China Public Opinion Supervision Net

» see yuluncn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The thing that made this site was a photograph. In June 2004 it published pictures of Li Xin, then the vice mayor of Jining in Shandong, on his knees in front of a business partner, apparently begging a woman he had wronged to keep quiet. Nobody needed the accompanying text. The pictures went everywhere, the man was investigated, and he was eventually convicted of extortion and sentenced to life.

The site behind them was China Public Opinion Supervision Net, at yuluncn.com, also rendered in English as the Chinese Public Opinion Surveillance Net. Li Xinde founded it on 1 October 2003. He had been a reporter since the 1980s and he ran this thing essentially alone: gathering complaints, going to the province, taking the photographs, writing it up and putting it on a server he controlled. Chinese readers of the period had a term for what he was, a citizen reporter, and Nicholas Kristof wrote him up in the New York Times in May 2005 as evidence that the Chinese web was going to be harder to hold than the Chinese newspaper.

For a stretch it was not even a dissident operation. When the Jining story landed, Xinhua itself ran a comment piece crediting a civilian anti-corruption website with defeating the kneeling vice mayor. Exposing a crooked local official is not against the party line. It is the party line, right up until somebody outside the system does it faster and in public, and then the problem is no longer the official.

I have nothing personal here and the reason is more specific than region. In 2004 the Turkish web I sat in was hardware forums like donanimhaber and frmtr, and my contribution to public life was a signature block listing my own components. There was no Turkish version of a lone man driving to another city to photograph a bureaucrat, or if there was, I was three tabs away from it and never looked. This grave is here because the genre deserves a marker, not because I was in it.

~ the case file ~

~ the kneeling photograph ~

The Jining story was not the only one. The site is also credited with the case against Wang Yachen, a former mayor of Fuxin in Liaoning. The pattern in both is the same and it is what made the site dangerous: it did not publish opinions about corruption, it published the evidentiary object, a picture or a document, in a form nobody could argue with by writing a rebuttal.

That is also the answer to why a site this small mattered. Chinese newspapers of the period could do investigations, but they had editors above them who had phone calls to take. A one-man site had the same evidence and no phone call. The cost of that arrangement was that everything the site was rested on one person's freedom, and the state understood the accounting better than the readers did.

~ the closures ~

It was closed more than once. The final shutdown came on 16 June 2005, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China filed it as a joint operation, public security and censorship agencies together taking down two political websites. Li told Reuters the following year that the site had been shut before and that his blogs were routinely blocked, and he kept moving.

The archive shows how loose that ending was. The logo at the top of this page came off a capture from 18 February 2006, eight months after the official death, because whatever was answering at that address had not fully stopped answering. Red characters reading 中国舆论监督网 over a patterned strip, with the domain spelled out underneath. It is a homemade banner and it looks like one.

~ what they did to the founder ~

The site died in 2005 and the case against the man took another fourteen years to arrive. Police arrested Li Xinde on 23 October 2019, days after he published on a business conviction he considered wrongful, and arrested his son Li Cao the same day. Both were charged with illegal business operation, which is the charge Chinese authorities reach for when the conduct they want to punish is publishing.

On 7 January 2021 the Pizhou People's Court gave Li Xinde five years and a fine of 300,000 yuan. His son got one year and 50,000. He contested the verdict and appealed. By the time that sentence was read out, the website that made his name had been offline for more than fifteen years, which tells you the state was not settling accounts with a website.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »