Chinese ‘Netizens and police play ‘hide and seek’
Posted: Monday, March 02, 2009 3:08 PM
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Beijing, China
By Ed Flanagan, NBC News Researcher
BEIJING – As the government here tries in vain to control its burgeoning and unruly blogosphere, the term "duo maomao" or "eluding the cat" has been added to the ever-growing list of buzzwords in Chinese ‘Netizens’ vernacular.
Eluding the cat is a children’s game, similar to hide and seek. In this case, though, it refers to an incident far beyond a lighthearted children’s game: the authorities’ convoluted explanation of the death of Li Qiaoming, a prisoner in a Jinning county prison in China’s southeastern Yunnan province.
Twenty-four-year-old Li was arrested in January when he allegedly was caught illegally logging. His death due to severe head trauma less than a month after he was jailed was ruled an accident by the Puning County Public Security Bureau. They declared in their official report that Li had "run into a wall" while playing hide and seek.
A local government newspaper, the Yunnan Information Times, later offered more details, describing a fight that supposedly erupted during the game:
"The police disclosed on the evening of February 12 the latest development in their investigation: ‘The deceased caught the fellow prisoner named Pu during the 'elude the cat' game. Pu was unhappy and the two men had a dispute. During the argument, Pu kicked the deceased once and then punched him on the head once. The deceased lost his balance and fell backwards, whereupon his head hit the sharp corner formed by the wall and the door. This was how the deceased got injured."
The explanation of the circumstances behind prisoner Li’s death instantly caused an uproar in the Chinese blogosphere.
On Sina.com, a popular Web portal in China, the incident’s discussion thread generated over 54,000 comments expressing outrage – and a good deal of mordant humor – over the official report.
Similar incident caused mass protests
This is not the first time that tortuous official explanations have led to public outcry.
Last June, the drowning death of Li Shufen, a 15-year-old girl from Guizhou province, erupted into an Internet firestorm.
The girl’s parents claimed that police ignored their calls for a thorough investigation when their daughter, whose body was found in a river, appeared to have been raped and possibly murdered.
The parents’ anger rose when it emerged that the son of a senior local official may have been involved in the girl’s killing. The boy’s story went that he and two other youths were with Li Shufen, but that she had committed suicide while one of the boys was doing pushups on a nearby bridge. The story and the seeming immunity of the boy due to his government connections sparked massive riots involving an estimated 30,000 people.
The incident also sparked the term, "fu wo cheng," or "doing pushups" – an ironic label for the boy’s seeming indifference to his friend as she allegedly committed suicide.
Unprecedented cooperation? Or PR coup?
Perhaps wary of another flare-up like the Li Shufen incident – and prompted by the central government, which recently held a meeting of 3,000 public security directors in Beijing to discuss how to diffuse protests before they turn into so-called "mass incidents" – the Yunnan government quickly announced that they would permit an independent investigation of the prisoner Li’s death.
What shocked everybody the most was the government’s decision on who would make up the investigative unit: ‘Netizens.
In a web forum dedicated to the discussion of the eluding the cat story, a regular poster on the forum described how she was surprised to be selected to head the investigation committee after she gave her personal information to the Yunnan publicity department over the phone. "I saw the investigator list on the Yunnan net and surprisingly, I became the head of the netizen committee."
Public opinion was quickly torn between those who thought that the government was making an earnest attempt to connect to its citizens and skeptics, especially after it became clear that the initiative was established not by the Yunnan Public Security Bureau but by the provincial public relations department.
The skeptics’ view turned out to be correct. The netizens who were chosen for the panel soon found themselves at a carefully scripted press event and lecture from the local police. In addition, they were blocked from any serious inquiry beyond questions directly posed to the county’s chief justice and were not allowed to view CCTV footage of the incident, review physical evidence, interview the prisoner Li allegedly fought with, or see the site of the incident.
Successfully defused situation
From a public relations/crisis management point of view, however, the Yunnan provincial government was able to successfully divert a potentially volatile section of Chinese society and defuse the situation before it turned into another "mass incident," of which tens of thousands occur each year.
In other words, they eluded the cat.
Update: According to the web site ESWN, the Yunnan Public Security Bureau held a press conference on Friday where they announced that prisoner Li Qiaoming had been murdered by his fellow inmates and that the "elude the cat" story had been concocted by the suspected prisoners in order to mask their responsibility for Li’s death.
It was also noted that though the netizen investigation team had been told that the surveillance video of the incident was considered a "state secret," the real reason why they weren’t allowed to view the footage was because it didn’t exist. The prison’s closed-circuit TV system had broken down six months before.
The prison warden has since been dismissed.
