• Twitterer amoiist caught up in police blog probe
• Inquiry centres on murder ‘libel’ against officials
The hundreds following amoiist on Twitter were used to his stream of messages. But they ended abruptly with two terse updates early yesterday morning.
“i have been arrested by Mawei police, SOS” he wrote. Then shortly afterwards: “Pls help me, I grasp the phone during police sleep.”
His followers quickly passed on his plea to other Twitterers. But since then there has been silence from amoiist – also known as Peter Guo, or Guo Bofeng – who is apparently the latest internet user to be caught up in an inquiry that began with claims of defamation but which police now say involves “state secrecy issues”.
As many as seven bloggers have been detained over claims that a 25-year-old woman, Yan Xiaoling, had been gang-raped and murdered. It was further alleged that the man responsible was connected to local authorities in her city in Fujian province, southern China.
Officials dismissed the stories, which first surfaced in late June, and insisted Yan had suffered a haemorrhage caused by an ectopic pregnancy. They turned their attention to tracking down those they suspected were responsible for the stories.
According to Global Voices Online, Guo posted an interview with Yan’s mother in which she repeated the claims and accused local authorities of a cover-up.
An employee at Mawei police station told the Guardian: “These cases are in the process of investigation. We are not in charge of the case so we can’t tell you more. We will release information if there is progress.”
The case is testament both to the growing ability of Chinese citizens to share information through the internet, and to the restrictions on those who do.
In a recent, unpublished interview with the Guardian over the government’s Green Dam censorship programme, Guo said: “The significance of internet in China is huge. It can’t change the current situation in China right away, but it has deeply influenced China. Through the internet, Chinese society has become more and more diverse, and more importantly many people who are unaware of the truth have started to hear different voices.”
Guo, who described himself on Twitter as “a trouble maker in Amoy [Xiamen], living with character sales”, is reportedly a professional interpreter. His two calls for help were in English, although he generally uses Chinese.
He often blogs and tweets about news, current affairs and internet censorship, frequently with a satirical tinge, and has more than 1,500 Twitter followers. A message posted several hours before his pleas read: “Peter Guo, one of the twitterers in China, originally from the Fujian countryside, not a famous blogger; people called him amoiist, good character, young, handsome.”
Liu Xiaoyuan, who represents another detained blogger, You Jingyou, said lawyers had been told they could not meet their clients because the case involved “state secrets”.
Liu’s client wrote his power of attorney in advance because he feared he might be the next to be detained. Another man who was away when police visited his home yesterday told Liu he believed they planned to detain him.
The lawyer said: “I do not know why exactly [You] was detained. Whether it is because he wrote something or he spread something or planned something is still unknown. But from the police we know it was connected to the Yan Xiaoling case.”
He said bloggers had been held more frequently in the last two years. “I think it is because the internet’s power is getting bigger and bigger and the internet uncovers many issues so the authorities get more pressure.”
Another lawyer told the Xinkuaibao newspaper that if officials had been libelled they should sue the bloggers involved rather than launching a criminal case. “We can tell that the local officials haven’t caught up with the need for the development of open information and the internet. They have not adapted to it and feel it is a big deal if some bad information appears on the net.”
Twitter is blocked in China but many on the mainland still tweet through a variety of means.
We hold the journalists to account
There’s no blogging ‘conspiracy world’, only a conspiracy of silence by the cosy lobby over scandals such as MPs’ expenses
Politicians are what they are: it is impossible to become a successful politician without making compromises. Even the most idealistic young candidate eventually realises that to succeed in climbing the greasy pole you make a thousand small compromises and eventually the temptations of office are abused.
I have been pointing to snouts in the trough and saying they were all at it for years, and for years the likes of Jeremy Paxman, Nick Robinson and Michael White having been saying that I was living in “pathetic conspiracy world”. Well, there was a conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence over expense fiddling. Fiddling that amounts to fraud worth tens of millions of pounds, year after year.
The irony of Hazel Blears, of all people, calling me a “vicious nihilist” can’t be let go without a chuckle. When it comes to annihilation of the self, who got the last laugh there?
And who was it that jumped to Blears’s defence by saying “She [Hazel Blears] rightly attacked blogs written with nothing but ‘disdain for the political system and politicians’, whose unending quest for scandal, conspiracy and perceived hypocrisy – and nothing else – fuels public mistrust and cynicism”? But why do you think the influence of blogs has grown? It is because the likes of Michael White have failed to keep sufficient checks on politicians and to hold MPs to account.
They are as complicit in the expenses scandal as the fees office or anyone else who didn’t bat an eyelid. They sit in their rent-free offices – you didn’t know? The taxpayers pay for lobby journalists’ offices as well as MPs’ duck houses. They drink the same taxpayer-subsidised booze, eat in the same subsidised restaurants and in Robinson’s case put it all on expenses to be picked up by the television taxpayers. Do you see the similarities?
With the level of access that a senior lobby journalist has, it is ridiculous to suggest that they didn’t know what was going on. They knew. Said nothing. If they didn’t know that is even worse – what are we paying them for?
Robinson hides his taxpayer-funded expenses just like the MPs tried to do. I know, I FoI‘d them. Which troughing MP is he buying the drinks for – wouldn’t you like to know, you paid for ‘em? Robinson recently said he was shocked by the fact MPs could claim 20 quid a day for food, but why the hell is he so surprised? I highlighted it many times on my blog and I know he is a fan. If he was doing his job properly he would have known about this perk and should, if he found it so shocking, have been able to blow the whistle on it years ago. He simply wasn’t interested in rocking that boat. In any event, as he told me on Newsnight, he of course pulls his punches.
White has been a long-term apologist for our corrupt politicos and still, after all we have seen in the last few months, argued a few weeks ago that we should be proud that our scandals are “small beer” in comparison to Italy.
This downplaying of MPs’ corruption as “petty” and not something un homme sérieux should waste time on is all the evidence you need of the cosy relationship between the lobby and their sources. Men of the world such as White don’t concern themselves with petty cash – these are the members of the fourth estate who are meant to be holding politicians to account.
At every turn White finds someone else to blame rather than politicians for the mistakes they have make. Lest we forget, it was White who defended the Sleazy Lord Levy. It can never be the fault of the politicians; he attacks the “over-mighty and cynical media pack”. One thing has become very clear, the cynical media pack were not cynical or feral enough.
White and his Guardian colleague Polly Toynbee have failed miserably in everything the fourth estate should be. White once categorically stated, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that I had a “naive conspiratorial view of the political process and of politicians, which says in effect they’re all crooks, and they all ought to be in jail, and we will fearlessly expose them on the blogosphere”. Well, I do try.
It seems to me, White, you accidentally foresaw what would happen when politicians’ expenses saw the light of day. There are a lot of crooks and some will go to jail. Who was really naive?
Perhaps now would be a good time to admit that you were wrong, as the bloggers were right and your Daily Telegraph rivals have caught you off your guard and exposed just how little proper scrutiny you have actually achieved in all those years in the lobby.
To be the saviour of democracy is a big ask – it’s perhaps too much to ask. But the rise in influence and success of the free flow of information on the internet has certainly not corrupted democracy either. The years of Labour lies and spin, personified in the power that Damian McBride wielded over a compliant press lobby – now that was corrupting our democracy, the off-the-record smearing, and it was smearing, not briefing, that went on – was out of hand. Very few lobby journalists come out of this well.
I can’t help but think of the line in the film Gladiator about Maximus Decimus Meridius, “Today I saw a slave become more powerful than the emperor of Rome”. If you look at Smeargate, it was the internet that enabled a determined blogger to expose Downing Street in a way that the more compliant lobby hacks in Westminster were unwilling to do. The more of us there are, the more the corrupt have to fear.
This is an edited version of Paul Staines’s speech at a Henry Jackson Society/Delib/Messagespace debate, The internet: saviour or corrupter of democracy?, at the House of Commons on Tuesday 30 June