Chinese street vendor's execution prompts online backlash Xia Junfeng in court. He cited self-defence but was not allowed to call witnesses. Photo: China News Service BEIJING: For a country that sentences more people to death than the rest of the world combined, there is something to be said about the spontaneous outpouring of sympathy over the execution of Xia Junfeng, a convicted double-murderer. But Xia's death, on Wednesday, may well have gone unnoticed, if not for a series of chilling posts from his wife, Zhang Jing, which quickly went viral on Weibo, a popular social networking and messaging platform. "Early this morning, the court sent people to take me to meet Xia Junfeng for the last time," she said. I'm going crazy. Getting ready to go. Xia Junfeng with his wife, Zhang Jing, and their son some years ago. A few hours later, authorities confirmed the execution had been carried out, but not before one last insult. Officials rejected Xia's final request to be photographed in his final moments for his son's memory. "Xia Junfeng begged them to take a picture for our family but they said no," she said . Why are you so cruel, why? A painting by Xia Junfeng's son, that went viral on Weibo. Zhang Jing also revealed on Weibo that Xia was stoic as they said goodbye. "When we were together, the whole family was crying in a heap, yet Xia Junfeng did not shed a tear," she said. Xia's story has resonated strongly with the general public and attracted broad coverage in the Chinese media. Much focus has been on the couple's only son, now in his early teens, who had taken to painting portraits of his absent father. Those paintings were also widely circulated on Weibo. In May 2009, Xia had been laid off from his factory job. To make ends meet he had taken to selling sausages from his street stall in Shenyang, in north-east Liaoning province, when he ran into trouble with local urban management officers, known as chengguan, who wanted him to move along. A scuffle broke out and took a violent turn. Xia stabbed two of the chengguan to death with a meat knife. The authorities alleged the attack was unprovoked. Xia and his supporters said it was in self-defence from a savage beating, and there were witnesses to prove it. "I was there at the scene," Xia's wife, Zhang Jing, said at the time. We found six eyewitnesses to prove Xia was beaten. All these witnesses are willing to testify, but they were not allowed to appear in court. The impunity of chengguan, generally considered to be a rung or two below police, has become notorious across the nation. Outrage erupted in Hunan province in July when a watermelon vendor died at the hands of six urban enforcers. Xia was swiftly sentenced to death, and an appeal was rejected in 2011. It has been a week that has been packed with a bizarre array of news from the courts, even by Chinese standards. Former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai was sentenced to life in prison. Han Lei, who responded to a road rage incident with a woman by killing her one-year-old son by throwing him onto the pavement, was sentenced to death. A Beijing court heard businesswoman Ding Shumiao colluded with a corrupt former railways chief over projects worth more than 185 billion yuan ($AUS32 billion). But the most searched term on Weibo on Wednesday was Xia Junfeng. There were the angry comments on the injustice of it all, and how the chengguan involved with the watermelon vendor's death got off lightly. There were those who pondered why Bo Xilai's wife, Gu Kailai, was only given a suspended death sentence (which is usually commuted to a set jail term), despite murdering British businessman Neil Heywood. But ultimately, it was mostly an outpouring of sadness and sympathy. "I am overwhelmed with sadness and a sense of powerlessness" one netizen said. My heart is weeping.