03/21/2011

The tragedy of Zhao Wei

While the arguable non-story of China’s “Jasmine protests” enjoys excited and widespread coverage internationally, boiling over into a tug-of-war over the very real harassment of foreign journalists in China, there is one potentially great big story missing from everyone’s agenda — the mysterious death of Chinese college student Zhao Wei (赵伟).

And yet, the chilling story of Zhao Wei, who was very possibly murdered by railway authorities on his way home to Inner Mongolia during the Spring Festival rush more than a month ago, goes to the very heart of the issues and anxieties that are of most immediate relevance to all Chinese, and could contribute to demands for change.

How can the government ensure safety of life and property for ordinary Chinese? How can Chinese find justice in a society where special interests can get away — possibly quite literally in this case — with murder?

Given such immediate concerns about justice and fairness in Chinese society, Zhao Wei’s case has the potential — just the potential, mind you — to become what the Sun Zhigang case was for China’s detention and repatriation system back in 2003.

For those of you fishing around for another news hook, let us remember that China’s powerful Railways Ministry, subject right now to one of the biggest corruption probes in memory, is involved in Zhao’s case too. They are, Xinhua reports, now charged with the official investigation, despite the possibility that their own local authorities in Daqing are culpable.

Got your attention?

Zhao Wei’s story drew a firestorm of interest online earlier this week after a link to an open letter written by his desperate parents emerged through Sina’s microblog, or “weibo,” platform [WARNING: this link includes a photo some may find disturbing].

The essentials of Zhao Wei’s story, which receives basic corroboration by an official Xinhua News Agency release today — we’ll come to that in a moment — runs as follows.

Read more at China Media Project

Mar 21, 2011 2:56:34 PM | Current Affairs, Law

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
The Sino-Japanese Relationship: (apologies to Facebook) It’s Complicated Over the last four days, CCTV has had comprehensive coverage of the massive earthquake which struck Japan last week. Despite the ongoing NPC and CPPCC meetings China, CCTV still filled more than half of its morning news time with the latest information from Japan. Chinese leaders and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed China’s sympathy to its neighbor immediately after the earthquake, and a Chinese rescue team arrived in the disaster zone over the weekend to assist their Japanese counterparts in the relief and rescue efforts. It seems that Chinese government has decided to put historic conflict and recent territorial...
PREVIOUS POST
“History’s Conclusion: Western Style Democracy is Not for China” The following is an article from Huanqiu Lianwang by Song Luzheng. Both Marxism and Western style democracy arrived in China from the West, with the latter arriving first. Not only did democratic theory attract the interest of Chinese political elites, but democracy was attempted on two occasions. One was the constitutional monarchy-orientated 100 Days Reform movement and the reforms of the late Qing dynasty. The other was the American style ‘Constitution of Five Powers’ during Nationalist rule. Marxism only really influenced China after the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. However, it was Marxism that gradually emerged victorious amongst the...