I have very mixed feelings about this article...but it may be of interest. M
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of George Lessard Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2010 4:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [chineseinternetresearch] Columbia Journalism Review: Chinas Chess Match - How the web has empowered the people Feature November / December 2010 Chinas Chess Match - How the web has empowered the people Columbia Journalism Review By Howard French http://www.cjr.org/feature/chinas_chess_match.php [excerpt] Early in 2003, like millions of other migrants of his generation, Sun Zhigang, a young graphic designer, left central China, where he had attended university, and headed for the countrys booming industrial Southeast. His quest: work, and with luck, fortune. When he entered an Internet café one evening, shortly after his arrival in Guangzhou, he was stopped by police who demanded to see his ID, which he had left behind in his nearby apartment. It was a costly mistake. The police had just launched a large-scale dragnet of illegal migrants, and as was common at the time for people without papers, he was promptly hauled off to detention. Three days later, Sun Zhigangs family was informed of his death, which the police claimed had been caused by a heart attack. But the Southern Metropolis Daily, a local tabloid that was just establishing itself as a powerful crusading force in the countrys news landscape, would not let the story end there. A few weeks later, it ran a two-page spread that put a far more sinister spin on the incident. Citing a confidential autopsy report, its bold headline read: UNIVERSITY GRADUATE, 27, SUDDENLY DIES THREE DAYS AFTER DETENTION ON GUANGZHOU STREET. Word of Suns death spread rapidly, so rapidly that what ensued was without precedent in China. Within two hours of the newspaper hitting the street, thousands of people from around the country had posted angry commentary on Sina.com, Chinas largest news portal. What would quickly become known nationwide as the Sun Zhigang case had begun to go viral. After its initial scoop, the Southern Metropolis Daily was banned from reporting further on the incident, but old-fashioned censorship measures like this would prove too little, too late. Online discussion of the case was already mushrooming, and so was the scope of debate, which began with calls for justice in one particular tragedy but quickly led to far broader demands for legal reforms to put an end to the arbitrary detentions and other abuses routinely suffered by hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers. In June, with the Sun Zhigang case still the talk of the Internet, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao announced an end to regulations that police had used for two decades to summarily detain paperless migrants in hundreds of detention centers, which were maintained around the country solely for this purpose. Beijing has never acknowledged the public fury and Internet mobilization around the Sun Zhigang case as the driver of this major reform, but for most of Chinas Internet-savvy public, the connection was unmistakable. Looking back, Chinas Internet era could well be said to have begun with this case. Not literally, of course, since China had been online already for several years. But the outcry over Sun Zhigangs death is widely seen in China nonetheless as the opening act in the age of th [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chineseinternetresearch/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chineseinternetresearch/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
