous-substances offense. Xu’s execution took place on May 21, 2026, according to local media and a public statement from Yoozoo on Weibo. The company said the case had reached its conclusion and that justice had ultimately been served.

The killing and its aftermath underscored how sharply China’s high-stakes tech and media worlds can collide. Lin was not only a game tycoon but also a gatekeeper for one of the country’s most valuable cultural properties, an intellectual property that reached a global streaming audience through Netflix and carried Chinese science fiction far beyond mainland markets. Xu’s execution closes the criminal case, but the episode remains a stark example of how business resentment, personal grievance and a billion-dollar entertainment franchise became inseparable.