Chinese express condolences for student slain in Boston

Many Chinese went online Wednesday to mourn Lü Lingzi, 23, the Boston University graduate student who died in Monday's Boston Marathon explosions. More than 20,000 people posted messages of condolence on her micro-blog, where her final entry featured her last breakfast. Many more people noted their sorrow on other social media platforms.She called herself Dorothy Lu in English, but to her parents and the Chinese nation sharing their grief, she will forever be Lü Lingzi, whose given name Lingzi means "Excellent Child" in Chinese. She had been living up to that exacting name.Born in the northeast province of Liaoning, an industrial heavyweight under China's planned economy that declined into rust belt in more recent, capitalist times, Lü attended the Northeast Yucai School in the provincial capital Shenyang. Yang Yongkun, a former teacher, called Lü "especially smart, sincere and honest," according to the Shenyang Evening News, her hometown newspaper.BU Chaplain Robert Hill said he had visited the injured woman twice, and "she has her friends around her, and she will soon have family around her."

Despite regular tensions in the U.S.-Chinese relationship, Chinese students flock to U.S. universities in such numbers that they are the leading source of international students in the USA, known as the "Beautiful Country" in Chinese.Like most young, urban Chinese, Lü enjoyed documenting and sharing her life and likes online. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are banned by China's communist authorities because of their capacity to inform and organize protest and opposition, but their domestic, censored versions are hugely popular.Once she reached the USA, Lü kept posting on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter equivalent, and could more easily access her Facebook page, where she wrote "New Hampshire is such a great place!" last October.On Weibo, Lü listed her interests as food, music, reading and finance. She enjoyed posting pictures of cooking experiments, including her first "successful" kimchi pancake March 30. She noted unhappier moments, such as the time a professor's criticism "wrecked" her good mood March 8.Some state-owned Chinese media used the bombings as a chance Wednesday to criticize what they see as the West's "double standards" on terrorists, meaning the failure to meet Beijing's request to crack down on exile groups advocating independence for Xinjiang, China's Muslim province in the far northwest.