lawsuits and sweated i-pods

You may remember that back in June the Mail on Sunday reported that the suppliers of Apple i-pods were sweating their workers. I posted on it here. Not surprisingly the Chinese press took up the story and ran a number of exposes on the subject.

Now Foxconn, the company concerned have struck back in the courts. They’re not suing the MoS or any Chinese paper. They’re suing two journalists who covered the story as individuals and have managed to have their assets frozen in pursuit of huge damages. Details here. Not surprisingly, this is all over the Chinese media. Roland Soong asks:

This is not a question of whether the First Financial Reporter was right or wrong in his reports. Either way, FoxConn is entitled to file a civil libel suit against the newspaper, which employs that reporter and his editor. But since when does a civil libel suit involve freezing the assets of the reporter and the editor, including their bank savings accounts, stock holdings, homes and automobiles, to the tune of 10 million RMB for the editor and 20 million RMB for the reporter? As the reporter noted, this amount is many more times than that which he can ever expect to make in his lifetime. By comparison, how would the western media react if a prominent American newscaster such as Katie Couric were sued by a large corporation and have all her personal assets frozen for the duration of the legal proceedings? The Chinese media workers are of the opinion that if this case were allowed to go through, it will be the end of any coverage of the doings of large corporations. So why are the western media and press freedom organizations silent on this affair?

My suggestion would be that in the Thomas Friedman scheme of things companies like Foxconn are themselves agents of freedom in China and cannot, therefore, be oppressive themselves. Western media doesn’t exactly party-line on this, but it’s a pervasive outlook which tends to make for tunnel vision . What we actually seem to have here is a classic developmental dictatorship stitch up, where an oppressive government colludes with a large business to silence critics. As uleewang points out, this has not gone unnoticed in China:

Luckily for FoxConn, their lawyers found out that the two China Business News reporters, due to some rather complicated legal loophole at this messily-managed paper, did not have formal contracts. Therefore, there may be a chance that the court would regard them as "correspondents", or stringers, despite the fact that they had worked full-time at the newspaper. Under the 1993 Supreme Court judicial interpretation, part-time correspondents may be held liable personally in libel suits. Such plotting, if true, bespeaks FoxConn's determination to go after journalists daring enough to criticize it. Even so, this does not make the Shenzhen court any less of a conspirator in this ugly business. Their interpretation of the law would be crucial to how this whole show unravels. Interestingly, the Internet ire so far is directed not only against FoxConn, but many journalists are also pointing a finger at the court and the Shenzhen government.

Comments

[John Brissenden]

If I were Apple V-P of PR, I'd advise "Steve" to strike a rhetorical blow, and recapture some moral foothills, by funding the reporters' defence.