Going down a news rabbit hole in China

After an hour's drive into Beijing's western suburbs, we located the place – a nondescript hotel in the shadow of a highway that rented out a few rooms as offices. None of them was rented to the Chinese Citizens' Rule of Law Network, nor to the Association of Chinese Legal Workers, to which the site claims to belong. Indeed, there is no such association, we were told by an official at the clerk's bureau of the Ministry of Justice, which registers such organizations.

Curiouser and curiouser. The posted articles about Mr. Yang appeared under the byline "Bei Dou," a pen name meaning "North Star," which did not give me much to go on. When somebody finally answered the phone at the site's office, he refused to identify himself or to respond to questions and hung up on me twice.

By Friday evening, the official shutters were coming down in ways that every Chinese knows is a sign that the authorities have had enough. People.com.cn, the online version of Peoples Daily, had removed its article, for example.

Local government and police officials in Tangshan were refusing to answer questions, referring me to a police statement confirming that Mr. Yang had been arrested, along with a police officer and 36 other suspects, and saying that the case "is still under investigation." The next day, the Rule of Law Network was "closed for maintenance."

"North Star," though, had opened blogs on five blog-hosting sites and posted on them the articles that first appeared on the Rule of Law site.

On one, he identified himself as Pan Shupei, a reporter for a state-run agency whose personal motto is "Restore the reality of news and report the news behind the news."

He said his boss had closed the website down for a while because the Tangshan story had attracted too much attention. He wanted to cool the issue down now that it had become a national Internet "cause célèbre."

"This was an easy case to spread because people hate corrupt officials' connections with powerful rich people," says Mr. Qiang, who tracks Chinese websites. Who wanted to spread it, though? And is it true?

The day before he shuttered his site, "North Star" recounted in a post that he and his colleagues had decided to publish the article they had received about Yang and his gang because, "It was recommended by an editor from a very important Communist Party newspaper."

"This is an internal leak through the Rule of Law Network," Qiang believes, which suggests that, while the site may not have a real address nor a genuine sponsor, it does enjoy the support of one government or party agency or another.

"How true it [the leak] is is another matter," Qiang adds. Somebody, somewhere, seems to have wanted to draw national attention to a criminal case that had gone unreported. Who that might be, and what the purpose was, remains unanswered. "We have to wait and see what the official version of events is, and how it differs from the Internet version," says Qiang.

The reasons why that version has emerged are still obscure. But despite the manipulation, Qiang argues, the Internet in China provides a megaphone for such stories. As such, he says, it remains "a force to make the truth come out."

Page: 1 | 2