For China's Censors, Electronic Offenders Are the New Frontier

For two months, the posting bounced from Web site to Web site around the country, with delighted readers eager to share it with others. The topic touched a nerve for many Chinese, who are constantly told in official propaganda how party leaders are the "vanguard" to be emulated but who just as constantly see their local officials involved in corruption and dissolute living.

For reasons Fan does not understand, the posting long escaped the notice of Ling An censors. Finally, though, officials from Ling An and surrounding Qing Liangfeng County got wind of the merriment. Not amused, they had the city Propaganda Department order that the report be deleted immediately. The department's deputy director called, Fan said, accusing him of airing dirty laundry in public.

Fan, a businessman at heart, quickly complied, taking the satire down Aug. 8 and replacing it with a statement saying the intern "lacked social experience" and had made a blunder. The description of Xu's death was untrue, the Web site said, and the intern was fired for posting it. He has since gone into hiding, Fan said.

"We hope readers don't talk about this anymore, and please do trust the party," the notice concluded.

Fan's troubles were not over. Police raided his offices Aug. 24 and seized 13 computers, confiscating his investment and putting him out of business. Officials said he was allowing young people to log on from his office, turning it into an unauthorized Internet cafe. But in Fan's view, it was the Ling An party leadership getting back at him for the embarrassing report on their colleagues' deaths.

"It's revenge," Fan said.

Web Wins in Credibility

As July rains pelted China, the northeastern province of Shandong got an unusually heavy three-hour downpour. As a result, the provincial capital, Jinan, flooded.

Guided by the provincial Propaganda Department, government-controlled newspapers and television stations focused their reports on efforts by authorities to rescue those stranded by the floodwaters and restore municipal services to affected areas. In all, officials reported, 34 people were killed in and around the city.

Not so, insisted an Internet contributor who identified herself as Red Diamond Empire. At least 100 people were killed in downtown Jinan alone, she said, when floodwaters poured into an underground supermarket.

As usual, she went on, authorities were concealing the real death toll to minimize the scope of the tragedy. The truth came out because bystanders saw the bodies as the floodwaters receded, she said.

After her account attracted wide attention, the 23-year-old woman, identified only by her surname Li, was arrested and charged with contributing to public disorder by spreading rumors. The arrest was widely reported in government-controlled media. But more than a month later, a Jinan taxi driver eagerly recounted to a visitor how several hundred people had died in the supermarket.

Jinan residents and others across China readily believed the anonymous Internet posting rather than the official version provided by city and provincial authorities. Using their censorship powers, local governments routinely have concealed the extent of natural disasters and other accidents to avoid blame from the central government in Beijing. As a result, many Chinese learned long ago not to believe statistics relayed by the government-controlled media.

Tracking a Cancer Rumor

From spring well into the summer, southern China's banana farmers faced a crisis they could not understand. From cellphone to cellphone, a text-message rumor had swept the country saying that Chinese bananas carried an infection called "Panama virus" that could cause cancer. As a result, consumers everywhere were leery, and bananas piled up unsold.

Distraught agriculture officials knew of no such problem with Chinese bananas. Eager to restore the market, they called in the Public Security Ministry's electronic censors to find out where the rumor originated. From message to message, the monitors traced it back through thousands of cellphone connections.

After weeks of sleuthing, they discovered the first message had been sent by a woman in Nanning, capital of Guangxi province just northwest of Vietnam. Because she lived in a major banana-growing region, they surmised the woman might have been seeking to inflict harm on a local businessman or farmer.

But after tracking her down and interrogating her, Nanning police said she explained that she was only passing along what she had read in an article in China Daily, the government's main English-language newspaper. Beijing police launched an investigation at the newspaper's head office in the capital. The article in question was indeed about bananas and it did mention cancer, they found, but the writer had said nothing about bananas causing cancer.

After further interrogation, China Daily editors said, Nanning police discovered the woman was reading the paper as a way to improve her English -- which was still shaky -- and she had misunderstood the article.