As they awaited their fates in holding cell No. 9 of the Puning County jail, Li Qiaoming (李蕎明) and half a dozen fellow inmates played “elude the cat,” a Chinese hide-and-seek.
Li put on a blindfold, groped for quarry and soon was lying on the floor with a fatal head injury.
That, at least, is the story disseminated by the police in Yunnan Province, where Li, a 24-year-old farmer, lived and died this month after his arrest on charges of illegal logging.
Public reaction to the official explanation of Li’s death was swift. Thousands of Internet users surmised that Li died from a beating by the police.
Rather than suppress the accusations, provincial officials invited the public to help solve the case. They sorted through 1,000 volunteers to choose a 15-person committee that would visit the scene of the crime, cull the evidence and “discover the truth.”
The results proved dispiriting to those who hoped for an investigation of the police. But the case riveted the public and fueled a discussion online and in state-run media about the extent — and limits — of official attempts to shape public opinion.
In explaining his motives for a citizen investigation, Wu Hao (伍皓) of Yunnan’s propaganda department said he hoped to restore faith in a government that could be unresponsive to accusations of misconduct.
In an interview with Chinese reporters this week, he said the authorities could easily have quashed the debate, but “past experience has shown that the doubts of the netizens will not shift or recede.”
Although the reaction to Wu’s effort was initially favorable, it soon soured. When they arrived at the jail last Friday, the committee members were given access to the crime scene but were not allowed to view surveillance tapes, examine the autopsy report or question the guards.
They were also not permitted to interview the prime suspect, Pu Huayong (普華永), an inmate who police said had been unhappy with the outcome of the “elude the cat” game and attacked Li.
Soon after disclosing the identities of the “volunteers,” Web users also found that nearly all the “randomly selected” investigators were current or former employees of the state-run media. The team leader, Zhao Li (趙立), had worked as an “Internet commentator” to shape debate online with pro-government postings.
Over the past week, more than 70,000 postings accumulated on one of China’s most popular bulletin boards and many were less than sympathetic.
Even the Beijing News criticized the process.
“We’ve learned two lessons from this case,” it said. “One is that such inspections cannot solely rely on passion and idealism but on rational and pragmatic work. The second is that this has again exposed the flaws of the current system and that the need to establish an independent investigation system involving experts is urgent.”
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS