Tianya, Bandao and other websites have joined together to form the "Internet Media Alliance Against Public Relations" against the Internet Post Deletion companies which are usually know as the "Internet hatchetmen companies." The reason was the emergence of more and more Internet public relations firms which live off deleting negative information on the Internet. They charge their clients on the basis of the content, quantity and location of the target posts. A post at a small website might cost 100 yuan to delete; a post at a big website or web port may cost as much as 1,000 yuan.
This is illegal in China in the authoritarian paradigm sense of not actually permitted by the government. But if they’re well enough connected to the state, it’s the kind of thing that companies can get away with, at least for a while.
There was a lot of this going on in the melamine scandal of last year: the cover up that Beijing copped for was actually driven, in large part, by essentially private sector behaviour. Fair enough in a way because Beijing is responsible for the system that generates it. But it does highlight the actual problem with China’s general expanse into the world, which is not so much about government policy but about exporting China’s internal chaos abroad. See, perhaps, the Google hacking incidents, and who knows what else. Beijing probably doesn’t: as pointed out last week it has to use spy satellites to monitor what its own cadres are actually up to.
Comments