- Nov 5, 2011
- 5,855
China: The Communist Party’s Tricky Search for Security Online : on blogs.wsj.com : http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/02/28/insecure-how-the-communist-party-undermines-itself-online
By Russell Leigh Moses
The Chinese Communist Party showed how concerned it is about its control over the Internet on Thursday when it announced the establishment a new committee on Internet security headed by a some of the party’s heaviest hitters, including Chinese president Xi Jinping.
News of the new committee came on the heels of a scandal over a brutal assault on a nurse by a local government official in eastern China’s Jiangsu province that showed how Beijing’s obsession with security can often serve to undercut the party online.
Xi Jinping
Reuters
The party’s preoccupation with the Internet and how to control it has led to a certain schizophrenia. Sometimes the Chinese leadership plays the role of the soft supervisor, allowing the public to sound off about smog while criticizing lower-level officials for not using social media more as a way to engage with skeptical citizens. Other times it pays the heavy-handed censor, deleting posts and seeking to silence influential bloggers.
Increasingly, propaganda authorities have recognized the value of timely disclosure, particularly when crises occur. But, as the incident in Jiangsu illustrates, the impulse to clamp down has proven tough to resist.
Details of the episode, in which a high-level official and his government-employed wife allegedly attacked a nurse in a Nanjing hospital after checking their daughter into the emergency room, have been sketchy where the state-controlled media is concerned. According to an account published in state-runNanjing Dailyon Friday (in Chinese), the assault occurred late on the night of Feb. 24 after the nurse informed the parents that, due to overcrowding in one part of the hospital, a male patient was being transferred into the female ward where the daughter was being attended to. The nurse was struck several times by the woman’s parents and is said to be currently paralyzed as a result of injuries sustained in the beating.
The parents, according to a report on thePeople’s Dailywebsite (in Chinese), have been suspended pending an investigation.
Violence against hospital staff in China is not a new phenomenon, and official commentators first looked to place this tragic event in that larger context of uncivilized behavior (in Chinese).
But what is particularly noteworthy is that state media took an inordinate amount of time before reporting on the incident, likely because they had not been given the go-ahead by authorities.
Previously–in Nanjing, for example — the response of the authorities has been quite rapid. And when there have been rumors of official malfeasance and misconduct generally, there’ve been determined efforts by Beijing recently to show them to be nonsensical (in Chinese).
It’s not clear why authorities hesitated in this case, but it clearly cost them.
First, Chinese micro-bloggers ran with what they knew—or thought they did, rumors and all. There were unsubstantiated accounts on social media sites of a doctor also being attacked during the same confrontation, of another physician fighting back and defending the nurse, and of the nurse herself possibly faking her injuries.
Because state news outlets stayed silent on the event, authorities were left not only playing catch-up to social media, but also were prevented from addressing rumors of everything from what official positions the accused parents actually occupied to whether the recently-appointed Nanjing party secretary visited the nurse in the hospital to offer a personal apology.
When the story finally did come out, the official response was a tale of two cities reacting reluctantly and with little coordination: Nanjing media talked about the event as another in a set of hospital attacks and finally released a video of the assault that had been widely posted on social media days before. Beijing, meanwhile, was left to comment on the larger lessons of the tragedy, stating that the incident showed that there are “officials who think that their identity is a free pass for all occasions, who will feel that power gives them a license to do everything, including the use of violence” (in Chinese).
This was not a division of labor, but a divided view: of what actually happened and what it all meant.
The Xi leadership has been battling for some time with the question of how to be a ruling party in an era where technology has changed so many of the rules. It’s an enormous challenge and they are right to worry.
But creating more committees to centralize policy-making is only part of the job. The other part is winning the race for relevancy where social media and public opinion is concerned. And as long as the focus is on security, rather than service, it’s a race the party could be in regular danger of losing.
..and read the comments, please ..
- like this:
.. Call of the PRC running dogs and China’s image will begin to improve.
By Russell Leigh Moses
The Chinese Communist Party showed how concerned it is about its control over the Internet on Thursday when it announced the establishment a new committee on Internet security headed by a some of the party’s heaviest hitters, including Chinese president Xi Jinping.
News of the new committee came on the heels of a scandal over a brutal assault on a nurse by a local government official in eastern China’s Jiangsu province that showed how Beijing’s obsession with security can often serve to undercut the party online.
Xi Jinping
Reuters
The party’s preoccupation with the Internet and how to control it has led to a certain schizophrenia. Sometimes the Chinese leadership plays the role of the soft supervisor, allowing the public to sound off about smog while criticizing lower-level officials for not using social media more as a way to engage with skeptical citizens. Other times it pays the heavy-handed censor, deleting posts and seeking to silence influential bloggers.
Increasingly, propaganda authorities have recognized the value of timely disclosure, particularly when crises occur. But, as the incident in Jiangsu illustrates, the impulse to clamp down has proven tough to resist.
Details of the episode, in which a high-level official and his government-employed wife allegedly attacked a nurse in a Nanjing hospital after checking their daughter into the emergency room, have been sketchy where the state-controlled media is concerned. According to an account published in state-runNanjing Dailyon Friday (in Chinese), the assault occurred late on the night of Feb. 24 after the nurse informed the parents that, due to overcrowding in one part of the hospital, a male patient was being transferred into the female ward where the daughter was being attended to. The nurse was struck several times by the woman’s parents and is said to be currently paralyzed as a result of injuries sustained in the beating.
The parents, according to a report on thePeople’s Dailywebsite (in Chinese), have been suspended pending an investigation.
Violence against hospital staff in China is not a new phenomenon, and official commentators first looked to place this tragic event in that larger context of uncivilized behavior (in Chinese).
But what is particularly noteworthy is that state media took an inordinate amount of time before reporting on the incident, likely because they had not been given the go-ahead by authorities.
Previously–in Nanjing, for example — the response of the authorities has been quite rapid. And when there have been rumors of official malfeasance and misconduct generally, there’ve been determined efforts by Beijing recently to show them to be nonsensical (in Chinese).
It’s not clear why authorities hesitated in this case, but it clearly cost them.
First, Chinese micro-bloggers ran with what they knew—or thought they did, rumors and all. There were unsubstantiated accounts on social media sites of a doctor also being attacked during the same confrontation, of another physician fighting back and defending the nurse, and of the nurse herself possibly faking her injuries.
Because state news outlets stayed silent on the event, authorities were left not only playing catch-up to social media, but also were prevented from addressing rumors of everything from what official positions the accused parents actually occupied to whether the recently-appointed Nanjing party secretary visited the nurse in the hospital to offer a personal apology.
When the story finally did come out, the official response was a tale of two cities reacting reluctantly and with little coordination: Nanjing media talked about the event as another in a set of hospital attacks and finally released a video of the assault that had been widely posted on social media days before. Beijing, meanwhile, was left to comment on the larger lessons of the tragedy, stating that the incident showed that there are “officials who think that their identity is a free pass for all occasions, who will feel that power gives them a license to do everything, including the use of violence” (in Chinese).
This was not a division of labor, but a divided view: of what actually happened and what it all meant.
The Xi leadership has been battling for some time with the question of how to be a ruling party in an era where technology has changed so many of the rules. It’s an enormous challenge and they are right to worry.
But creating more committees to centralize policy-making is only part of the job. The other part is winning the race for relevancy where social media and public opinion is concerned. And as long as the focus is on security, rather than service, it’s a race the party could be in regular danger of losing.
..and read the comments, please ..
- like this:
.. Call of the PRC running dogs and China’s image will begin to improve.
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