China’s censors working overtime

China’s censors have been busy in recent weeks. Most recently there was the strange case of the car that somehow eluded the tight security that generally surrounds Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, crashing through barriers and exploding, killing the three occupants, two nearby tourists and injuring about 40 others.

Pictures of the incident taken from innumerable mobile phone cameras quickly blossomed on to the internet and were just as hastily removed from Chinese social media sites such as Renren and Sina Weibo. The sanitised Government version initially referred to the incident as a simple traffic accident and when that looked patently ridiculous, as a terrorist attack.

The names of the three people in the car identified them as members of the Moslem Uighur minority from the far west of the country, and five ‘suspects’ have since been arrested.  

There the matter, as far as the Government in Beijing is concerned, rests.

Chinese social media played its part in alerting Western journalists to another case, which otherwise might have gone completely unnoticed. A former street vendor, Xia Junfeng, was executed for killing two officials who were punishing him for operating an unlicensed shish kebab stall.

At first sight there seemed little unusual about the incident in a country that routinely executes hundreds of its citizens every year, but the execution of Xia touched a raw nerve among members of China’s massive blogosphere.

Many who followed the case believed that the evidence at Xia’s trial had been rigged to show him in the worst possible light and that he, in fact, killed the officials, known in China as chengguan, in self defence while they were beating him up.

However, the greatest anger was directed at comparisons with the another killer before the courts, Gu Kailai, the wife of a disgraced Politburo member, Bo Xilai, who was convicted of poisoning a British businessman, but was given a suspended death sentence. It is likely that she will be released from prison within a few years.

A professor at the Chinese University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, Tong Zongjin, summed up the mood when he said that if Gu could escape the death penalty after killing someone with poison, Xia should not have been put to death.   

Once again the censors struck and within a few hours all comments on Xia’s execution were swept clean. The official record of his death, among thousands of others, is all that remains – another example of the fact that in this socialist paradise there is still one law for the powerful and influential and another for the masses.