Seeking Justice Online in China

Recently, Chinese people are passionate about an old case in 1994 — the Thallium poisoning of Zhu Ling:

Zhu Ling^[a] (Chinese: 朱令; pinyin: Zhū Lìng, 24 April 1973 – 22 December 2023) was best known as the victim of an unsolved 1995 thallium poisoning case in Beijing, China. Her symptoms were posted to the Internet via a Usenet newsgroup by her friend from Peking University, Bei Zhicheng, and were subsequently proven to be caused by thallium poisoning. Her case was then reviewed by physicians in many different countries who examined her symptoms and made suggestions as to diagnoses and treatment. This effort was recognized as the first large-scale tele-medicine trial.^[6] Her life was ultimately saved, but she suffered serious neurological damage along with permanent physical impairment, and died in December of 2023.

In 2005, Bei Zhicheng’s internet article pointed out that the suspect, who’s also Zhu Ling’s roommate, Sun Wei, is very likely guilty. His narrative won over Chinese netizens’ trust, especially given the fact that this hotly discussed case has become a high-profile cold case that the police stopped investigating for seemingly no reason. People believe that the police stopped investigating because the suspect’s family is powerful—Sun’s grandfather held a high position in the government.

Upon Zhu Ling’s recent death, Chinese netizens’ anger culminated. Almost 20 years later, today, people have been voluntarily investigating, reposting, and signing petitions for the case. Chinese netizens tried hard so that the Australian government and media would also pay attention to this and banish the suspect, who is now living in Australia. In 2005, this case marked one of the first times that Chinese netizens’ sought justice online against an unfair judgment in their mind, and almost 20 years later, people are still using this powerful tool to voice their thoughts about this case. This article describes some well-known cases of Chinese netizens’ seeking justice online and then analyzes why does the CCP allow such behavior.

Background

With many newer and easier-to-use social media such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu rising in popularity, Chinese netizens have begun to seek justice online. It has become one of the easiest ways to expose and attract attention to corruption, collusion, and unfair treatment.

A famous example is Zhong Guangwei’s case. Zhong Guangwei was a miner from Shanxi. The mining work caused him to develop pneumoconiosis in 2008. Although he won the case against the mine owner, the mine owner refused to pay the promised compensation even 4 months after the judgment became effective in September, 2010. He eventually resorted to Weibo, and his post attracted the attention of Deng Fei, a journalist for "Phoenix Weekly." After Deng’s interview with Zhong, many Chinese netizens helped him — people visited him in Shanxi and some netizens even sent him to a hospital with better treatments in Nanjing.

Zhong passed away in March 2022. Before that, in February 2022, he reposted Deng Fei’s post about the “Xuzhou chained woman incident” which was another famous case of justice sought online. Zhong replied “Thank you, Teacher Deng, for speaking out for the chained woman! If it weren't for your initial support in my case, the consequences would be unimaginable.” This post is like a torch, conveying the warmth and enthusiasm that netizens have extended to him to the next victim of unfair treatment.

I have been describing netizens who more or less described the truth and exposed the injustice. This presents the readers with the bright side of seeking justice online. Nevertheless, as one would expect, many people could distort the truth and incite netizens to achieve their goals (e.g. the case of Liang Ying and Luo Guanzhong).

Why does the Chinese Government Allow this?

You may wonder why is such behavior allowed on the Chinese Internet by CCP. That is a fair point—exposing the cases online usually damages the reputation of the party. The fast-spreading posts on Weibo make sure more people will see the unfair treatment, resulting in criticism against the government across different cities and even across countries. For example, Zhong Guangwei’s case described above makes people reprimand the court for inaction; Zhu Ling’s case even more so destroyed netizen’s trust in the legal system — many even used VPN to send posts criticizing the CCP for the injustice in this case on X. In fact, in 2013, “Chinese Americans have launched a petition on the White House website, demanding that U.S. authorities investigate and deport Sun Wei, who is suspected of causing Zhu Ling's thallium poisoning.”

The reason that the CCP allows occasional online justice-seeking is that it is a decent way to monitor local governments. In a vast land like China, people fighting against local corruption might have difficulty conveying the matter to a higher-level government. As a result, many local problem go untold, like a timed bomb that could explode into some terrible scandal at some point. The central government would like to get more information to spot the local problems and potentially solve them early before the matter grows into something uncontrollable. In short, the central government has to balance between the potential of instability and collective action and knowing too little about the local governments’ performances (there are many economics/political science papers on this trade-off; to list a few: Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin (2009), Lorentzen (2014), Qin, Stromberg, and Wu (2017))

What are the alternatives to getting information from the Internet? One way is through the petitioning system. Since ancient times, petitioners who encountered unjust treatment by local powers would travel to Beijing and tell their grievances. Nowadays, there are online services that petitioners can utilize, but every year, thousands of people still choose to go to Beijing for their cases. However, such methods are usually stringently monitored and brutally hindered by the local government. For example, in 2013, “A Beijing court has issued a verdict against 10 defendants who acted as "black security guards" in Beijing, capturing and detaining petitioners from Henan.” Sometimes, when petitioners return to their hometowns, the local government punishes them by sending them to re-education camps. And with those hindrances of the local government, it is hard for the voice of petitioners to actually go through to the central government. Most of the time, the petitioners are just so discouraged that they give up the idea of petitioning in the capital.

Thus, seeking justice online becomes an acceptable strategy for both the petitioners and the central government. For the petitioners, they circumvent the corrupt local government that wronged them by posting directly on social media that the whole nation’s netizens including central government officials can see. For the central government, it gets to monitor the local governments’ behavior closely, preventing large-scale collective action later. The Internet essentially serves as a surveillance tool in this case. For example, in June of 2023, a video showing a man holding hands with a young woman prevailed on the internet. Netizens uncovered the identities of the individuals featured in the video and found out that the man is a high-up in the SOE, PetroChina. This was scandalous because this man was married to someone else. Consequently, "according to the Disciplinary Regulations and the Law on Public Service Sanctions, Hu Jiyong [the man in the video] is given the punishment of expulsion from the Party and dismissal from public office."

To sum up, I present a short history of Chinese people seeking justice online. Chinese petitioners often resort to the Internet to vent their dissatisfaction with certain judgments or treatments. The central government allows portions of such posts to exist because it utilizes them to surveil local issues, even though the posts do create a negative image of the CCP.