It was Xu Ting’s lucky day. In April 2006, Xu Ting noticed that for every thousand yuan he withdrew from his local ATM in Guangzhou, China, his bank would only charge him one yuan. Doing what any young, enterprising migrant worker would do, he withdrew more than 100,000 yuan over several days and fled. Before leaving, he made sure to inform several friends about the malfunctioning ATM.
It wasn’t until a year later that Chinese police caught up with Xu Ting, arresting him at a train station in Shanxi province. Under China’s nascent criminal justice system, stealing a sum more than 100,000 yuan is grounds for life imprisonment. In his subsequent trial, Xu Ting was found guilty for the theft and sentenced to life in prison.
Then, something unexpected happened. Message boards and blogs throughout China caught wind of the case, and the public outcry was enough to make the authorities sweat. On Tianya, China’s largest message board, tens of thousands of people complained about what they saw as an unfair sentencing. Many posters noted the irony that bank managers and presidents are generally regarded as some of the most corrupt people in China, routinely passing off counterfeit currency and bribing complicit government officials, yet it was those same people arguing stridently for his imprisonment.
It seemed outrageous no one from that circle was even on trial, let alone serving a life sentence in prison. “China has no law; the common masses are simply raped!” one poster exclaimed. Someone else noted dryly it was a Communist slogan to “execute common people for petty crimes.” In another post, one person lampooned the government’s official line that everyone is equal in front of the law. “In Chinese law everyone is equal. Anyone found guilty is sent to a deep swimming pool and thrown in. Everyone drowns, unless of course you have money, which you can use to build a raft and paddle across.”
The outrage over corruption in China’s banks had finally boiled over, and the people had found a cause célèbre in Xu Ting. As the public criticism reached fever pitch in December 2007 and January 2008, a new ruling came out of the Guangzhou courts. Xu Ting’s case would be reheard due to a lack of sufficient evidence in the first trial. No other cause was given, and there was no mention of the public debate taking place over Xu Ting. However, to many observers, it was a sign that public pressure, the bulk of which had taken place online, had forced the government to act.
Xu Ting’s case illustrates the problems China’s ruling party faces in controlling public opinion on the Internet. China’s firewall does a reasonably competent job of filtering websites that have dissentious content, but the Web 2.0 revolution seems to have caught China unprepared. The user-driven nature of blogs, forums and social networks makes blocking offending content all but impossible. To do so would require China to dismantle the emerging technologies of Web 2.0 and thereby damage its own economy and infrastructure. It is rumored that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao himself regularly browses the Tianya forums.
These services have given a long-disenfranchised group of people an outlet to express their grievances with the ruling party. Chinese people are moving online in huge numbers, with more than 150 million people online already. The relatively anonymous nature of the Internet gives Chinese web-goers a confidence that might not otherwise exist. Fear of reprisal is much more real when one sees armed police staring back.
In a way, this new outlet harks back to the failed Democracy Wall movement of 1978 and ’79. The public was initially encouraged to post banners and graffiti decrying the excesses of the failed Cultural Revolution and the crimes of the Gang of Four. Soon dissidents and members of the democracy movement in China began writing and posting things on the wall that criticized-then-Chairman Deng Xiaoping and the Communist Party in general. The wall was summarily torn down. Unfortunately for the Communist Party, officials are finding the Internet is not so easily silenced.
Xu Ting’s case now awaits a decision in his second trial. However, not everyone is rooting for his release. In a blog posting, journalist Teng Yun decried the fact that it was the public and the media, not the courts, determining Xu Ting’s fate. If this were a fully developed legal system, I would be inclined to agree with him, but Chinese courts don’t provide an avenue for the public to weigh in on the case – an important check on governmental power. Until that starts to happen, it’s good to see public voice being heard, even if it isn’t through the ideal means.
Hunter Pavela is a senior Chinese and philosophy major who is currently studying abroad in Beijing. He can be reached at hpavela@umd.edu.
