Enigma of China Read Online Free PDF Page B

adding another spoonful of the spicy sauce to the noodles. “She hurries to the computer the moment she gets home-before she even thinks of cooking or washing.”
    “You’re always so busy with your work. What else can I do alone at home?” She turned to Chen. “I’m simply fed up with the newspapers. Just yesterday, I read about the exposure of another corrupt Party official. It served him right, but in the newspaper, it’s always due to the great leadership of the Central Party authorities that a rotten cadre is exposed and punished. As to why and how it happened, we are never told anything. The former premier made his famous statement about preparing ninety-nine coffins for corrupt officials and one for himself. It was an unmistakable and heroic gesture promising to fight corruption, no matter the cost. He got a five-minute ovation for his speech. But did he succeed in rooting out the corruption? No. The situation has been getting worse and worse.
    “That’s why people rely on the Internet for detailed information on how these officials fatten themselves like red rats. The Web is also censored, but quite a number of sites aren’t run by the government. Consequently, one or two fish may still, from time to time, escape the net. These are commercial Web sites, run for profit, so the contents have to be eye-catching and feature information that’s unavailable in the Party newspapers.”
    “Thank you so much, Peiqin. That was a very helpful overview,” Chen said. “But I have a specific question for you. What is a human-flesh search?”
    “Oh, that. I hope you aren’t the target of one, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen,” she said, with a teasing smile. “I’m just kidding. When and where the practice of crowd-sourced investigation started, I don’t know. Possibly in one of the popular, controversial Web forums, where users-or netizens-can post their own comments. They are called ‘netizens’ because the public space of Internet is a kind of nation, of which they are citizens. For many, it is the only space wherein they can act like citizens, with a limited freedom of speech. As for the term human-flesh search , it was originally used to describe an information search that is human-powered rather than computer-driven. The netizens-the most dedicated Web users-sift through clues, help each other, and share information, intent on tracking down the target information one way or another. But the popular meaning nowadays is that it is not just a search by humans but also a search for humans, one which plays out online but is intended to have real-world consequences. The targets of this kind of search vary, from corrupt government officials, to new Big Bucks who appear suddenly with surprisingly large fortunes, to intellectuals too obsequious to the authorities, or any other relatively high-profile figure you might imagine. However, almost always there is an explicit or implicit emphasis on sensitive political and social issues somewhere in the target’s background.”
    “Can you give me an example, Peiqin?”
    “Recently, there was one in Yunnan Province. An amateur hacker broke into a local Party official’s laptop, downloaded his diary, and put it online. That official, named Miao, was the head of the county tobacco bureau. He wasn’t a particularly high-ranking cadre, but he had a lucrative position. The contents of the diary proved to be very spicy. It included detailed descriptions of his extramarital affairs, his under-the-table deals done in the name of Party interests, his pocketing government funds, and his bribing others while others bribed him, all in a complex cobweb of connections. The diary reads like a novel, with the persons involved labeled only by initials-such as B, M, S, and so on-but with dates and locations too. You might think this would be no big deal, since no one could tell if the diary was true or not. But you know what? A crowd-sourced search started immediately. Netizens threw