Once upon a crime

PUBLIC OPINION

Public anger over a death in police custody refuses to subside

Jan 14th 2017 | BEIJING

THE Chinese Communist Party has a formula for responding to crises. In the Mao era it buried unpalatable news. That is harder to pull off when smartphones and social media provide a steady flow of revelations about schools built on toxic soil, tainted foodstuffs, poorly stored vaccines and other scandals. Instead the government tries to manage public sentiment. It releases some information, raises questions and very often launches an investigation. Later, a senior official makes a pronouncement on the issue and a few people are fired. But in most cases almost nothing is done to fix the underlying problem. Sophisticated censorship prevents follow-up reports; public anger fades.

One recent scandal, however, has refused to die. Last May a 29-year-old environmental scientist, Lei Yang, died in police custody in Beijing. Officers said he had a heart attack after being arrested for soliciting a prostitute. Chinese people are used to being bullied by the police. Most victims are poor and cannot fight back. Mr Lei, however, was well-educated and worked at a state-linked think-tank.

Relatives challenged the official version of events. They said that his bloodied, bruised body suggested he had suffered something other than a heart attack. They insisted Mr Lei was going to the airport, not a brothel. A high-profile lawyer sought legal action against the five officers on behalf of the family. “We want our most basic rights to personal safety, civil rights and urban order,” former classmates of Mr Lei at the prestigious Renmin University in Beijing wrote in a petition. They said his death was “a tragedy arising from the system”.

The government took its familiar steps to quell the outcry. President Xi Jinping said the police should behave better, a comment that People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, directly linked to Mr Lei’s case. An autopsy in June corrected the cause of death to choking. The police involved were put under investigation. And censorship was stepped up: online searches for Mr Lei’s name were blocked.

But anger grew again in December when prosecutors dropped charges against the police. They said “inappropriate professional conduct” by the officers had caused his death, but the wrongdoing was “minor” (Mr Lei, after all, had resisted arrest). The family acquiesced, citing exhaustion and “great pressure”. Mr Lei’s remains were cremated on January 6th.

But the public continues to fume, circulating petitions and online articles decrying the verdict. The decision not to press charges was “extremely evil”, one microblogger wrote. Another said that even if Mr Lei had hired a prostitute, he would have been right to run away because the penalty for such an offence was so high—“steal a dog and get your hand cut off,” as the author put it. Mr Lei’s case was widely touted as evidence that the rule of law, which Mr Xi says he wants, has yet to materialise.

State media, however, have dismissed such complaints as sensationalism and rumour-mongering. The clamour spooks the government, which is keen to keep the middle class onside. Particularly chilling for the authorities is the involvement of graduates of Renmin University, who have kept up their efforts to draw public attention to the case. Thousands of them belong to discussion groups on WeChat, a popular social-media service. The party has been terrified of student-led movements since it crushed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in 1989. It has now shut down many of these online conversations. In the days after the decision not to charge the officers, censorship on Weibo, a microblogging site, rose to a three-month high, according to Weiboscope, which tracks such things. The party’s old habits die hard.