China Prosecuted Internet Policeman In Paid Deletion Cases 26
hackingbear writes: "In China, censorship is not just about politics; it's also a vibrant business. Police in Beijing have detained at least ten people, including employees at web giant Baidu and a web censor working at the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau (cached version), over allegations that they deleted defamatory online posts about companies and government enterprises in return for money, the Beijing News reports. The case was first surfaced when Baidu noticed and reported several of its workers' illegal activities. From 2010 to 2012, Gu, an ex-Baidu employee, is believed to have deleted over 2,000 posts on Baidu, 500 on news site Sohu and 20 posts on qianlong.com, with over 2 million yuan ($322,000) reportedly changing hands. While Gu can delete negative Internet posts for topics ranging from environmental issues to product quality problems on behalf of companies, he could not delete posts relating to his government clients. So he paid and asked Liu, a Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau web censor, to issue official orders to the web sites to remove the posts (Google translation of Chinese original). Liu was found to have accepted 770,000 yuan ($124,000) from Gu for deleting posts. He also received 150,000 yuan ($24,000) from other sources."
Re:Incomprehensible Headline (Score:5, Informative)
That's about as much as I understood from that headline. Is the headline talking about China-prosecuted Internet-Policement or how China Prosecuated an Internet Policeman.
To understand articles about China, you need to understand something about China. China is a single party state. You might think that makes the government more monolithic with a greater unity of purpose. But the opposite is true. In multi-party democracies, each party has their own ideology, and only one at a time is running things. But in China, all these ideologies, from reactionary Maoist to free market wingnuts, compete within the communist party, because that is the only way to influence policy. These different ideological factions control different bureacracies and branches of the government. What is going on, is that these factions are competing for power by trying to suppress criticism of themselves, while allowing people to attack their adversaries.
If you take a little time to learn about Chinese politics, and who the big players are, this infighting can be very entertaining. Many Chinese consider it a spectator sport.
Corruption in China (Score:4, Informative)
Corruption in China is a fact of life. It's systemic and pervasive. As much as the government talks about stamping it out, they only inflict pin pricks. They make WAY too much money through corruption and it's widely known/accepted in Chinese society. One need only look at the sheer numbers of government functionaries who send their kids overseas to school and who keep huge sums of ill-gotten money in foreign bank accounts. These are kids who have parents with official salaries are often less than US$15k a year and they're parked in posh apartments (paid for in cash), studying at top 20 universities (paid in cash), driving around in fancy cars, living a lavish lifestyle, etc. There's very little effort made to hide it.
The people who benefit from this system are shitting their pants about potential discontent from those who aren't benefiting from the game. One of Mao's rallying cries was stamping out corruption. Once he got into power (by force), those folks were systematically rooted out, jailed, and often killed. Small wonder more and more of these "government officials" are sneaking money and family out of the country and applying for foreign passports. They know there will be a purge following this binge.
Fasten your seatbelts.