Man Imprisoned For “Inciting Subversion” Believed to be Legendary Chinese Blogger

For 12 years, the anonymous Chinese blogger program-think eluded authorities while writing on the most sensitive of topics: the Great Firewall, the Tiananmen Massacre, high-level factional politics, freedom of speech, and more. But since its most recent post on May 9, 2021, the blog has remained silent. Observers were left wondering: who was program-think and what happened to him? Now, a Shanghai woman whose husband was arrested on May 10, 2021, and sentenced this February to seven years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power,” thinks she knows the answer. Bei Zhenying believes that her husband Ruan Xiaohuan, a talented programmer and prolific blogger, was program-think. In a series of interviews given to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Radio Free Asia, and CNN, Bei detailed the charges against Ruan, how she came to suspect he was program-think, and his turn from blogging about information technology to politics. The CPJ documented the charges against Ruan and noted that authorities denied Ruan representation by the prominent human rights lawyers Bei had recruited to defend him:

On February 10, a court in Shanghai sentenced Ruan to seven years in prison for allegedly inciting the subversion of state power, according to multiple news reports and Ruan’s lawyer Shang Baojun, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app.

[…] A copy of the verdict reviewed by CPJ said that Ruan was also sentenced to the deprivation of his political rights for two years and the confiscation of 20,000 renminbi (US$2,904) worth of property.

Bei told CPJ that Ruan’s closed-door trial began about six months after his arrest but then she received a notice from authorities in March 2022 that it had been paused indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She said she doubted that it was “even humane” to detain him for that long before his sentencing.

Bei was not allowed to attend any hearings in Ruan’s trial, and the state-assigned lawyers in the case told her that they could not give her any information about the proceedings due to nondisclosure agreements they had signed. The first time she saw Ruan since his arrest was at the February 10 verdict announcement.

“He lost a lot of weight and his hair has grown white,” said Bei. “But otherwise he looked fine.”

Ruan filed an appeal on the day of his verdict, but the appeals court refused to recognize Shang as his lawyer, Shang told CPJ. The court also refused to recognize [Mo Shaoping], and instead gave Ruan two state-assigned lawyers. [Source]

Here's a Redditor explaining why Ruan is likely to be Programthink. The user searched a leaked database and found the password of Programthink's gmail. He then found that the password was also used for an account called "xhruan".https://t.co/guKrqp85Uk去年我定位到编程随想的过程/

— Wenhao (@ThisIsWenhao) March 22, 2023

 

At Radio Free Asia, Gao Feng also spoke with Bei Zhenying and one of Ruan’s associates, the latter of whom speculated that Ruan’s writings on high-level corruption crossed authorities’ unspoken red lines: 

“My husband basically admits that he wrote the posts, but said he did it in order to make things better,” she said. “He also submitted evidence of his contributions to the nation, and never expected that the court would treat it as a serious crime.”

“The punishment of seven years is at the lighter end of the possible range of 5-15 years,” she said.

[…] One of Ruan’s associates told Radio Free Asia at the time of his detention that he was likely detained over an in-depth analysis of party leaders’ wealth following the publication of the Panama Papers in 2016, and his political theorizing and anti-brainwashing campaigns.

The person said Ruan’s blog had turned him from an uncritical supporter of the government to someone who “longs for freedom and democracy.” [Source]

CNN’s Nectar Gan interviewed Bei and learned how she came to believe her husband was program-think: 

She learned during police investigations that her husband had posted more than 700 articles on an overseas platform – just as Program Think did.

“It can’t be just a coincidence,” Bei said.

She burst into tears at an internet cafe the moment she drew what she believes to be the connection between her husband and the influential blogger, she recalled.

“I came to realize how much pressure he had been under for such a long time. He was doing all these dangerous things, carrying so much weight on his shoulders all by himself,” she said.

“Even after he was caught, no one could help him because nobody knew he was Program Think.”

[…] Ruan never cared much about money or material comfort. Instead, he longed for what he called the “open source spirit” – freedom, openness, sharing and cooperation, Bei said.

“He thinks one must pursue spiritual values in life. For him, it is technology – that’s what he finds valuable. But only recently did I discover that his (quest) for freedom had also morphed into a (longing for) political freedom,” she said. [Source]

Highly recommend: the legendary tech/political blogger Program Think (Ruan Xiaohuan), the epitome of the fight for internet freedom from within China.
“Under the Communist Party’s ubiquitous surveillance – both online and in real life, he managed to carry on for 12 years – that… https://t.co/xQO57DKcJp

— 周锋锁 Fengsuo Zhou (@ZhouFengSuo) March 29, 2023

PEN America and PEN International released a joint statement calling for Ruan’s immediate release: 

“The seven-year prison sentence handed down to Ruan Xiaohuan for his politics and technology blog is an outrage. Blogging is not a crime and the heavy prison sentence on national security charges for his writing illustrates the dire situation for free expression in China. We call on Chinese authorities to vacate his prison sentence and release him immediately,” said Angeli Datt, PEN America’s China research and advocacy lead.

“The severe sentence against Ruan Xiaohuan is yet another example of the authorities’ willingness to use every means available to silence dissenting voices. It is notable that PRC government representatives continue to freely post on social media platforms banned in China while persecuting others who seek the same freedoms,” said Ross Holder, Head of Asia/ Pacific Region at PEN International. [Source]

CDT translated representative excerpts from three of program-think’s posts soon after his disappearance in 2021.

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/man-imprisoned-for-inciting-subversion-believed-to-be-legendary-chinese-blogger/

Photo: China, by Martín Justicia

China, by Martín Justicia (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/photo-china-by-martin-justicia-2/

Censors Delete Viral “Kong Yiji Literature” Anthem

Every movement needs its anthem. In the now-censored musical parody “Sunny Side Kong Yiji,” the emergent “Kong Yiji literature” wave seems to have found one of its own. “Kong Yiji literature” is a genre of self-deprecating online writing that compares unemployed college graduates to the eponymous protagonist of Lu Xun’s 1918 short story, an impoverished scholar who is the object of ridicule at the village pub. The original short story is a critique of state and society’s apathy towards the marginalized. The modern offshoot tilts its lance at the Chinese state’s hoary belief in the “bootstrap mentality,” whereby mere effort is supposedly a recipe for financial success. 

The song was originally uploaded to video sharing site Bilibili by user @鬼山哥. It was a direct response to a rash of recent state-media reports admonishing youth to work hard and stop complaining. People’s Daily instructed youth: “Work Hard & Your Days Will Become Ever Sweeter.” CCTV posted a WeChat article, “Facing Up to the Anxiety Behind ‘Kong Yiji Literature,’” that misconstrued the “Kong Yiji” genre and pooh-poohed youth concerns about suffering a similar fate to Lu Xun’s famed protagonist. CCTV also aired footage of an impoverished “bang-bang” porter working as a Porsche drove past, while the cloying voice-over narration praised the supposed peace of mind earned through manual labor. These reports reveal official unease with youth dissatisfaction as expressed through the “lie flat” and “involution” memes, and now, the “Kong Yiji literature” trend. 

“Sunny Side Kong Yiji” immediately went viral. Its highly sarcastic lyrics imagine an incongruously optimistic modern day Kong Yiji, an educated patriot condemned to a life of working as a delivery boy:

 

In my tattered scholar’s gown, I head to the Lu Village pub

Barman! Warm two bowls of liquor, here’s nine coppers for some grub

Spouting scholarly babble in my ragged gown, I roll into the pub

Barman! Warm two bowls of liquor, here’s nine coppers for some grub

They mock my erudition, my face is turning red

You dare impugn my honor? I’ll go on drinking and butting heads

Rickshaw Boy didn’t work hard enough, that’s why he’s dead

Everything Lu Xun wrote was stuff that shouldn’t be said

Chen Sheng and Wu Guang had it rough because they wouldn’t work for their bread

Accusing eyes turn to me and ask: “What’s gotten into your head?”

I glance down at my gown and say I’m—

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

The Man has the nerve to write, “It’s time to knuckle under, see?”

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

I’d rather slack off than let you exploit me

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

You drive a Lamborghini, yet laugh and call me lazy

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

This corrupt society’s got fuck-all to do with me!

I keep my face clean, but my pockets are always empty

So I throw on my gown and write copy for the powers that be

I thought work would be a breeze, but it’s 996: six days a week, twelve hours a day

When I have the nerve to “maliciously” ask for my pay, the cops drag my hungry ass away

How is there no labor law in this evil society?

Why’s it so easy for the elites to trample on our dignity?

The tales no one dares to tell are beyond belief

The other patrons stare and ask, “How come you aren’t scared?”

I laugh and say it’s because I’m—

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

The weakest branch, I stopped fighting back long ago

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

Time weathered my edges, now I’ve only got scars to show

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

Optimism’s my armor, but behind the mask the tears flow

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

You ask if I’m happy, but all I want to do is curse

The tavern starts buzzing when I finish my verse

What does all their negativity and mockery have to do with me?

I went to school to help China rise, not to be some delivery guy

Hearing this, everybody smirks

Except for that one stupid jerk

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

I tear through this crumbling wall, looking for justice and light

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

We all need the applause, whether it’s criticism or praise

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

In the censored comment section, how many embers of dissent still blaze?

Sunny Side Kong Yiji, Sunny Side Kong Yiji

I’d hoped to be a Zhuge Liang, instead they’ll take me out like Shang Yang. [Chinese]

“Sunny Side Kong Yiji” got over 3 million views before it was censored. @鬼山哥’s Bilibili account was also suspended for 15 days. On the popular question-and-answer site Zhihu, @鬼山歌 explained his motivation for writing the song and expressed his surprise and dismay at having his account banned. Most tellingly, he quoted his own lyrics to compare himself to Shang Yang, the Qin dynasty philosopher-politician who was executed by being torn apart by five horses after falling afoul of that era’s ruling families: 

I anticipated that the song would be censored, but I never imagined that my account would be shut down, too.

[…] Life’s been tough recently. I’ve been out of work for a long time, and my mom’s hospital bills have wiped out all the money I saved in Shanghai. On top of that, I’ve got a few outstanding debts. I’d been planning to earn some money delivering takeout, but then my car got messed up. Then I thought I’d continue singing on Bilibili, but I tested positive for COVID just a few days later.

Then I happened to see CCTV’s hot takes about “youth clinging to the gown” and “life becoming ever sweeter,” and all that stuff, and it got me so mad I made the video, just to blow off steam and share my frustration.

Everybody knows what happened next.

The video was censored, my account was banned, and my only means of making money has been shut off.

[…] The iron fist came down on my last revenue stream, and now I have no idea what I’m going to do.

They’ve forced me into a dead end, and for what? Just because I told the truth?

“I’d hoped to be a Zhuge Liang, [but] instead they’ll take me out like Shang Yang.” [Chinese]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/censors-delete-viral-kong-yiji-literature-anthem/

CNN – An influential Chinese blogger disappeared from the internet. This woman says she knows why

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/cnn-an-influential-chinese-blogger-disappeared-from-the-internet-this-woman-says-she-knows-why/

Word(s) of the Week: “Kong Yiji Literature” (孔乙己文学, Kǒng Yǐjǐ Wénxué)

“Kong Yiji literature” emerged as a self-deprecating meme among young Chinese netizens who joke that their academic credentials have made them “unemployable,” too overeducated or overqualified for the jobs currently available. They liken themselves to the titular protagonist of Lu Xun’s 1918 short story “Kong Yiji,” an impoverished scholar whose pedantic airs are mocked by the denizens of the tavern he frequents. After Kong Yiji’s legs are broken as punishment for stealing books, he drags himself into the tavern for one last drink, disappears, and is presumed dead—not that anyone around him seems to care. Lu Xun’s short story was a blistering critique of what he saw as the ills afflicting early twentieth-century Chinese society: the rigid and outdated imperial examination system, the destruction of the intellectual class, and an apathetic citizenry indifferent to the suffering of others.

While the recent iteration of “Kong Yiji literature” is more light-hearted than its namesake, it does speak to some of the problems of today: youth unemployment, urban poverty, limited socioeconomic mobility, and a hyper-competitive educational system that may not prepare students for a career after graduation. “When I first read the story,” explained one young netizen, “I didn’t really understand it. But now I’ve turned into the protagonist!” Another commented: “Everyone says a degree is a stepping stone, but I’m slowly coming to realize it’s more like a pedestal I can’t get down from, much like Kong Yiji couldn’t get out of his ‘scholar’s robes.’” “If I weren’t so educated, I could find some other kind of work to do,” lamented another, “but no, I just had to go and get an education!”

In mid-March, the “Kong Yiji literature” meme saw a resurgence after a joint social media post from the Communist Party Youth League and state broadcaster CCTV prompted a backlash for accusing unemployed or underemployed university graduates of being overly picky and having an aversion to hard work. Furious netizens hit back, accusing the author of the post “Facing Up to the Anxiety Behind ‘Kong Yiji Literature’” of misconstruing both the meme and Lu Xun’s original short story, and of gaslighting young people struggling in a genuinely tough job market. As RFA reported, many readers took issue with the smug, preachy tone of the post:

The Youth League and CCTV post […declared] that “the value of academic qualifications can only be realized when one’s potential is fully explored in creative, practical activities.”

“The reason why Kong Yiji fell into his predicament wasn’t because of his learning, but because he couldn’t let go of the airs of a scholar and was unwilling to change his situation through labor,” the CCTV and Youth League post said.

“The scholar’s long gown can shackle the mind, and temporary difficulties do not equal a lifetime of failure,” it said.

It was picked up in copycat editorials and short videos following the same line, including one short video on Bilibili in which a young woman is shown making deliveries to a home and removing packaging, while musing that having a degree shouldn’t “shackle” the mind. [Source]

The Weibo post was inundated with critical comments, but these were soon censored, leaving only the favorable comments visible. Some Weibo users got around this by forwarding versions of the post so that readers could leave comments. CDT Chinese editors have archived some of the comments left on Weibo and Zhihu, a selection of which are translated below:

Selected Weibo comments:

仙女甜了酱：The author praises higher education, while criticizing students for not abandoning their aspirations. He raises the bar for “lying flat” [slacking off], while also mocking “small town test-takers” [ambitious students from humble backgrounds]. Since when did the news media become so arrogant?

死不油腻：What I really want to know is this: if Mr. Lu Xun could hear about this post from his grave, what would he have to say about CCTV?

勵志天下9_601：Chalking up Kong Yiji’s tragic fate to his personal failings without even considering social factors, and using this to lob implicit criticism at today’s educated youth is not just ignorant and superficial, but malevolent.

Selected Zhihu comments:

我到不了：So Lu Xun wrote “Kong Yiji” as a critique of Kong Yiji? And here I thought it was a critique of the decadent old society! […] In Lu Xun’s works, the common people are apathetic, but Lu Xun never blamed that apathy on the common people themselves.

我在中间应当休息：Not this again! The wise old author of this post is truly a master of feigned ignorance. Do you suppose that when Lu Xun wrote “Kong Yiji,” he meant it as a satire of Kong Yiji himself, or was it a satire of society at that time? […] You state media types spend your days handling the rich and powerful with kid gloves, but you have the nerve to sneer at young people for not working hard enough?

无产者：Let me translate this post into the language of [Lu Xun’s] short story: the rare few who can afford to wine and dine in the tavern’s exclusive private room are superior to the masses. Yet those who stint at nothing to gain an education and the right to wear a “scholar’s gown” should be criticized. And then, shamelessly, you ask them: “Hey, how come you aren’t willing to exchange that scholar’s gown for a short tunic, and go join the manual laborers?” [Chinese]

Despite heavy comment censorship, the CCTV post continued to generate controversy, with many online commentators and essayists weighing in. An essay published on the WeChat account 非虚构故事 (Feixugou Gushi, “Non-fiction Stories”) criticized the CCTV post for its condescending tone and failure to recognize economic realities. The author noted that in 2023, China will add nearly 11.6 million new university graduates to the job market, an increase of 820,000 from 2022. And in Beijing, the number of graduate students (in both master’s and doctoral programs) surpassed the number of undergraduates for the very first time. A short excerpt from the essay:

Young people aren’t stupid, and everyone is well aware that state media has its own agenda. In the current economic downturn, many enterprises—particularly private companies—are struggling. The job market has shrunk significantly, and it cannot absorb all of the recent college graduates.

This is a structural social problem. But state media, ignoring the elephant in the room, paints it instead as a personal problem: if you can’t find enough jobs, it must be your own fault, and don’t blame society. 

[…] As one netizen commented: “Education has made me dissatisfied with the status quo, but has left me powerless to change it.” [Chinese]

A WeChat essay by 龅牙赵 (Baoya Zhao, “Bucktoothed Zhao”) also pointed out the structural nature of youth unemployment. If university graduates were to lower their standards and begin taking manual labor jobs, as suggested by the controversial CCTV post, they would crowd out those currently working in manual labor. The author uses two fictional characters—Lu Xun’s Kong Yiji, and Camel Xiangzi, the protagonist of Lao She’s novel “Rickshaw Boy”—as stand-ins for white-collar and blue-collar workers, respectively:

We all understand the reason behind asking Kong Yiji to doff his scholar’s gown and go pull a rickshaw. It is a way to solve the problem of a large number of unemployed Kong Yijis by “guiding” them to engage in jobs that have nothing to do with their majors or academic credentials.

But you can’t just water down Camel Xiangzi’s already-thin gruel in order to solve Kong Yiji’s unemployment problem.

Kong Yiji can decide to take off his scholar’s gown and pull a rickshaw, but where does that leave Camel Xiangzi? [Chinese]

The rich variety of “Kong Yiji literature” memes include a musical version and a manga version that envisions Kong Yiji as an engineering college graduate barely eking out a living in a modern “urban village.” Whereas the narrator of Lu Xun’s short story was a boy who worked in the local tavern, the narrator in the manga is the son of a landlord who rents a room to Kong Yiji. And while Kong Yiji was brutally beaten and likely died in Lu Xun’s tragic tale, in the modern-day manga version, Kong Yiji simply slinks back to his hometown, behind in his rent and unable to make a go of life in the big city. Several panels of the manga are translated below:

Here in the imperial capital, the rental situation is different from other places: all you can get for 1,000 yuan a month is a room in an illegally-constructed building in an “urban village,” far outside the city proper.

My father said I was born stupid, and didn’t have the makings of a scholar.
Luckily, our family managed to cash in during the capital’s “demolition and construction” phase, so it was enough that I could add and subtract and count money.
Kong Yiji was the only one of our renters ever to arrive with a suitcase of books.

Kong Yiji was unwilling to take a job beneath his station, he couldn’t afford to go abroad, and his family didn’t have much in the way of savings, so his only option was to try his luck in this unfamiliar first-tier city.
Male diner: Kong Yiji, did you really graduate from a four-year university?
Kong Yiji: Of course!
Female diner: Then why do you earn less than Ah Zhen, who didn’t even graduate from primary school?

It was only then I realized that Kong Yiji hadn’t shown his face around here in a very long time.
Fruit-seller: He’s long gone. He went back to his hometown.

[Chinese]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/words-of-the-week-kong-yiji-literature-%e5%ad%94%e4%b9%99%e5%b7%b1%e6%96%87%e5%ad%a6-kong-yiji-wenxue/

Photo: Raining night out AGAIN, by QuantFoto

Raining night out AGAIN, by QuantFoto (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/photo-raining-night-out-again-by-quantfoto/

US Crypto Executive Charged With Bribing Chinese Official

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency executive indicted on charges of fraud in 2022, has now been charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Business Practices Act for bribing one or more unnamed Chinese officials. An unsealed indictment holds that Bankman-Fried sent at least $40 million in cryptocurrencies to a Chinese official in order to unfreeze accounts belonging to Alameda, a hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded. At The New York Times, Matthew Goldstein reported on the alleged bribery scheme: 

The authorities said that in early 2021, Chinese officials froze the money in the Alameda accounts, which were held in two of China’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. The accounts had been frozen in connection with an investigation into one of Alameda’s trading partners.

Mr. Bankman-Fried came up with the plan to pay bribes, prosecutors said, after other efforts to unfreeze the money were unsuccessful, including hiring lawyers to lobby Chinese officials and creating fraudulent accounts in an attempt to deceive the Chinese authorities.

The bribe, according to the federal prosecutors, was paid in at least two parts, with the first taking place in November 2021.

The indictment said that after Mr. Bankman-Fried received confirmation that the accounts were unfrozen, the rest of the bribe was paid. The unfrozen funds were then used to fuel additional trading at Alameda. [Source]

Bankman-Fried allegedly paid the first bribe just two months after two top Chinese regulators, including the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), took harsh measures to end cryptocurrency mining and trading in September 2021. The September ban was the culmination of nearly a decade of regulatory unease with cryptocurrencies as both risky and environmentally-unfriendly assets, but did not end the Chinese trade in crypto-currencies: blockchain-focused consulting company Chainanalysis found in October 2022 that the ban had been  “ineffective or loosely enforced.” In November 2022, just over a year after the PBOC and other agencies came out against cryptocurrencies, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) announced that the deputy governor in charge of the PBOC’s cryptocurrency regulation, Fan Yifei, had been detained for unspecified “suspected serious violations of discipline and law,” a common precursor to corruption charges. There have been no public statements by officials in the United States or China connecting Fan to Bankman-Fried, or indeed, to cryptocurrency corruption. Other officials have been disciplined for their links to cryptocurrencies. Xiao Yi, a former vice-chairman of a provincial political advisory body, was stripped of his Party membership for “abusing his power to introduce and support companies to engage in virtual currency ‘mining’ activities that do not conform with the national industrial policy,” among other charges. 

In Sept 2021, China issued an order to "clean up and ban" crypto and financing through coin offerings. They gave up trying to regulate a space so full of "illegal and criminal activities" like money laundering, fraud, and pyramid schemes. 2/https://t.co/pfEHnlGOI0

— Martin Chorzempa 马永哲 (@ChorzempaMartin) March 28, 2023

4/ So SBF's purported bribe came when the CN gov was shutting down all crypto business in China, worried about capital leaving China, and the funds involved were huge. Whoever unfroze the accounts was MASSIVELY sticking their neck out.

— Martin Chorzempa 马永哲 (@ChorzempaMartin) March 28, 2023

Fan and Xiao are two of the nearly 5 million Party members (of a total of approximately 96 million) who have been investigated on graft charges since Xi Jinping took control in 2012. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is now entering its second decade, with connections between officials and private business under increasing scrutiny. In January of this year, Bloomberg reported on Xi Jinping’s ongoing anti-graft push, which despite “overwhelming victory,” is still “far from over”:

“Action should be taken to prevent leading officials from acting for any interest group or power group, and to forestall any collusion between officials and businesspeople,” Xi told a meeting of anti-corruption regulators on Monday, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

He also warned against “any infiltration of capital into politics that undermines the political ecosystem or the environment for economic development.”

The message that graft cannot be allowed to thrive in the Chinese political system is one that Xi delivers regularly. In December, just after securing a third term in power, Xi said the country had achieved an “overwhelming victory” in its battle against corruption but added that the work was “far from over.” [Source]

The search for graft is seemingly endless. It also seems to remain popular in the public eye; China’s hottest TV show, “The Knockout,” is an ode to Xi’s anti-corruption drive. Since the end of the Two Sessions in March of this year, six provincial- and ministerial-level officials have been detained for graft investigations, as have 10 heads of state-owned corporations. Chinese soccer has been rocked by a corruption investigation that has seen the detentions of the country’s most famous ex-footballer, Li Tie, and the president of the Chinese Football Association, Chen Xuyuan. The investigations threaten to derail China’s foundering hopes of becoming a global soccer power. In recent weeks, graft investigators have also charged Zhao Weiguo, the head of chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup, with corruption for “taking the state-owned company he managed as his private fiefdom.” The CCDI also announced a new-round of corruption inspections to take place at many of China’s top banks as well as 30 state-owned industrial companies. The campaign is also going global. At The Wall Street Journal, Chun Han Wong and Keith Zhai reported that the CCDI will be deploying inspectors to Chinese embassies around the world in an effort to pursue fugitive officials and their ill-gotten windfalls abroad: 

These anticorruption inspectors will be based mainly in countries where corrupt Chinese officials are likely to have stashed large amounts of illicit funds, such as members of the Group of 20 nations, said one of the people. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the antigraft body, has pledged this year to ramp up cross-border efforts in fighting corruption, particularly across countries that participate in Mr. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative to build global trade infrastructure—a group that includes G-20 members.

[…] “Currently, quite a number of fugitive cases are old cases that stretch over long time spans and where there are few effective clues,” said a commentary published by the CCDI’s official newspaper in December that called for more international cooperation in fighting graft. Officials must overcome these difficulties by strengthening coordination and coming up with new tactics and techniques, the commentary said.

[…] CCDI personnel would likely take up their overseas roles in their capacities as government officials from a state agency, rather than as party inspectors, to conform with diplomatic convention, according to the people familiar with the plan.

For instance, CCDI officials taking postings in embassies abroad could go as officials from the National Supervisory Commission, one of the people said. That commission functions as the CCDI’s state equivalent in a practice known as “one set of personnel, two signboards.” [Source]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/us-crypto-executive-charged-with-bribing-chinese-official/

Administrative Proceedings—“People Suing Government”—Removed From Chinese Legal Database in New Blow to Transparency

China Judgments Online, a database of legal documents run by the Supreme People’s Court, has removed nearly all administrative proceeding verdicts from its website. It is a major retreat from an earlier era of judicial transparency ushered in by the inauguration of the CJO database in 2013. Administrative proceedings are generally suits brought by ordinary citizens against state agencies. Their removal mirrors the quiet removal of an untold number of other verdicts, civil and criminal, that scholars have tracked since 2021. A WeChat blog @行政诉讼案例 (In English, “Administrative Case Law”) run by a practicing lawyer in Heilongjiang Province broke the news of the databases removal of the cases. The blog revealed that only 31 verdicts are still available online, a decrease from the 554,534 that were available in 2019: 

Starting in September 2022, I found that I was unable to log on to China Judgments Online (CJO). The official explanation was that the system was undergoing updates. Yet, a few days later, after the CJO update was completed, I found that verdicts on administrative proceedings were no longer available on the site! Another few days later, verdicts on administrative proceedings gradually began to reappear on CJO. Later, fans of this blog said the real explanation [for their removal] was that hostile forces had been using verdicts from successful suits against administrative agencies to write essays and articles. In response, the court system reviewed all administrative cases in order to remove sensitive cases from the database before the opening of the 20th Party Congress. Other fans held that the reason for the mass removal was that conflicting verdicts in similar administrative-proceedings cases were having a negative effect on the reputation of the courts. But whatever the reason, the number of [publicly available] verdicts on administrative proceedings is dwindling quickly. All of the cases I’ve shared on this WeChat blog were downloaded from the CJO database. After the system was updated, I found that many of the verdicts that went against administrative agencies could no longer be found! By 2023, nearly all of the verdicts on administrative proceedings were no longer available to the public on CJO. As of March, only 31 such verdicts are still available. 

[…] “Administrative proceedings” are colloquially known as “people suing the government.” The plaintiff and the defendant, then, occupy unequal positions. Since the administrative-proceedings system was instituted in the 1990s, it has been the subject of many complaints. It’s difficult to file an administrative procedure case, hard to win one, and even harder to enforce a ruling. With these three great obstacles to surmount, almost all plaintiffs in administrative proceedings complain that the court and administrative agencies are in cahoots and that the court is a black box in such lawsuits.

[…] Because I work on cases of administrative procedure and administrative reconsideration, I log on to CJO daily to conduct case law research and search for precedents. Since 2020, I have compiled a list of over 2000 administrative proceedings related to eminent domain, illegal construction, petitions, [access to] government information, administrative reconsideration, and other topics, encompassing 15 types of lawsuits. I have benefited tremendously from studying these cases. They have broadened my perspective and improved my ability to handle administrative proceedings. I have deepened my knowledge of the law through CJO’s open database of verdicts on administrative proceedings. A good case document can provide endless benefits for lawyers like me. Although no two cases are identical, case types exhibit distinctive patterns. Therefore, I focus my document searches on cases that share certain characteristic patterns. Taken together, these documents provide insight into the reasoning behind judgments. I focus on the legal reasoning in these cases: how did the judge apply the law? There is no single standard answer to this, but being able to examine the legal reasoning behind the verdicts is helpful. The legal precedents in these cases have been extremely influential in my handling of cases of administrative procedure and administrative reconsideration. In 2020, I took on an eminent domain case that asked whether the lessee of the commercial property in question was a stakeholder in the conflict [and thus had rights to remuneration]. The first trial held that they were. The appeal held that they were not. The case then moved to the Supreme People’s Court (SPC). The plaintiff sought me out to ask whether there was any chance of winning the case. At the time, the presiding judge of the SPC was Wang Xiaobin. I did some research on his legal reasoning in many similar cases, and found that he often ruled against the government in eminent domain cases when he thought the lessee was a stakeholder in the conflict. After reading the presiding judge’s previous rulings, I instantly became more confident in our case. Preparing the materials for the appeal and applying to the SPC took a year and a half. In the end, the SPC vacated the provincial court’s decision and issued a remand. The plaintiff received commensurate compensation. This anecdote illustrates that when researching cases, it is best to search for legal precedents in which the presiding judge or higher court has dealt with a similar case. These precedents will be incredibly helpful for you. And it’s not always true that the higher the ruling court, the more helpful the case will be [in your preparation]. Rather, it’s better to look at verdicts issued by the court currently handling the case, or the court directly above it. As the saying goes, “Real power lies with the sheriff, not the Supreme Court.” If you cite SPC case precedent to a grassroots level judge, he might completely ignore you, because he knows your case will never reach the SPC. But if you cite case precedent from his court or the one directly above his, he might take it quite seriously, because he’d be worried that his ruling might be vacated in a subsequent appeal! If you cite a case that he personally has presided over, the effects are even better. People have great trouble contradicting themselves. The more you cite his own verdict, the more he’ll be pleased with it and convinced it’s correct. 

[…] Lastly, I hope that the courts at all levels will reinstate the public disclosure of verdicts on administrative proceedings. I have a personal interest, because this WeChat account “Administrative Case Law” needs more source material to work with. But there is a public interest as well. Greater transparency and standardization of the legal procedures behind administrative litigation will encourage supervising judges to rule on the basis of the law and will help average citizens to defend their legitimate legal rights in administrative proceedings. [Chinese]

In 2020, the database housed over 100 million documents. In its heyday, CJO was hailed for shedding light on China’s sometimes opaque legal system. In 2020, the site started requiring a phone number, tied to Chinese citizens’ ID cards, to register. By 2021, the number of new cases added to the database dropped by 80% and millions of documents were quietly removed during an unexplained “migration” process, including all death penalty verdicts issued by the Supreme People’s Court. Politically sensitive cases were the subject of special attention. The case of a man who stood in Tiananmen Square while wearing a t-shirt commemorating the 1989 Beijing Massacre on its 30th anniversary was erased from CJO, as were at least 600 speech crime cases related to dissent about the zero-COVID policy. The rationale for the case removals has not been publicly explained—but eye-brow raising incidents of bureaucratic conflict have spilled into the open. In 2022, the Liaoning branch of the Cyberspace Administration of China warned the CJO against violating unspecified internet regulations. At ChinaFile in February that year, Luo Jiajun and Thomas Kellogg, both of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, examined the driving forces behind the decreasing transparency of China Judgments Online: 

A closer look at some of the cases that have been removed, however, suggests a different set of concerns. It seems clear that the SPC views certain kinds of cases as embarrassing to the Party: Some of the purged cases highlight official corruption or illustrate the Party’s use of the criminal justice system to crack down on its critics. Other cases present an unflattering view of Chinese society, and have likely been removed for that reason. In other words, the SPC wants its transparency mechanisms to paint a picture of a fair and benevolent CCP, and a healthy and wholesome Chinese society. Many verdicts that cut against that idyll have been removed.

[…] Other targeted searches we conducted—as well as those by other researchers—over the past few months reveal a similar pattern of large-scale purging of cases, and also highlight exactly which terms and which crimes the court system has targeted for removal. First, judgments containing key terms that China’s leadership deems “sensitive,” such as “Twitter,” “freedom of speech,” “rumor,” “feminism,” and “national leaders,” have been almost completely eliminated from CJO. Second, many verdicts involving certain kinds of crimes have been removed, including not just “picking quarrels,” but also political crimes such as subversion and morally fraught crimes such as blackmail. Third, many controversial cases have been removed. This seems especially true for cases that have been the subject of public scrutiny in ways that reflect badly on either the Party itself or on Chinese society as a whole. One district court in Anhui province went even further: It simply removed all of its criminal cases from the database.

A June 2021 judicial corruption case from Shandong province, initially posted to CJO but removed less than two weeks later, is one of many cases that cast an unflattering light on the Party-state. On June 8, a vice president and two fellow judges in the intermediate court in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, were convicted of bribery after taking millions of renminbi from over 60 lawyers from different law firms over several years. The case highlighted systemic judicial corruption that included a number of key players, including judges, lawyers, large corporations, and state-owned enterprises. Lawyers caught up in the scandal included top members of the provincial-level lawyers’ association and well-known legal academics, which suggested that bribery had permeated both the court system and the legal profession up to the very highest levels in the province. After the scandal attracted national media attention, the verdicts in the case were removed from the CJO database, and further media reporting on the case abruptly ceased, most likely on orders from the propaganda authorities. [Source]

The seeming roll back of transparency in administrative proceedings has potentially serious political implications. At Foreign Affairs, Yale Law School professor Taisu Zhang wrote that the Party-state is increasingly turning to “legality” as a source of legitimacy, as opposed to the realization of a socialist policy program or cheap nationalism: 

Laws can be employed to control or oppress, just as they can be used to protect individual rights and freedoms. Insofar as laws are expressions of its leadership’s political will, the party has an interest in enforcing them systemically and rigorously, especially if it wants firmer control over its local agents. In other words, it has an interest in investing in technical “legality,” even if it has none in political liberalization. 

[…] The benefits of this emphasis on legality extend far beyond controlling local officials or increasing social conformity. They potentially provide an entirely separate source of political legitimacy that does not rely on economic performance: that government behavior is increasingly legalistic can be a source of social trust in and of itself. As generations of social scientists have observed, many human societies have a tendency to “accept law as reason,” to see legality as an inherent reason to accept state action. This acceptance may or may not be morally justifiable, but it is a recurrent phenomenon even in—and perhaps especially in—nondemocratic, illiberal societies.

Recent research increasingly suggests that this phenomenon exists in China, as well. Surveys show, for example, that the Chinese urban population responds positively to institutional reforms that enhance the legal professionalism of government policy, even when those reforms restrict, rather than protect, individual rights and freedoms. The Chinese government certainly seems to think that legality can be a major source of political legitimacy: recently, whenever there has been a strong wave of public unhappiness against local government action—for example, after a major scandal in 2022, in which officials in Henan Province attempted to stop a run on local banks by imposing pandemic lockdowns—the central government’s response was to reemphasize the importance of “governing the country according to law” and to promise more legal training for local officials. Clearly, it is betting that further investment in legality, rhetorically and substantively, can directly fortify public confidence in government action. [Source]

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/administrative-proceedings-removed-from-chinese-legal-database-in-blow-to-transparency/

Photo: The city lights of Shenyang, China, by NASA Johnson

The city lights of Shenyang, China, by NASA Johnson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/photo-the-city-lights-of-shenyang-china-by-nasa-johnson/