Kathrin Hille of the Financial Times (London) with a detailed, nuanced – and very disturbing contemporary account of how China suppresses and deters dissent in How China Polices the Internet Excerpts follow:
On the night of January 29 this year, five peasants were delivered into Jinning detention centre, a dark little facility in the province of Yunnan in southwestern China. They were accused of illegal logging, a lucrative sideline for many farmers in this impoverished region.
It was a routine arrest. But 10 days later one of the men, a 24-year-old named Li Qiaoming, was dead. Presenting his bruised and swollen corpse to shocked parents on February 12, the police said Li had died accidentally during a game of blind man’s buff, or “elude the cat” as it’s called in China. Officers explained to the elderly couple that their son had been chosen as the “cat”, was blindfolded by cellmates, and while chasing the “mice” banged his head into a wall with such force that he died of his injuries four days later. The case was closed and Li’s parents sent back to their village.
But the next night, a Friday, officers on duty in a different department of the Yunnan police – the internet security management division – detected some unusual online activity. The story of Li’s death was being discussed with fervour. Two prominent local bloggers asked how stumbling into a wall could possibly kill someone. Internet bulletin-board users ridiculed the official explanation, suggesting instead that Li had been beaten to death by jail wardens. A cartoon appeared, showing three men in striped prison outfits with their heads stuck in the walls and the floor of a cell.
Nor did the commentary subside over the weekend. Li’s family started voicing their doubts and pain. Their son was to have been married on February 16; he and his friends had been cutting and selling trees in order to raise money for a more lavish wedding. Soon, “elude the cat” websites started to appear, featuring pictures of Li and his fiancée and offering forums for debate of the forensic evidence. Online bulletin boards saw outpourings of fury about police brutality and the government apparently lying to its people. This wasn’t the first time Chinese officials had faced a rambunctious online community, but in this case they decided to handle things differently. Wu Hao, deputy propaganda chief for the area, put out an online appeal for “netizens” to help investigate the case. Within hours, thousands had signed up. Wu picked a group of 15, among them some of the bloggers who had been most vocal in attacking the police’s behaviour and in fuelling the debate. He invited them to tour the Jinning detention facility and be briefed by the wardens. State media outlets ran stories about the bloggers entering through the heavy metal door that had banged shut behind Li three weeks earlier.
And while the blogger investigation committee couldn’t do much real investigating – its members were refused access to surveillance camera footage and to key witnesses – the stunt proved a coup for Wu. The bloggers released a report concluding that they knew too little to give a proper assessment of what had happened, while provincial prosecutors announced that Li had not died from playing blind man’s bluff but had been beaten to death by another prisoner. Soon, the debate died down.
Wu told me this story with pride three months after Li’s death. A 39-year-old former reporter at the official Xinhua news agency, Wu is no revolutionary. But he is unusual in agreeing to meet me for an in-depth discussion of his work. While local reporters and editors feel the propaganda department breathing down their necks on a daily basis, the department is normally keen to keep foreign news organisations at arm’s length – and in the dark about exactly what it does.
The article by Kathrin Hille – How China Polices the Internet . describes how China censors the Internet in response to changed circumstances by selectively allowing the bloggers to work, that is by allowing bloggers access to small amounts of data and to publish items such as The Mysterious Death of Li Qiaoming on Fool’s Mountain.