On June 22, 2008, a sixteen-year-old girl by the name of Li Shufen went out in the evening with three young men, all of whom were reportedly well-connected politically in Weng'an county of Guizhou province. Late that night, officials came to her house to tell her parents that their daughter had committed suicide. Li Shufen's father, doubting the officials’ explanation, requested an autopsy. Soon there were rumors that the girl had been raped and murdered, so her family kept her corpse on ice, demanding an adequate explanation. Following a second autopsy on June 28, the local Public Security Bureau notified the family that “since the cause of death has been ascertained [i.e., drowning], the preservation of her body is no longer necessary” and it demanded that the body be interred that day or the police would handle the matter themselves.

Rather than calm the situation, the notification angered residents, who continued to suspect foul play. There were many reasons why the people of Weng'an distrusted officials. Weng'an is a poor county in the poor province of Guizhou, not far from the prefectural city of Zunyi, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had paused along the Long March in January 1935 to convene a meeting that would lead to Mao Zedong becoming preeminent leader. In 2008, Weng'an county was still overwhelmingly agricultural, with 90 percent of the population engaged in farming. There were, however, other resources in the area, including the potential for hydropower and the development of phosphorous and coal resources. When the Goupitan Hydropower Station was built in 2004, more than 4,000 peasants were relocated, but others refused to be moved, complaining bitterly about the low compensation that they were offered. When county party secretary Wang Qi went to Jiangjiehe village, where most of the peasants to be relocated lived, residents blocked the road and would not allow Wang and his entourage to leave unless they were offered higher compensation. Soon the police showed up and over thirty villagers were injured in the ensuing conflict. In 2007, after again demanding that all residents relocate, the government moved in with bulldozers and leveled houses and fruit trees. Fields were sprayed with herbicides to prevent the crops from ripening. Some 1,000 villagers were thus forcibly relocated to Seven-Star village in the country seat, where they continued to believe that their compensation was too low.