Say somewhere in China, during the Olympics, mobs of citizens go spastic over some case of official malfeasance, or mishandled public concerns thereof. Not some quibble over sovereignty or state security (like Tibet or terrorism) which turns public opinion against "anti-China" forces. We’re talking a squarely domestic social crisis. Will word of unrest filter out to the wired masses elsewhere around the country? Will Netizens clamor in curiosity and anger? Will their attempts to access information and engage in debate be stymied?

   Will this make them even angrier? Will they find cracks in the vaunted Great Firewall of China? Will senior leaders react fast enough to dispel the uproar? Will a lot of observers still be stewing for some time afterward? Will the 20,000 to 30,000 foreign journalists in China for the Games be all over the story? The answer to all these questions is likely to be yes, if we’re to judge by reactions to violent convulsion in Guizhou this past weekend.

   On Sunday night, I stepped into my favorite pub in Beijing to find it dead quiet but for Little Wang, the 22-year-old exec barman. Wang’s a scrawny migrant from the south who mixes a mean mojito with an unflagging social conscience (he appeared on this blog in a previous post), and it does not take much to press his buttons. Little Wang was literally stomping mad over the mass protest in China’s deep-south a day earlier.

    Wang had first read about the incident in Weng’an county on popular Chinese Web forums, particularly Maopu. People were up in arms over the death of a 16-year-old girl who drowned in a river a week earlier. Police ruled her death a suicide; her family suspected she was raped and murdered. Rumors spread that two young men she was with were somehow related to the county party secretary and a police station chief, and that the girl’s uncle, a local teacher, was beaten to death outside public security headquarters where he pressed her case (turned out he was beaten but not dead, as later revealed by a Hong Kong TV interview with him from his hospital bed).

    On Saturday afternoon, a group of 300 people led by family, friends, and classmates descended on the police and government HQs. The crowd eventually swelled to as many as 30,000 people. A standoff with riot police spiraled out of control. In seven hours of fiery bedlam, people smashed, looted, and torched police cars and government offices, injuring more than 100 police. (The blog ESWN carries lots of pix)

     Suspicious death cases with police links can easily stir moments of national reckoning over class barriers in China today, as they long have race relations in the States  - take the case of Sun Zhigang in 2003 or Lu Haixiang in 2004. Little Wang was plenty steamed about the rumors of foul play in Weng’an. The sentiment was echoed by his understudy Xiao Huang, who confessed to being “dizzy” from hearing Little Wang’s rant but added: “I myself have never thought anything good of China’s police. They’re all corrupt scum of the earth.”

    What really riled Little Wang, though, was his confusion about the case. Why were people in Weng'an angry? Were their suspicions true? Why didn’t the government address them properly? Efforts to answer his questions only left him more frustrated. Wang:

“…All night and morning, I was clicking on posts about it. First it was there. Then it was gone. Then it was there again. Then gone. Every few minutes it was being deleted, sometimes every few seconds. The site had orders to block it. That was obvious. But they couldn’t keep up. Every time they did, we Netizens got angrier and angrier.”

 
      Little Wang gave up surfing on Tianya, the go-to Web forum in China for discussion of social injustices. “Tianya’s too serious!” he scoffed. In fact, though the editors were scrubbing out posts about Weng’an, Tianya groupies were masking their posts under oblique headers, sometimes very oblique headers. Roland Soong, the Hong Kong-based uber-blogger behind ESWN,  detailed this phenomena (see comment 030), which was later covered in The Wall Street Journal. Wrote Soong on Sunday evening: 

"For example, the first item says that oveseas media are paying a great of attention of the lives of people living in the plateau of the Yunnan-Guizhou area.  The second item says that the people of X'an (Guizhou) are lighting an extra large sacred flame to celebrate the Beijing Olympics.  The third item just says, "Delete this!!  Your mother's c*nt!"  The fourth item says that "when the army arrives in southwestern China, I think something big will happen!  I believe that our troops have conscience."  The fifth item says that the anti-American posts from the anti-American warriors have all met death -- the revolution has not yet succeeded and our comrades need to keep working.  What was that last one?  The term "American" is being used for "Chinese"!"

 

     I explained Soong’s insights to Little Wang. He said such invention was also evident on Maopu, a buzz-driven entertainment site which targets a younger audience (the name means “pouncing cat”). He took a seat at my laptop and scrolled way down the site in search of links on the Weng’an rioting. Nothing. Little Wang sprung to his feet in a fit of accusatory stuttering:

    “You see! Gone again!”  

     By this time the easiest info to find in Chinese was by far the official Xinhua new agency’s initial two-graph report, which came out after the news proliferated in the forums and on Chinese news sites outside the mainland. Little Wang, for his part, was surprised Xinhua would report the incident at all. “You must be kidding? All we can get is Xinhua?” Part of it read:

"During the process of reception by the relevant government officials, certain people instigated the masses who did not know the truth to attack the county public security bureau, county government and county party offices.  A small number of criminal elements vandalized the offices and set fire to many offices and vehicles."

 

     “Doesn’t look like a ‘small number’ to me,” cracked Wang.

     My shaggy mixologist friend was only further irked by what official attempts to paint people protesters as a herd of know-nothings incited by misinformation and ‘criminal elements’, even if, by many accounts, this was partly the case. “How are they supposed to know any better, when the government conceals everything from them?”

     A lot of Chinese Netizens felt that way, and over the next couple days they let the government know it. Not that there were tons of open venues for dissent. Whereas threads of discussion were cut off too fast to engender lasting debate on many Indies forums, those of central media appeared to be less carefully vetted in the first two days. Comments there predominately cast the protesters as “rights defenders” up against corrupt local cadres and police.  

     It’s not that surprising, in this day and age, that central government media would allow such scrutiny of a small-town mess. This is how the Communist Party distances itself from its problems. Still, it’s interesting to see how -- as the provincial and central government began to investigate the matter and establish their official version of events -- their online departments moved into a guiding role. They became mother ships, swallowing up a good proportion of the virtual space for critique of the government. Soong analyzes this stratagem of co-option in uniquely Chinese political terms, both traditional and technocratic. “Hydrological engineering”, he dubs it:

"Yes, HYDROLOGICAL ENGINEERING!  Many of the current crop of central government leaders are technocrats with engineering background.  As such, they must understand that public opinion is water that can carry the ship as well as turn it over. [per the dynastic conception of the imperial mandate to rule]  The point about hydrological engineering is not to build dams to hold the water back because there will be a catastrophic dam break one day that might bring down the entire system.  Instead, the point should be about controlling and redirecting the awesome power of nature in less harmful ways down selected channels."

"In the case of the Weng'an mass incident, the major portals were deleting the related posts as quickly as possible.  At Tianya Forum, it was estimated that a Weng'an-related post has an average lifetime of 15 seconds before being deleted by the administrators.  That was supposed to be a record speed.  The same thing was happening at Sina.com, Sohu.com, Baidu, etc.  So this was building massive dams all over the map which builds up a tremendous pressure.  Where was the pressure release point?  You may be amazed that it was over at the Xinhua Forum.  The webmasters posted the official Xinhua news story on the forum.  That does not help in itself because Chinese netizens think that this Xinhua story was vague and misleading.  However, the webmasters allowed the comments to run freely.  This meant that the Xinhua posts became the meeting points of all those who want to talk about the Weng'an incident but could not do so elsewhere.  Although that post did not contain any news information (such as photos and videos), it was a place for people to vent their outrage.  As a result, Xinhua got a record-setting number of visitors who were very appreciative.  Is this the plan for the future?  You'll find out at the next mass incident (and there will be many)."

     On the independent forums earlier this week, an abundance of anonymous posts have emerged from "authoritative local sources" who dispel rumors of official meddling and blame the dust-up on small band of rowdies. Soong, who has translated quite a few of those posts, notes that Netizens do not trust them:

"On one hand, there is the legendary "50-cent gang."  These are supposed to be professional Internet writers who get paid 0.50 RMB for every post favorable to the government position.  When yet another version of the Weng'an mass incident gets published as being the ultimate truth, the author is accused of being a member of the "50-cent gang" who is trying to confuse the public.  Indeed, if you read through enough versions, you will probably throw up your hands and decide that you don't know what the truth is anymore.  Instead, you change your investigation to questioning the motives of the people who are producing these versions."

"On the other hand, there is the legendary "Internet special agent (网特)."  These are supposed to be professional spies who are paid by anti-China hostile forces to publish unfavorable information about China.  For example, some of the posts mentioned that the People's Liberation Army has been dispatched to Weng'an with tanks and artillery, with the hint of a Tiananmen-like massacre to follow.  Immediately, the other netizens reacted by pointing that these posts are coming from "Internet special agents."  The netizens want to draw a very clear line: they may be protesting against what is happening in Weng'an but they will not serve the purpose of the anti-China hostile forces.  This is very clear."

     By Monday, local authorities had detained or questioned as many as 300 rioters, and ordered a new inquest into the girl’s death. But the results of the review appeared a foregone conclusion. Three days after my encounter with Little Wang, state media across the country were leading on the file compiled by Guizhou’s Communist Party-run media – the Guizhou Daily, Guizhou Television, and the Guizhou Metropolis Daily – which took on key questions in the case point by point. It stood faithfully by the provincial government findings that the young men with the dead girl had no family connections to officials and had done no wrong - the girl had simply jumped into the river. The file was broken down into a series of “inquiries” in The Beijing News, a progressive tabloid. At the top of the Maopu message board, the same body of information was packaged as “rumor” and “fact”.

     Maopu was back to its perplexing ways on Thursday. One featured link on the Weng'an protest poked a number of holes in the eyewitnesses accounts from the dead girl's friends. But the topmost link turned the problem of public mistrust in the case on its head: "Why didn't anyone doubt the rumors?" begged the title.

     One reason is officials in Weng'an did too little, too late to address people's suspicions. So argued the Jinan-based Qilu Evening News, far from Guizhou in Shandong province, in an editorial on Tuesday:

"In the Internet age, if public information lags in the slightest, it can leave room for rumors to be broadcast. This is a reality that must be confronted."

 

     Arguably, senior leaders did react much faster and more attentively than they might have in the past. The provincial government sprung to action, backed by orders from Chinese leader Hu Jintao. Guizhou Party Secretary Shi Zongyuan, formerly chief of the state press and publication regulator, was in Weng'an within 48 hours of the incident.

     Shi ultimately pinned the riot on a "criminal elements" with "ulterior motives" - not a popular statement at all, as noted. But at a "public forum", according to the Guizhou Daily, he also did acknowledge "social conflicts that had accumulated over time", "tense relations between cadres and the masses", and "people's dissatisfaction toward our work".

   But the remarks were airbrushed when compared to unpublished comments Shi made behind the scenes at a meeting of 100 local officials. Blogging For China translated the intriguing account of a Guizhou journalist named Wu Hanpin, who apparently was in attendance and later blogged on the exchange:

"After listening to the comments of those attending, Shi Zongyuan said: Weng’an county has always had tense relations between cadres and citizens, police and citizens. Weng’an county has repeatedly had violent incidents of robbery, murder, and rape which have gone unsolved. The people who live here lack a sense of security. The failures of the county public security ministry has made everyone in the local community angry. He advised that those responsible for county public security should be “dismissed from class”. Hearing this, all of the local political leaders (members of the people’s congress, political consultative conference) clapped in approval."

      That page of Wu's blog now appears to be blocked.


     By the end of the week, Little Wang was not impressed by the Guizhou government's moves to resolve the issue fairly. He'd read a dizzying array of accounts and arguments, from Wu's to those on Maopu. He still believed it highly plausible that the dead girl was raped and murdered; that the two young men she'd been with were related to top Weng'an officials; and that the protesters were instigated to commit violence.

     He did not believe the provincial government was going over the heads of Weng'an officials to conduct an independent probe into the death or the riots. "Even if they sack a few officials, it's just a show," he concluded. "But how am I to really know?"