Peasant's death sparks calls for change
Jim Yardley, New York Times
Friday, January 16, 2004
naar overzicht artikels van Internet
HARBIN, China. On Oct. 16, the day she died, Liu Zhongxia was riding in her onion cart when it scraped a sedan. Ordinarily, her death would have drawn little attention. But in a country increasingly divided between rich and poor, one detail stood out:
The sedan was a BMW.
Liu was a peasant. The driver of the BMW, Su Xiuwen, was the wife of a businessman. The initial scrape was minor, but after a confrontation, Su drove the car into Liu.
The trial in December lasted less than two hours, with Su receiving a suspended sentence. The death was ruled an accident.
And that would have ended it, except for two things. First, the "BMW case" tapped into sharp class resentments emerging in this Communist country, which long espoused a classless society. And second, that anger was able to coalesce in what is becoming an increasingly influential court of appeals in China: the Internet, which boiled with online outrage.
This week, in a rare step, officials here announced an investigation into possible judicial corruption in the BMW case, state media reported. There is already speculation that Su could face a harsher verdict, a result that would appease the online critics but could also set an uneasy precedent for legal reformers trying to establish genuine rule of law in China.
"If the case involved a tractor, I'm sure it wouldn't have attracted any attention," said Qu Wenyong, dean of the sociology department at Heilongjiang University in Harbin. "But it involved a BMW, which symbolizes wealth and power. People immediately associated it with the gap between rich and poor."
That yawning gap is a fundamental contradiction of China's economic boom. Wealth is pouring in, giving rise to a swelling middle class, yet hundreds of millions still live in poverty.
In northeast China, which was once the country's industrial center but is now mired in unemployment, it is not hard to find class bitterness rubbed raw by the case. "We ordinary people have to obey the laws," said a taxi driver. Su, he said, does not: "She has the power. She has the privilege. She can drive wildly."
Initially, the incident barely attracted attention outside Harbin.
That day, Liu's husband, Dai Yiquan, accidentally bumped their onion cart into the side of the BMW, pushing the car about a meter.
Dai, interviewed at his small village home outside Harbin, said Su jumped out and began hitting him.
Then, after bystanders intervened, she returned to the car, apparently to back up and free the BMW from the cart. But she unexpectedly drove forward, crushing Liu and injuring several others.
The car crashed to a halt against a tree.
"My wife was dragged for six or seven meters," or about 20 feet, Dai said. He saw blood coming out of her mouth. "People said she was already dead," he recalled. "I was just dumbfounded."
The question at trial was whether Su had intentionally tried to harm Liu or had simply mistakenly put the car into first gear instead of reverse.
The trial was notable for the absence of eyewitnesses, despite so many people having seen the incident.
Su's husband admitted that he had paid more than $20,000 - a huge amount of money in rural China - to people who were injured, which may explain why none testified at the hearing.
One of them was Dai, who said he received almost $10,000, roughly eight years of wages. He said he did not even attend the trial. "I just want peace for my family," a weary Dai said. "I don't care about the verdict and whether it is justice or not."
But China's "net citizens" cared very much. Editors at SINA.com, the country's most popular Web site, said that after the verdict, more than 200,000 messages were posted to chat rooms, many suggesting that corruption was to blame. A spate of articles in the media fueled their anger. Some quoted Dai accusing Su of intentionally trying to harm his wife.
Guo Liang, a scholar with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who studies the role of the Internet in Chinese society, said that the case was the latest example of growing influence. He said Internet protests of a police beating death last year had helped prompt a change in national detention laws. The Internet also became a primary information source during the initial outbreak of SARS.
While a majority of Internet users are China's urban elite, Guo said, he recently finished a study showing that poorer, more rural residents are increasingly going online, renting time at Internet caf閟 for as little as 12 cents an hour.
"This platform has really changed the situation in China, because everybody can write something," he said.
But there are definitely limits. The government methodically arrests Internet "dissidents" and tightly monitors postings about sensitive political subjects, like Tibet, Taiwan and Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement. Government censors can tolerate unexpected subjects like the BMW case for weeks - undoubtedly using them to gauge public opinion - only to suddenly shut them down.
Chinese newspaper reporters and online editors say censors did just that to the BMW case late on Wednesday. Newspapers were told to stop reporting, and links to the case were erased from SINA.com. Sources said no explanation was given.
Guan Mingbo, the husband of Su, believes the Internet has victimized his family. Guan, who owns a development company, said he paid money to Dai and others as an apology, and to help them cover medical and funeral costs.
His wife, he said, was not a murderer, just a bad driver who does not know how to handle a car.
In fact, he told state media that he used connections at the local traffic authority to get her a license in 1997. Otherwise, he said, she would not have been able to pass the test.
The New York Times
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