The Point via Creative Commons/Flickr.
In China, with its population of more than 1.3 billion, no misdeed can escape the all-seeing eye of the human-flesh search.
Author, Tom Downey, tells the story of the Chinese digital dragnet In this week’s New York Times Magazine. Scouring the Web for clues, Netizens collectively mobilize to unmask, and harass pro-Tibet protesters, corrupt officials and alley cat husbands, who run afoul of social mores. Think of it as the ultimate in crowdsourced punishment.
“The human-flesh search has unimaginable power,” says Zhang Yanfeng, the lawyer of a man whose wife committed suicide after discovering his affair.
After the story of Jiang Hong’s suicide hit the Internet, her husband’s life was turned upside down by the human-flesh search. Before throwing herself from the balcony of her 24th story home, Hong wrote 46 short posts on her blog, “Migratory Bird Going North,” detailing the affair of her husband, Jiang Chang. The diary, which was reposted and widely circulated, churned the emotional incident into a firestorm.
One commenter, called Hypocritical Human, urged any reader who saw the pair to rip their skin off. Each new poster seemed to scream more loudly for retribution to be paid in blood.
“We should take revenge on that couple and drown them in our sputa.” Calls for justice, for vengeance and for a human-flesh search began to spread, not only against Wang, but also against his girlfriend. “Those in Beijing, please share with others the scandal of these two,” a Netizen wrote. “Make it impossible for them to stay in this city.”
Accumulating evidence about the pair, the human-flesh search came up with an interactive map with the location of Wang’s parent’s home, the dry cleaning business that belonged to the parents of his mistress–even the license plate numbers for his brother’s car. His parent’s home was vandalized and, eventually, Wang and his mistress were fired from their jobs at Saatchi & Saatchi. The company said that the two had voluntarily resigned.
Downey says that the power and intensity of the human-flesh search demonstrates the difference between how the Internet is used by ordinary people in the U.S. versus China. However, the “vengeful populism,” as Downey calls it, is not new, nor is it limited only to China.
In New York City in 2006, a woman who found a cell phone in a cab and refused to return it to the owner felt the venom of the flesh and blood Web. In South Korea, a woman whose dog crapped on the Seoul subway was discovered and subsequently shamed after she refused to clean up in a well-publicized video.
When Downey spoke with Rebecca MacKinnon, visiting fellow of the Princeton University Center for Technology Policy, she compared the human-flesh search to a Red Guard 2.0, similar to the way Mao unleashed the rage of the masses to informally police corrupt officials. “It’s easy to denounce the tyranny of the online masses when you live in a country that has strong rule of law and institutions that address public corruption, but in China the human-flesh search engine is one of the only ways that ordinary citizens can try to go after corrupt local officials,” Downey says.
Beyond redressing the grievances of a totalitarian system, however, the human-flesh search is one way Chinese Netizens feel they can correct social evils, but the tyranny of the majority can get really, really ugly.
For the full article, click here.
