Unlikely heroes for Chinese blogosphere
Posted: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 3:21 PM
Filed Under:
Beijing, China
By NBC News' Ed Flanagan
BEIJING – It’s not often that a confessed murderer is feted publicly for her heroism and bravery, but that is precisely what happened to Deng Yujiao in China’s blogosphere following her release from house arrest last week.
Deng, a 21-year-old waitress from Hubei Province who fatally stabbed a Communist Party official after he tried to force himself on her, became an Internet sensation in China after she was arrested on suspicion of voluntary manslaughter a month ago.
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| Chinafotopress / Getty Images Contributor |
| Deng Yujiao, in white shirt, leaves a local court on in Badong County, Hubei Province, on June 16 after being exempted from criminal charges. |
According to the police investigation, two local officials, Huang Dezhi and Deng Guida, were customers at the Fantasy City Bathhouse, a karaoke parlor in rural Badong County, on May 10th when they approached Deng and demanded "special services." (In China, bathhouses are often fronts for brothels.)
When she refused, Deng Guida (who was not related to Deng) allegedly threw a wad of money at her face and pushed her onto a nearby sofa. As they proceeded to attack her, she pulled out a fruit knife and repeatedly stabbed and killed Deng Guida.
Deng immediately turned herself in to authorities and police initially charged her with manslaughter.
However, details of the case soon leaked out on the Internet. Deng told her side of the story to a Chinese newspaper, and the county government went into overdrive to downplay allegations of similar acts of aggression by Deng Guida and Huang Dezhi.
Chinese bloggers and netizens reacted swiftly. They began to express their outrage over government excess and Ms. Deng’s helplessness in the face of unruly government officials.
A rallying cry against government oppression
Strangely enough, Deng’s case is not the first time that an accused murderer has generated such great public sympathy.
A month before the Summer Olympics last year, Yang Jia, a 28-year-old man armed with a knife, entered a Shanghai police station, killing six police officers and wounding three others. A seemingly straightforward case of murder instead became a rallying cry against government negligence and oppression.
Details surfaced that prior to the attack, Yang had sued the Shanghai police for psychological damages because he allegedly suffered a brutal police interrogation after being detained for riding an unlicensed bike.
Soon after the case hit the news in China, bloggers discovered that the lawyer assigned to represent Yang in his lawsuit, also worked for a government office that directly supervised the officers in the accused police station. As a result, his case had been summarily rejected.
Yang was found guilty of murder in the stabbing incident and executed in September. But not before bloggers channeled their frustration and anger into a bevy of angry blog posts and forum discussions, many of which were removed by censors.
Atmosphere of unrest
It was in this atmosphere of growing Internet unrest toward government corruption and excess that the Deng Yujiao case exploded – there were more than 4 million Internet posts about Deng’s plight since her story became public.
On popular forums like Tianya and Sina, people debated the case and criticized the many discrepancies allegedly found in the Badong county police report. At the height of interest in the story, the Associated Press noted that Chinese netizens were dedicating popular love songs to Deng and even writing verses in classical Chinese that honored "how beautiful and fierce" she was.
Attempting to stifle support for Deng, accusations soon arose from local authorities that she was dealing with an undisclosed "mental imbalance," and she was sent to a local mental hospital. In an effort to kill interest and coverage of the sensational story, journalists and citizen bloggers who attempted to interview Deng were manhandled and beaten by "unknown assailants." But the attempts to discredit Deng only further infuriated bloggers who intensified their discussion of the subject and even organized legal representation for her.
One blogger who helped assemble Deng’s defense team was Wu Gan, also known online as "Tu Fu," or The Butcher. Representing a new generation of activist bloggers who have begun to pop up in China, Wu was actually in Hubei for a business trip when the story initially broke around May 13.
Outraged by the specifics of the case, Wu decided to travel to Badong to check on Deng and to assist in her legal case. In true blogger form, he broadcast his every move – from meeting Deng’s mother for the first time to assembling her legal team – on a popular online community called Club.kdnet.net, which soon became a hit.
A reassessment of strategy
The intense public interest eventually forced county officials to reassess their initial strategy for dealing with Deng, which consisted of the usual combination of discrediting the accused and blacking out the mainstream media. The government made some concessions as it transferred Deng from a mental hospital to her parent’s home, where she was kept under house arrest.
Then last week, a Hubei court freed Deng after just a two-hour trial.
However, the court’s formal legal decision was that the defendant was "guilty of intentional injury." That way, Deng was granted her freedom, and the government was able to save some face with a guilty ruling – but it also wriggled out of a potentially explosive response from the public.
Still, with the muzzling of Iran’s Internet and the recent outrage over China’s Green Dam censoring software, one has to wonder how long governments can maintain deaf ears to the unruly blogosphere.
