Cyber manhunters: social ethic guardians or privacy violators?

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• [12:42 April 20 2009]
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By Xie Ying

In olden times, the government would attach posters to public buildings offering rewards for the capture of wanted criminals, or renrou.

Today, China’s “Most Wanted” continue to be hunted, but there are few rewards being offered and the government no longer decides who makes the list. That job falls to an Internet-savvy band of bounty hunters that decides which of the nation’s philandering husbands, animal abusers and corrupt officials deserve to be taught a lesson, via an online manhunt they call renrou sousuo.

Literally “human flesh search”, renrou sousuo describes the process of finding out as much personal information as possible about the selected quarry and posting it online for the world to see. What happens next is up to whoever wants to play the game.

The first widely publicized cyber manhunt was launched in 2006 and was sparked by the appearance online of a series of videos showing a woman crushing a kitten to death with her high heels. The gruesome images enraged many Web users, including a person masquerading as “Dark Judge” who posted the woman’s photo at Tianya.com and urged people to hunt her down.

Just six days later the woman was identified as Wang Jue. When her boss was made aware of what she had done, Wang was suspended, and after feeling the pressure from the online community, she posted an apology online.

Increasingly, renrou sousuo are being launched to identify corrupt public officials. In December, Web users began circulating images of Zhou Jiugeng, the then head of the Jiangning housing bureau in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, wearing a Vacheron Constantin watch and smoking 150 yuan-per-pack cigarettes. Before the month was out, Zhou had been dismissed from his post and had been put under investigation by the Jiangning discipline inspection commission.

Disgraced official Zhou Jiugeng is pictured at a press conference with his expensive cigarettes.