Suspicious deaths & alleged coverups in China

The Western media is busy covering China's latest crackdown on foreign news, which - actually - doesn't really change the status quo very much except when it comes to financial news. It's certainly a step backward when it comes to Chinese people's ability to access world economic and financial news in a timely manner (Beijing shoots self in foot once again), but its not like general news from foreign sources was ever freely distributed in China.

Meanwhile, Roland Soong of ESWN is complaining that the international media - and the English-language blogosphere - has failed to pick up the story about student demonstrations in southern China sparked by the suspicious death of schoolteacher Dai Haijing. Her death was ruled as a suicide but is widely believed by her students and friends to be a murder, according to online postings Roland has translated.  The protests reportedly snowballed into thousands of people, who overturned cars, smashed windows, etc., resulting in over a dozen hospitalizations. According to my Google news search (conducted Monday evening EST), all Western media coverage (at least what's accessible through Google) all comes from the same Associated Press article.

Interestingly, somebody has created an anonymous blog on Blogger.com (clearly for foreign consumption) called China Watch TV and is posting various documents and accounts from online forums about what is going on. There is English translation but it reads like machine translation - in other words, you practically need to know Chinese in order to understand the translation.

I don't remember protests happening for this type of reason in the 1990's. I think the rise of this kind of protest may signal a new phase.  Economic protests - peasants protesting over confiscated land, workers protesting over unpaid back wages and mistreatment, or even students protesting over being cheated out of their diplomas - is one thing. Those kinds of protests have been been going on for a very long time. But for such a big protest to happen over an alleged police cover up - in other words, over something that doesn't physically or economically impact the people demonstrating - that did not happen when I was working in China from 1992-2001, as far as I know. Does this indicate just how much social volatility there must be in some of China's cities, and just how fearful the authorities must be of the lid blowing off? Does it mean people are more ready to act on their anger and frustration than any time since 1989?  Or am I completely off base here? If so, I'm sure my readers will let me know..

The violence surrounding Dai Haijing's case may help to explain why the media in Guangzhou has (from what I hear) been kept completely away from the death of a respected Guangzhou doctor - who according to the Guangzhou rumor mill was brutally murdered by car theives. John Kennedy has posted on his Feng37 blog about it, translating the one blog post he could find about the doctor's death after an acquaintance of his with public security ties first told him the story.  (If the post's permalink isn't working for you, go to the main URL and scroll down to the long post about the doctor, which includes his picture). John writes:

Was having early-morning dim sum with an old friend recently, a sympathetic cog (fully aware that I blog) in the anti-freedom machine (spend enough time in an authoritarian country and you're bound to meet one or two) who launched into the story about one high-ranking administrator at some well-known hospital in Guangzhou who, driving home from work one night, was struck by another vehicle on the road. Instead of calling 9-1-1, the occupants of the offending vehicle, allegedly a group of thugs from Hunan province, drove the car to the outskirts of the city where they sold it and proceeded to kill the administrator, cut his body into pieces which they then buried. A few days later, all the suspects were caught.

Upon returning home I Googled the supposedly dead's name. A bunch of medical reports and hospital websites turned up, but absolutely nothing about his death. Was I given bunk information? Or was this a mass coverup aimed at preventing an increase of distrust and dislike of out-of-provincers who already make up somewhere between a third and half, maybe more, of the population of greater Guangzhou? For whatever reason, local media haven't yet reported on this story. Is the man even dead? If I were a journalist, I suppose I would phone the man's hospital and ask, but I'm a blogger so I fired up the Technorati, and a second search brought up only this one blog post dated August 19, self-explanatory enough I suppose. But is the blogger really who s/he says, a former student and almost-resident of the deceased? Is a bit of hear-say [sic] and a bit of inside gossip enough to go on? The blogger's convinced me, and I trust my friend, thus this post.

John subsequently found an obituary for Dr. Qing Sanhua on the web, with no cause of death given. 

In the West we frequently complain of too  much crime reporting. But when people don't trust the press to be reporting the truth about whether crimes have been committed or not, and rumors swirl around unconfirmed, what does that do to a society?

Comments

[sun bin]

It seems such recent events indicate a few trends:

1) Since non-political protests are not punished, people are willing to take part in.
2) This serves as a trend in China's slow open up to "free speech" -- yes, still too slow, but the govt is just loosing ground inch by inch
3) such easing up is inevitable, as economic and information flow (internet!) opens china up, and as the rigidity of the top-down system could not address the issue of unfairness in society

finally, the SARS event was the turning point.

[mike]

regarding dai haijing - what if the mobs are wrong? what if she did commit suicide? maybe the reason few media have reported on the death itself (as opposed to the wider issues of cover ups and mass incidents) is that it is a somewhat confusing and hard to crack story. this kind of rationale (mob rises, allegations must be true) is just as worrying as the continuing corruption and cover ups.

I am reminded of the chinese girl who set up an internet site defaming her father for having an affair. the online mob rose and her father was castigated by all. turned out he wasn't having an affair after all. did another mob rise to apologise to the father? of course not.

[Feng 37]

That's the point, isn't it? Allow these stories to be told so that people don't have to resort to street mobs just to get answers.

[oiwan]

actually it happened. my beida friend told me that around 2001, a Arts student was raped and murdered in beida's Arts campus, which is at the outskirt of beijing city, the surrounding is like rural area. it happened around june 4, and there was a campus demonstration. but in the end, the university managed to pacify the students and promise to improve the security of the outskirt campus.

[C. Brayton]

On the financial news angle you note in passing, it's interesting to note that the Xinhua Financial Network is a Caymans corporation controlled by Nevada-incorporated holding company, listed on the OTCBB, with a share participation by the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency, that has agreed to apply China's new strictures on business reporting to its coverage.

It makes an interesting comparative case study with the flap over Google's, MSN's and Yahoo's business practices in China, I think.

At any rate, this deal should certainly give XFN a leg up over competitors like Reuters, Bloomberg and FT, which have all dispatched negotiators recently, I've noticed, to work out terms for doing their own business in the PRC, with its overheated markets and the demand for business data and information they generate.

Moral of the story: The Chinese seem to be very good at using economic pressure to keep a tight rein on foreign media operations.

It always strikes me as incredibly risky to invest in a "free market" reform in which state agencies control information flows. And yet Western firms are flocking to do just that. Go figure.