Going down a news rabbit hole in China

Sometimes you come across a story that sounds too good to be true. When that happens in China, where the authorities keep a tight grip on the media – and when the news first appears on the Internet, a hotbed of intentionally spread lies – I have learned to ask two questions right off the bat.

Is it really true? And regardless of how true it is, why are we hearing about it now?

Those leaped to mind last week when I came across a story on the Web about a Chinese mafia boss with apparent connections to high-level Communist Party officials and a lifestyle Al Capone would have blushed at.

Trying to pin the story down, though, I found myself disappearing down an information rabbit hole, discovering how news can be used – and abused – for all sorts of purposes in China. I drew blanks at false addresses and with sources hiding behind false names, watched articles disappear from websites overnight, and realized that little was exactly as it seemed and practically nothing was verifiable.

"The Web is becoming a political terrain that all kinds of political forces are trying to use for their own purposes," says Xiao Qiang, who heads the China Internet Project at the University of California. As the key forum for debate in China, enjoying more freedom than traditional media, the Web is harder to navigate reliably here than elsewhere. "All kinds of political and economic agendas are competing. It can be very hard [to sort truth from fiction] because people are deliberately manipulating this medium," he adds.

This story began three weeks ago, when a little-known website, the China Citizens' Rule of Law Network, published an article about a mafia boss in the city of Tangshan who had reportedly extorted more than $100 million from local firms – said to be the biggest such racket uncovered since the People's Republic's founding in 1949.

With protection from a senior police officer, the article implied, Yang Shukuan had driven a private armored personnel car and a stretch limo around town kidnapping and threatening victims, indulged in drugs, forced a gang member's wife to be his mistress, and amassed 38 illegal firearms and 10,000 rounds of ammunition before being arrested last March. The policeman was detained a few weeks later.

Sex, drugs, guns, underworld kingpins, corrupt policemen – this story had it all, plus a suspicion that more senior officials than the policeman must have been involved.

Soon, papers and websites all over China – including People.com.cn, the online organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party – had published stories on "Three Treasures" Yang, as the mafia boss was known in Tangshan, a city 120 miles east of Beijing.

All the stories quoted one another, however. In the end, the trail of attributions led back to the Rule of Law Network. Nobody answered repeated phone calls to the number published on the site's home page, so early on Thursday morning last week, my assistant and I set off to find the address it advertised.

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