India has variants of this, but not as common or lethal. One has to
wonder how much blame the cultural revolution has to bear for all of
this - dumbing down 1/6th of the world is no easy feat, but it
certainly seems to have succeeded.
Cheeni
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?hp=pagewanted=all
China’s Cyberposse
Illustration by Leo Jung
By TOM DOWNEY
Published: March 3, 2010
The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed
on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a
middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length
black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a
riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her
hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to
stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.
“This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese
online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I
remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post
elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like
she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to
become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see
her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun.
Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a
Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in
which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted
their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from
their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s
crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.
There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the
practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the
term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang
min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in
English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in
China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the
few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen
called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the
kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush
scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced
the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a
couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the
video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?”
Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in
the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they
could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They
were right.
The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China
saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know
this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search
began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in
here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.”
Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten
killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang
Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made
public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the
cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call
iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and
pay a pension until death.
“Wang Jiao was affected a lot,” a Luobei resident known online as
Longjiangbaby told me by e-mail. “She left town and went somewhere
else. Li Yuejun, the cameraman, used to be core staff of the local
press. He left Luobei, too.” The kitten-killer case didn’t just
provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a
national phenomenon.
AT THE BEIJING headquarters of Mop, Ben Du, the site’s head of
interactive communities, told me that the Chinese term for human-flesh
search engine has been around since 2001, when it was used to describe
a search that was human-powered rather than computer-driven. Mop had a
forum called human-flesh search engine, where users could pose
questions about entertainment trivia that other users would answer: a
type of crowd-sourcing. The kitten-killer case and subsequent hunts
changed all that. Some Netizens, including Du, argue that the term
continues to mean a cooperative, crowd-sourced investigation. “It’s
just Netizens helping each other and sharing information,” he told me.
But the Chinese public’s primary understanding of the term is no
longer so benign. The popular meaning is now not just a search by
humans but also a search forhumans, initially performed online but
intended to cause real-world consequences. Searches have been directed
against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses,
