“'Handle Affairs According to Law,' Not 'Find a Law to Handle People'”

“依法办事”不是“找法办人”

Southern Weekend, 2009-07-22

An op-ed in Southern Weekend denounces two recent cases of criminal prosecution for alleged defamation as “nothing more than the weak masses reporting the perversions of law and corruption of local officials.” In neither case—one involving a citizen writing online about the corruption of his local township Party secretary, the other alleging that a local girl had died after being gang raped—was the “social order severely endangered” or “national interests” concretely damaged, as Article 246 of the criminal code describes criminal defamation. After noting that “protecting freedom of speech and cautiously using legal codes to mete out punishments has already become an international trend,” the op-ed further argues that “if this tendency to suppress new media's information dissemination and expressions of speech is not checked, then the nation's laws will become [corrupt officials'] personal law . . . and a new kind of local plague will run rampant throughout the over two thousand county and district level governments, damaging the nation's image.”