China Digital Times

SECTION: Law

• China Arrests Police Over Deadly Nightclub Fight

  

  From AP:

  Two police officers have been arrested over the beating death of a college student in a nightclub in northeastern China — a move apparently aimed at quelling increasing public anger at a force often accused of corruption and abuse of power.

  Recent weeks have seen a series of riots and attacks against government offices and police, sparked by alleged assaults on citizens and more general complaints over corruption and opaque decision-making. The arrests in the industrial center of Harbin come as the government has expressed concern that a souring economy could further stoke the unrest.

  Harbin police on Tuesday called a news conference to announce the arrests of Liu Linan and Qixin over the beating death of Lin Songling, a 22-year-old student at the provincial university of physical education. Both were identified as officers with the city police’s railway division.

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  • November 19, 2008 3:45 AM

• Cracks in a Great Wall of Silence

  

  An article in Asia Times looks at the lawsuit filed by journalist Cui Fan when local authorities in Inner Mongolia ordered her newspaper, the China Business Post, suspended:

  The CCP’s Bureau of Publication and Press in Inner Mongolia in September ordered the China Business Post, a business weekly with circulation of around 400,000, to suspend publication for three months after it ran a report exposing suspicious cash transfers at a public bank in Changde City, Hunan province.

  The bank was a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), one of the country’s “Big Four” state commercial lenders and the only one that has not yet sold its shares to the public.

  Unconvinced by the charges, Cui Fan, the journalist who wrote the report, filed a lawsuit with a court in the Inner Mongolian capital of Hohhot against the CCP press body, demanding a reversal of its decision and for it to make a symbolic compensation payment for damaging her reputation.

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  • November 18, 2008 10:58 AM

• Uyghur Woman Released, Without Forced Abortion (Updated)

  

  From Radio Free Asia:

  An ethnic Uyghur woman in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region who was scheduled to undergo a second-term abortion against her will—and whose case drew international attention—has been released to her family and allowed to continue her pregnancy, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.

  “I am all right and I am at home now,” Arzigul Tursun told RFA’s Uyghur service, shortly after she was released from the Women and Children’s Welfare Hospital in Ili prefecture.

  “I brought her home,” the local population-control committee chief, Rashide, said. “She wasn’t in good enough health to have an abortion.”

  Tursun’s case prompted calls to the Chinese authorities from two members of the U.S. Congress and from the U.S. ambassador in Beijing for a planned abortion of her pregnancy to be scrapped.

  Also from Radio Free Asia earlier reporting:

  An ethnic Uyghur woman in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region who fled a local hospital to avoid a forced abortion has been found by police and taken under guard to a larger hospital, according to her husband.

  “The police found my wife,” Nurmemet Tohtasin said in a telephone interview from the Women and Children’s Welfare Hospital in Ili prefecture. “My wife’s father was already at the hospital. They will probably do the abortion today.”

  Police tracked down Arzigul Tursun, six months pregnant with her third child, at a relative’s home Monday afternoon, he said. Late Sunday, Tursun had fled Gulja’s municipal Water Gate Hospital, where she was scheduled to undergo an abortion against her will.

  “Arzigul ran away while the village official who was guarding her went to get her dinner. She left with her slippers, a shirt, and a sleeveless jacket. She didn’t take her bag or her other clothing,” Tohtasin said earlier.

  Read also CDT’s previous post: Uighur Woman, Six Months Pregnant, Faces Forced Abortion.

  And on CECC’s website: Authorities Plan to Subject Uyghur Woman to Forced Abortion.

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  • November 18, 2008 8:55 AM

• Baidu’s Search Methodology Controversy Gets Heated Up as CCTV Steps In. (Updated with Videos)

  

  When the Sanlu scandal was first revealed two months ago, it was rumored that China’s search engine giant, Baidu accepted 3 million RMB from Sanlu to block out search results that consist negative images of the notorious milk company. Since then, Baidu has become a target of online criticisms. Recently, a sales plan leaked from the inside validifies the claim that Baidu does try to manipulate and censor search results for commercial purposes.  The company is now also facing an anti-monopoly lawsuit from Qmyyw.com, a website established by a Hebei medicine company.

  Originally published in tianya, a post reveals two screenshots of a sales plan ppt that Baidu offers to some car company. The screenshots show that Baidu provides value-added services that offer PR protections such as deletion of negative news, blockout of search links, and manipulation of topics in Baidu tieba (Baidu Post Bar).

  The original ppt can be founded here (part1) and here (part 2).

  Also from StreetInsider.com,

  Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU) will face a RMB174.4 million lawsuit for manipulating its search results for medical information site www.qmyyw.com.

  Qmyyw.com’s suit claims that Baidu search results now exclude Qmyyw.com’s content following the company’s reduction in its payment for Baidu’s bid ranking service. Citing reports from the Southern Metropolis Weekly, the rumor points out that Qmyyw.com purchased a number 3 spot on Baidu’s site for RM89,000 in March, but after the site lowered its payment in July, its visits fell from over 88,000 hits to 18,340 hits in just a month.

  Baidu has now claimed that its “search results are not influenced by its bid ranking service”.

  The “ranking bid” search methodology has long been controversial.  According to Jiefang Daily (in Chinese), the Hebei provincial government once offered 5600 RMB “bidding fee” to Baidu to put the government website on the top of the search results page that comes out the keyword “zhengfu wangzhan (government website).” However, because netizens then started to criticize the credibility of the government website, the deal was eventually cancelled. Ranking bids are very common in Chinese search engines. As a result, the credibility of search results is highly challenged. According to Beijing Morning Post (in Chinese), a netizen complains that when she searches the keyword “Diabetes mellitus” in a Chinese search engine, two of the ten results on the first page link to websites selling fake drugs.

  Online Marketing in China. SEO. also has this earlier detailed analysis of how baidu’s paid search program differs from Google’s.

  1. The paid search and the organic results are not clearly divided. You will only notice the difference by the small gray underlined term next to the displayed URL. 推广 means it is paid search, 百度快照 means organic search result.

  2. All paid search results will be placed before the organic search results. That means, if 20 customers buy the same keyword, the first organic search result will be found on page three. The price is based on a bidding process. Not only the CPC but quality factors like landing page evaluation will influence the position as well.

  3. The ads in the right column are no CPC-based ads. They are fix-priced for one whole year. Position no. 1 to no.3 have the same price and rotate among each other. Position no. 4 to no.10 are cheaper than no.1 to no.3 and rotate as well. If the position is already booked, you have to reserve and wait respectively until it will become free. There is no possibility to get out of the contract before this one year ends.

  4. Once a while you might notice one or two ads with a blue banner on position one and/or two. It looks similar to Google’s blue banner, but in fact it has a totally different meaning: if you search for a keyword and there are no paid results for that keyword because no advertiser has booked it, Baidu will display ads that are similar to the keyword you entered. Example: you enter ‘keyword advertising’ but there are no paid results, so baidu will show two ads for the keyword ‘advertising’ with a blue background.

  The story is getting more interesting as CCTV just covered Baidu’s “ranking bid” methodology in its two recent “News 30 Minutes” programs.  In the first day’s program, CCTV covered how fake drug websites put their links on the top of corresponding Baidu search results pages through “bidding.”  In the second day’s program, CCTV’s reporter interviewed two selling representatives inside the company. A few points are worth mentioning.

  1. The more a website wishes to pay, the higher its ranking will be shown on Baidu’s search results pages. A typical bid for the keyword “性病 (venereal disease)” is 16.56 RMB per click to put a fake drug website No.5 on the search results ranking list.

  2. Baidu does not censor the credibility of its bidders seriously. A sales representative admits that in a case where a medicine company does not have a license for its drug product,  after the company photoshoped a fake license, its website then easily passed Baidu’s censorship.

  3. Baidu blocks out those websites who decline to apply for the “ranking bid” service.  Qmyyw.com would be a typical example.

  4. Baidu claims to cover 95% of Chinese netizens, and 80% of its revenue come from “ranking bids.”

  Comments translated from the blog of 郭建龙 Guo Jianlong, the reporter who first started the whole investigation of Baidu’s “ranking bid” methodology:

  Even though Baidu is being accused of the suspicion of monopoly, I still want to propose a question: which powerful state-owned corporation isn’t using its monopoly to exploit the living of our ordinary people?  However, our media’s circumstance is too bad; there is completely no freedom to say.  Who dares to say bad things about the government? Who dares to touch dragon’s squama?  Who dares to question those state-owned monopolies? You need to know that if you don’t handle your question well, you’ll be severely punished.  Caijing shibao (Financial Times) got shut down only because of one article on ABC. Just under such circumstance, media becomes to bully the weak and fear the strong. Since it does not dare to touch state-owned corporations, then it finds an easy target and puts all its criticisms toward Baidu. In fact, Baidu is far better then those corporations. Think about the time when China Mobile punished those service providers; who dares to fart? Take another recall that when the government proposed the 4 trillion stimulus, besides saying good, who dares to provide counterviews? With regard to anti-governmental monopolies, what our media basically do is: when the government leaves us a shit and says “eat it,” media then starts to discuss whether to fry it to eat or stir-fry it to eat; but noboday dares to discuss why and for what to eat.

  From my point of view, Baidu is far better than CCTV. Therefore, after CCTV, such a dirty monopoly, also participates to attack Baidu, I decide to temporarly give up.  By the way, just to add one more ingredient, CCTV’s report actually uses the same cases I used in my early articles, especially that dirty hospital case. Are they not even willing to find a case by their own?

  Who made Baidu’s blockout an advantage? In the first place when Google propagated to do no evil and refused to block out searches of prohibited keywords, the result was that Google got blocked out. Baidu said: “we submit; we, from the technological perspective, promise to not let what the government dislikes appear.” Then, it got favoured.  However, as the technology now becomes mature, if they can block out what the government dislikes, surely they can also block out what those other companies dislike. It is just that government at that time who fosters today’s controversy. Now, it shouts and says no to Baidu. It is like what is said in the Chengyu “the success or failure of the affair is all due to Xiao He” and just appears ridiculous to me.

  Also, one interesting piece of humor translated from cnBeta:

  the reporter: “the more I wish to pay, the higher my ranking will be?”

  Baidu: “yes!”

  the reporter: “I’m from CCTV!”

  Baidu: “no problem, as long as you pay more than Hunantv does.”

  (Hunantv, 湖南卫视, is a local satellite TV station in Hunan province, who has placed serious challenge to CCTV’s popularity in recent years.)

  For more on China’s search engine market, please see the CDT tag “search engines.”

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  • November 16, 2008 11:12 PM

• China Jails Rioters, Criticises Officials

  

  Six rioters in the June mass incident over a teenage girl’s death in Guizhou have been jailed by state officials. Many others are still detained and are waiting for their sentences.

  In addition, the local government has been criticized for their response to “long-standing disregard of rampant crime in the county and incompetence in maintaining public security.” More, from Reuters:

  China handed sentences of up to 16 years in jail to six people for rioting after the suspicious death of a teenage girl, but also criticised the local government for incompetence, state media said on Friday.

  Thousands of locals mobbed government offices in Weng’an county, Guizhou in late June. The local police headquarters was torched and police vehicles wrecked after claims spread that authorities had covered up a teenage girl’s death.

  … Police had said the teenage girl had killed herself by jumping in a river, but residents said the girl had been raped and murdered by a relative of a senior government official.

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  • November 14, 2008 7:11 PM

• China Democracy Activist Detained for Subversion

  

  Guo Quan, founder of the China New Democracy Party, has been arrested on charges of subversion of state power. From the Associated Press:

  Guo Quan, who started the China New Democracy Party last year, was arrested in the city of Nanjing after he sent his son to school, his wife Li Jing said by phone.

  China has been governed by authoritarian one-party Communist rule since 1949. While other political parties exist, they are not allowed to wield any power.

  Guo has been detained several times — but only for several days at a time — since founding the party. But this time he could be held much longer, Li said.

  “I was told it was quite different this time. The police told me to prepare myself psychologically,” she said.

  Guo was also arrested in May for his critcism of the government’s handling of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

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  • November 14, 2008 7:05 PM

• China Outlaws Lip-synching after Olympics Row

  

  In response to the furor over the Olympics lip-synching incident, China is set to ban the practice of pantomiming to songs. From Telegraph:

  Now, the Ministry of Culture plans to name and shame performers caught lip-synching.

  Those who are caught miming twice will have their performing licenses revoked, according to proposed new legislation.

  Sun Qiuxia, an official with the Ministry of Culture, said: “People who perform for profit should not cheat audiences with fake singing or by pretending to play instruments.”

  Lip-synching has long been common practise in China. Yesterday, one Chinese pop star claimed that less than 20 per cent of singers actually sang when performing live.

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  • November 14, 2008 6:56 PM

• Yang Jia: Stranger than Fiction

  

  Time China blog looks at a bizarre twist in the case of Yang Jia, who became an Internet hero after being sentenced to death for killing six police officers in Shanghai:

  Liu Xiaoyuan, a Beijing lawyer who has been closely following the case, reported on Monday that the cop killer’s mother, Wang Jingmei, has finally emerged in public after disappearing for four months. According to Liu’s blog, Wang was secretly kept in a psychiatric hospital run by the Beijing Police Bureau throughout the prosecution of her son. A female officer who answered the phone at Beijing’s Office of Compulsory Treatment –which is responsible for cases like Wang’s–refused to comment or give her name when contacted Wednesday.

  Wang’s disappearance, which came after her visit to a police station to help in the investigation of her son, has heightened skepticism about the case and raised questions about Liu’s allegation that the police might have kidnapped her to prevent her testifying in her son’s case. (For example, artist and blogger Ai Weiwei argued here that Wang might be the only person who knows the details of how her son was beaten by the Shanghai cops in 2007 and the ensuing negotiation process between the police and Yang over that beating, all of which took place before the murders.) In Wang’s absence, the court overrode accusations of police misconduct and put Yang on death row.

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  • November 13, 2008 1:41 PM

• China Agrees to Loosen Controls on News Providers

  

  Following complaints filed to the WTO by the U.S., E.U. and Canada, China has canceled regulations imposed in 2006 that required foreign financial news services to go through Xinhua to distribute news in China. From AP:

  Calling it a “landmark agreement,” Brussels said companies such as Thomson Reuters Corp., Bloomberg LP and Dow Jones & Co. would benefit from better conditions for the sale of financial information to banks, government agencies and other customers in China.

  The Chinese mission confirmed that a settlement was signed Thursday in Geneva.

  U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said China’s commitment to establishing an independent regulator in the sector was especially important.

  Read also a Xinhua report on the agreement.

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  • November 13, 2008 11:02 AM

• Codify and Tighten Environment Law

  

  China’s environmental legislation lacks power to enforce China’s environmental protection law.

  Soaring economic growth in recent decades has put great strain on China’s environment, but according to a recent forum, China’s environmental legislation is lagging far behind.

  The forum, Legal Provision for Building a Environment-Friendly Society, was sponsored by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) and the Institute of Law, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and held November 2 to 3, in Shanghai.

  [...] China had its first environmental protection law as early as in 1979, but the law is not very helpful in meeting the current environmental challenges, according to Bie Tao, a senior MEP official responsible for legislation. Bie cited several inadequacies.

  The current law can do little to influence the government’s policy making process.

  Read the entire article to learn of the specifics of the inadequacies of the current environmental legal and regulatory structure.

  The weakness of China’s environmental legislation is also discussed in the previous CDT post regarding Zhang Jingjing.

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  • November 11, 2008 2:42 PM

• China Opens Website Charging For ID Verification Service

  

  China’s Public Security Ministry recently launched a website for the public to verify individual identification card information. However, some netizens have expressed their doubts as the service appears commercial, and privacy issues are also a concern.

  From Xinhua,

  China’s Public Security Ministry on Friday opened a website for citizens to verify individual identity cards.

  Any ID card can be verified for a 5 yuan (73 U.S. cents) online payment at the site, www.nciic.org.com, with a few seconds.

  The system is intended to facilitate transactions where ID is needed, such as online trading and apartment rentals, where fake IDs are often used.

  However, according to Xinwen chenbao (News Morning Post) (in Chinese), because the search results will also include photos and other individual information, netizens fear  that some of their private information may become public, and this service may further become a utility for “human flesh search engines.” The post also presents a controversial claim made by Liu Deliang, the director of the Center for Internet Legal Research at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who says that information that appears on individual identification cards should not be regarded as private.

  Despite privacy issues, some bloggers also doubt the legality of this business service.  Liu Xiaoyuan, a famous Beijing lawyer,  points out in his blog (in Chinese) that the ID verification service is managed  by a commercial company. Although it appears convenient for the public, it is really the public security department’s responsibility to provide such a service for free. How can they appoint some commercial company to make a profit from it? If the government executives transfer their functions to commercial companies, then the state should abolish those executives to save its expenditures.

  For more on the “human flesh search engine,” see CDT posts, “Virtual Carnivores,” and

  “Chinese Fear Online Mobs.”

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  • November 9, 2008 9:05 PM

• China Has Sentenced 55 Over Tibet Riot in March

  

  Fifty-five Tibetans have been sentenced for their role in the March riots, according to the New York Times:

  The prison sentences range from three years to life, Xinhua reported.

  The report in Xinhua was based on comments made Tuesday by Baema Cewang, vice chairman of the Tibet regional government, when he met with Michael Andrew Johnson, a visiting member of the Australian House of Representatives.

  Xinhua did not give details of how the sentences were handed down or what sort of trial the prisoners had received, if any.

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  • November 6, 2008 11:25 PM

• Chinese Lawyers Who Called For Bar Elections Are Fired

  

  From AP:

  At least seven Chinese lawyers who signed a petition calling for open elections in a government-controlled bar association have lost their jobs because of official pressure, several lawyers said Thursday.

  The seven were among 35 attorneys who signed the petition in August, said Cheng Hai, a leader of the campaign for direct elections in the Beijing Lawyers’ Association.

  Activist lawyers in the tightly controlled Chinese legal system have been at the forefront of the fight to use the rule of law to press for civil liberties and combat abuse of power. But they say they have faced official interference, obstruction and even physical harassment.

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  • November 6, 2008 9:43 PM

• Liyang City Police Provisional Regulations on Managing News

  

  Less than three weeks ago, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao announced that new rules on reporting activities by foreign correspondents on its territory, originally issued for the Olympics, would be made permanent. The rules allow foreign journalists to travel outside Beijing and conduct interviews without first applying to foreign affairs departments.

  The new rules are certainly a positive gesture. But the following internal documents (translated by CDT’s Lucy Lin) from a local government Public Security Bureau shows us another side of the story. Chinese authorities at every level have refined their information management and propaganda work, setting up more systematic and sophisticated control mechanisms for domestic and foreign reporters alike, long before Liu Jianchao’s announcement. The document was available last week on the official website of the Liyang City government in Jiangsu Province, but has since been removed. Liyang is a County-level city of three million people on the border of Jiangsu and Anhui, part of the Shanghai Economic Development Zone.

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  • November 6, 2008 12:53 AM

• Death Verdict for a Beijing Bribery Career

  

  From Caijing Magazine:

  Liu Zhihua appeared worn down and older than his 59 years when he stood before the Hengshui Intermediate People’s Court for sentencing October 18.

  The former vice mayor of Beijing had just been convicted on the bribe-taking charges pending against him since his sacking 28 months earlier.

  Prosecutors said Liu accepted about 6.97 million yuan in bribes while serving as vice mayor from 1997 to 2006 and director of the management committee of Zhongguancun Science Park from 2001 to 2006.

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  • November 4, 2008 7:30 PM