Going down a news rabbit hole in China
Trying to confirm a Web report becomes a lesson in the uses and abuses of news on the Internet.
from the June 29, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
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.
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.
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