There was a similar case in the US.
In the 70's, there was a crooked cop who was convicted (for some lewd acts) and had to surrender himself to prison. He chose to run instead and spent 22 years in the forest.<p>Eventually he couldn't take it anymore and surrendered himself. He was then given a suspended sentence citing that he already has been through enough.<p>Here's a podcast episode on that: <a href="https://snapjudgment.org/cop-out" rel="nofollow">https://snapjudgment.org/cop-out</a>
They guy had managed to inflict himself punishment at no cost to taxpayers. At least victims will have some relief, otherwise it's a waste of time.
> Yongshan police received clues about Song's whereabouts in early September, they said on their WeChat account.<p>So there is no tech or surveillance story here. Only the use of a relatively common high tech gadget aiding good old fashioned police work.
His crime is sufficiently distateful that I dont want to defend him specifically. But the overall subject raises interesting questions about enforcement of laws and their applicability as enforcement approaches perfect. (ie 100%)<p>For example consider speeding laws we can actually approach perfect enforcement using GPS data and engine management. But then the question becomes how does the archaic law morph when perfectly applied? Should _every_ driver who _ever_ speeds be charged the fine? That is roughly every driver every time they drive whom uses the highways near me. And how often should they be charged? Each time they exceed the speed limit (for example if speedlimit is 65 and I brake to 64, then speed to 66 several times, is that several tickets?) ...<p>I suspect that most of our laws have been written without grace/forgiveness knowing that we used to only catch a small percentage of perpetrators, and likely the most egregious of them (assuming frequency & magnitude would increase probability of being caught). What ought do if that percent sky rockets, but the laws were designed for the former value?
I've watched "Alone" on the History Channel from time to time. One of the things that surprised me was how the contestants were affected mentally. Often enough they tap out not from lack of food, but from lack of human contact.<p>It's amazing this guy survived. It's close to a miracle he did it alone.
Establishing a new identity wasn't a huge task when we were paper based. A pretty common approach was finding someone that died young, roughly your age, in a rural or religious community that probably didn't file the right papers to document the death. Or somewhere small enough that destroying the single paper in a file accomplished the same.<p>Then bootstrap that up from a birth certificate to a social security card and so on.<p>I imagine it's not that simple anymore.
Living in a cave not able to leave maybe <i>slightly</i> better than a jail cell? Of course I'm not sure what other horrors he faced in a Chinese prison.
I wonder if he'd had means, not a lot just a few thousand dollars, he would have been able to remain free.<p>Maybe moving completely out of the area, buying a used car cash and driving to another state entirely?<p>Somehow getting himself into Mexico and boarding a ship somewhere in south america or asia?<p>I wonder if these days with all the surveillance it really takes living in a cave to get away from law enforcement.
Reminds me of the famous examples of Japanese soldiers fighting on after 1945, two of them (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruo_Nakamura" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teruo_Nakamura</a>, on separate islands) until 1974.<p>(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout</a> even mentions “Shigeyuki Hashimoto and Kiyoaki Tanaka joined the Malayan Communist Party's guerrilla forces to continue fighting, returning to Japan in January 1990”)