New Reply

Post a Reply

Thread: Human flesh search engine is a uniquely Chinese phenomenon?

Title: (100 characters at most)

Content: ( 3,000 characters at most, please )

You can add emoticons below to your post by clicking them.

[quote=LEOPOLD219,300046]With their vast number of participants and angry nature, these witch hunts for a digital age are a uniquely Chinese phenomenon.

Xujun Eberlein, the Chinese-American writer and observer, said: “China’s population makes it easy to mobilize a large number of netizens to participate in such a search, especially considering that there are many smart and reasonably well-educated people in China who are intellectually underemployed."

She added: “I think there is some pleasure in the idea of making information available when there has been such significant suppression of both thoughts and facts over the previous five decades.”

According to Ms Eberlein, the term “human flesh search engine”, a literal translation of the Chinese, was first coined in 2001 when an entertainment website asked users to track down film and music trivia.

With 210 million Chinese wired up to the internet, it was a powerful concept. It quickly caught on and came to be used as a tool to punish the perpetrators of extra-marital affairs, domestic violence and morality crimes.

In one infamous case in 2006, a woman now dubbed “the kitten killer of Hangzhou” posted a video of herself stomping a kitten to death with her stiletto heels. China’s netizens erupted with rage and hundreds of amateur sleuths traced the video to Hangzhou, a city south of Shanghai. They discovered the woman’s name and that she had recently purchased a pair of high-heeled shoes on eBay. They attacked her until she apologized on a local government website and lost her job.

“Righteousness is one of the five virtues in the Confucian tradition,” Ms Eberlein said. “With the convenience of the internet, and in the case of non-responsive law, the righteous people took matters into their own hands.”
[/quote]

characters left

Name:

Get a new code