{"id":35569,"date":"2013-09-05T21:41:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T21:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=35569 "},"modified":"2013-09-05T21:41:00","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T21:41:00","slug":"35569-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=35569","title":{"rendered":"China\\’s Rumor Crackdown Has \\’No Basis\\’ in Law"},"content":{"rendered":"
2013-09-05<\/div>
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Netizens at an Internet cafe in Zhejiang province, Nov. 2, 2012.<\/div>
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Chinese authorities are misusing the law as they seek to press criminal charges against netizens detained for “spreading rumors online,” lawyers said this week.<\/div>
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“There is no definition in law for what constitutes a rumor, so this means we are talking about an issue with freedom of expression,” rights lawyer Ma Gangquan said in an interview following dozens of detentions for “rumor-mongering” across China in recent weeks.<\/div>
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“If they have genuinely infringed on anyone’s rights … then it should be up to the victim of that infringement to sue them,” he said.<\/div>
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“The government shouldn’t be using its power as public prosecutor to act on behalf of so-called victims.”<\/div>
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He said until the government gave a clear legal definition of a rumor, the detentions and punishments that resulted lacked legitimacy.<\/div>
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Greatest step backwards<\/div>
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Guangzhou-based rights lawyer Sui Muqing said the police and government should have little jurisdiction over the flow of online information, even if it is wildly inaccurate.<\/div>
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“The Criminal Law and the Punishments Law touch on rumors in two places, where obvious, deliberate, and direct harm has been done to society,” Sui said.<\/div>
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“In cases where someone has been harmed, it’s not for the government to prosecute.”<\/div>
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Sui said he saw the current war on “rumor” as the greatest step backwards for the rule of law in China since economic reforms began in 1979.<\/div>
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Targeting whistleblowers<\/div>
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Yuan Yulai, a rights lawyer from the eastern province of Zhejiang, said the war on rumor largely appeared to target online dissent and criticism.<\/div>
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“They shouldn’t be using illegal tactics to arrest netizens who blow the whistle [on wrongdoing] using their real names, just because they think it’s inappropriate, or it makes them uncomfortable,” Yuan said.<\/div>
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“If they do that, then it could have the opposite effect to the one they intended.”<\/div>
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A double standard<\/div>
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Netizens have hit out at the nationwide campaign after a string of highly publicized cases.<\/div>
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“These have all been like every other campaign before this one; they all have the same aim of curbing public freedom of speech,” Fujian-based blogger and online activist Peter Guo said in a recent interview.<\/div>
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According to Guo, when the authorities themselves get online information wrong, the rules are very different than for regular Internet users.<\/div>
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“A few days ago, the Beijing police put out a photo of an anti-prostitution campaign from a few years ago and made out that it was a recent photo,” he said. “They were reported by netizens.”<\/div>
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“[By their own standards], they should have been detained, but instead all they did was issue an apology on their microblog account and that was that,” Guo said.<\/div>
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String of cases<\/div>
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In recent weeks, the authorities detained Fu Xuesheng, accused of “fabricating” a sex scandal at the state-owned China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), as well as netizens who posted information to social media about the transfer of a local official, sparking a mass protest in the northern province of Shaanxi.<\/div>
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On Aug. 29, authorities in the central province of Hubei detained a man for “fabricating information and disturbing social order” after he reported that seven people had died in a road accident, when the authorities put the death toll at three.<\/div>
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Beijing’s “Regional Platform for Jointly Refuting Rumors” which monitors “false” information online, published a list of China’s “Top 10 Online Rumors” on Thursday.<\/div>
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They included a rumor that “infant soup” made of babies’ bodies was being sold in the southern province of Guangdong, “news” of a bus kidnap in the eastern province of Anhui, and an alleged rape-and-murder spree by six escaped prisoners.<\/div>
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However, some of the “rumors” listed sound similar to news stories already confirmed by RFA, including raids and beatings by “police” with uniforms but no ID cards.<\/div>
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Reported by Xin Yu and Yang Fan for RFA’s Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.<\/div>
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 <\/div>Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>the<\/span><\/a> <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>original article<\/a><\/a><\/a>.<\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/a><\/span><\/strong>
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<div><\/div><div>"There is no definition in law for what constitutes a rumor, so this means we are talking about an issue with freedom of expression," rights lawyer Ma Gangquan said in an interview following dozens of detentions for "rumor-mongering" across China in recent weeks.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}