The 27-year-old journalist wore a green jail uniform, with his head shaved and hands in metal cuffs, when he appeared on national TV in China and confessed his guilt in bribery allegations, but he had yet to be charged with anything.
“I willingly admit my crime and I repent it,” Chen Yongzhou (陳永洲) said in footage aired by state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV).
He said he took money while he was a reporter at a metropolitan newspaper in southern China in exchange for running several stories smearing a company that makes heavy machinery.
It was the latest of several high-profile, televised confessions, a new tactic by Chinese authorities attempting to scrub information they deem harmful, illegal or false from the public domain, especially from the Internet. The confessions have come alongside a propaganda campaign warning against relaying false information and new penalties for reposting untrue information in social media sites.
Critics warn that the government is trying to curb public speech and legal and journalism academics say the airing of confessions before court trials tramples on China’s rule of law.
“The street parades of yesterday have become television parades of today,” China University of Political Science and Law professor He Bing (何兵) lamented on his microblog.
He was alluding to China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when mobs denounced and punished suspected wrongdoers without due process.
This time, police and state media appear to be working together. Police detain the suspect and get a confession. Then the interrogation video footage — mostly likely filmed by police — gets aired on the country’s most powerful state broadcaster before a court gets to hear the case and sometimes even before charges are filed, such as with Chen, who was charged four days after his televised confession.
The practice has been highly selective, with clear political overtones.
“I don’t think this has anything to do with the trials at all,” said Carl Minzner, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York. “Rather, these are experiments with using public confessions on state television — completely independently of any legal proceedings — [are] a mechanism to send political warnings to the rest of Chinese society.”
“The political movement has overtaken the law,” He said in a telephone interview.
Legal academics say evidence gathered during the police investigation should remain confidential by law until the probe is closed. They question on what grounds police have given CCTV access to suspects in detention or video footage of their interrogations. They ask what is behind CCTV’s decision to air the self-incriminating footage and some have raised the possibility of coerced confessions.
“To declare suspects guilty before court trials, CCTV has not only violated the professional code, but also China’s existing law,” said Chen Lidan (陳力丹), a journalism professor at Renmin University in Beijing.
In at least one case, the lawyer of a suspect said his client never accepted an interview with CCTV, but believed the police edited, compiled and shared the footage from the interrogations with the broadcaster.
“For the police to do that, it is completely illegal,” said Yang Mingkua (楊名跨), lawyer for environmentalist and popular microblogger Dong Rubin.
CCTV did not respond to faxed questions about the confessions. Police in the four cities where such confessions have been filmed either could not be reached or did not respond to media requests for comment.
In one of the first prominent cases, Chinese-American investor Charles Xue (薛蠻子) was detained by police on suspicion of engaging in prostitution. It has become clear that Xue has been targeted in a government effort to discredit liberal-minded microbloggers who tend to advocate values such as democracy and freedom.
Xue urged other popular microbloggers to draw a lesson from him and expressed his support for more governmental regulation of online discourse. However, he was first seen on CCTV confessing about his escapades with prostitutes, drawing public snickers.
“According to my recollection, there has been six to seven times when I had sex with more than two prostitutes at once. Most recently, a female named A-Jie brought two other prostitutes and I had sex with them at the same time,” he said as if reading off a script. “Altogether, I paid 3,000 yuan [US$500].”
Xue remains in detention, but there has been no official word on whether he has been charged since his last television appearance on Sept. 15.
Then it was the turn of environmentalist Dong Liangjie (董良杰), who in September said on CCTV that he posted false allegations online, including one about contraceptive drugs in tap water. He was detained on suspicion of provoking trouble at the time of the confession, but it is unclear if he has been charged since then.
Last month, Dong Rubin said on the national network that he had taken money to make his clients look good online. A voice-over said he had fabricated rumors and purchased fake accounts to help spread them.
In the video, Dong Rubin — with his head shaved and hands cuffed — was seen in a yellow vest issued by a detention center in the southwestern city of Kunming. He was then charged with providing false capital in business registration. His lawyer said he did not admit any crime.
Also last month, freelance journalist and popular microblogger Ge Qiwei (格祺偉) appeared on TV when he was charged with blackmailing.
“This is an ugly thing,” Ge said of his offense.
He appeared much as Dong Rubin had — hands cuffed, yellow vest — though in his case the vest was issued by a detention center in Hengyang City in the southern province of Hunan.
Chinese authorities have deployed a similar tactic in another public campaign this year against alleged bribes made by foreign pharmaceutical companies to boost sales. They aired footage of a police interrogation in which a drug company executive confessed to the wrongdoing.
“Such parading is clearly a violation of due process and it shows how the party propaganda is prevailing over those who seek to promote the rule of law,” political scientist Dali Yang (楊大利) of the University of Chicago said.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS