Gao was arrested in August 2016 at his own grocery store following a DNA test stemming from an unrelated crime committed by one of his relatives, state TV said, ending a 28-year search.
Gao targeted young women wearing red and followed them home to rape and kill them.
He often cut their throat and mutilated their bodies.
Some victims also had their reproductive organs removed.
"The suspect has a sexual perversion and hates women," police said in 2004, when they linked the crimes for the first time and offered a reward of 200,000 yuan ($30,000) for information leading to an arrest.
'He's reclusive and unsociable, but patient,' they said at the time.
The original Jack the Ripper was a serial killer active in east London in the late Victorian era.
He is widely believed to have murdered five women, mutilating several of them. Those killings have never been solved.
Gao was identified after a relative was put under house arrest in Baiyin over allegations of a minor crime and had his DNA collected and tested.
Police concluded the killer they had been hunting for 28 years was a relation, and Gao's DNA matched the murderer's.
There were no explanations as to why the killings stopped in 2002.
Miscarriages of justice are not rare in China, where the use of force to extract confessions remains widespread.
In several high-profile cases in recent years, China has exonerated wrongfully executed or jailed convicts after others came forward to confess their crimes, or in some cases because the supposed murder victim was later found alive.
