Jin Ruchao's plan unfolded over several days of grim logistics. Between March 12 and 14, he purchased dynamite in three separate transactions from a supplier named Wang Yushun in Luquan District. On March 15, he rented a pickup truck to transport the assembled bombs, but the driver refused to continue midway through the journey, forcing Jin to stash the explosives in an abandoned building outside the city. That evening, working with rented three-wheelers and taxis, he delivered bombs to four targets: the Hardware Company dormitory on Dianda Street, an apartment block on Minjin Street, the Shijiazhuang Number 1 Construction dormitory, and the Number 3 Cotton Mill dormitory. After a brief rest, he made additional deliveries to the latter two sites. He then used multiple taxis to reach each location in sequence and trigger the detonations.

The four buildings Jin targeted were worker dormitories, the kind of communal housing that sheltered ordinary families in Chinese cities. These were not military installations or government offices. They were places where people woke up, ate breakfast, sent children to school, and came home from factory shifts. The 108 people who died were overwhelmingly civilians whose connection to the bomber was indirect at most. Jin had targeted these specific buildings because of personal grievances against his ex-wife, his former mother-in-law, and a former lover who lived in or near them. His rage consumed lives that had nothing to do with the disputes that consumed him.

Jin Ruchao was born on December 7, 1960. He lost his hearing at age eight due to an ear infection, and the resulting isolation shaped a life marked by loneliness and deepening resentment. He endured bullying at school and dropped out during middle school for financial reasons, moving through a series of jobs including work at a textile factory. His diary revealed suspicion toward family members and a fixation on his ex-wife, whom he blamed for a 1988 rape conviction and for traffic accidents that killed his mother and injured his father in 1994. Before the bombings, he had already committed murder, stabbing a girlfriend to death in her home in Maguan County, Yunnan, before traveling to Hebei to carry out his plan.

The Chinese government responded to widespread public fear by publishing an unusually detailed account of the bombings. Authorities initially posted a reward of 50,000 RMB for information leading to the bomber's arrest, then doubled it to 100,000 RMB as the manhunt intensified. Jin was captured in Beihai, Guangxi, just eleven days after the attacks. He pleaded guilty at trial. Wang Yushun and Hao Fengqin, who had supplied him with ammonium nitrate, were also sentenced to death. A fourth person received a suspended death sentence for selling detonators and fuses. On December 26, 2002, Jin, Wang, and Hao were executed.

China scholar Andrew Scobell described the bombings as perhaps the worst terrorist act in the history of the People's Republic of China. The attack was the largest mass murder in the country in decades, and it exposed vulnerabilities in how explosives could be obtained in industrial and mining regions. Conspiracy theories circulated suggesting that Jin was a scapegoat and that the bombings were actually the work of disaffected former employees laid off during China's economic restructuring. Whether or not those theories had substance, they reflected a broader anxiety in Chinese society about the human costs of rapid economic transformation and the potential for private grievance to escalate into public catastrophe.