Blog 10: China and Allege Police Torture

The New York Times reported a case where sixteen year old Yang Zhong was apprehended for the crime of “spreading online rumors”. Zhong regularly updates his blog on a Chinese micro-blogging website named Sina Weibo. It is similar to Twitter and Facebook in the United States. The police detained him after he raised questions about the mysterious death of a local karaoke club manager. The article continues to discuss how Zhong tells via a telephone interview of how the police tied him to an interrogation chair and four to five officers repeatedly hit, kicked and beat him on and off for two hours. The government’s official’s rationale behind this was that Yang was an “early target of new government regulations concerning the use of popular micro-blog services.” The new rules regulated that the sender of a micro-blog posted deemed to be a harmful rumor that is re-posted by others more than 500 times can be sentenced to up to three years in prison. In China at age sixteen criminals are deemed criminally responsible but are not considered adults facing full legal sanctions until they are eighteen.

Looking at the case from a sociological perspective, this case can be linked to cyber crime in China. Although, no one got hurt or threatened from reading his blog. In China, anything questioning the government or going against the government is wrong. China has a pretty low crime rate and is known to be a more tech savvy nation. Therefore, the government is attempting to regulate what is done and said via web and internet. This case is similar to how police use their authority all over the world including the United States to push their personal agendas and bias.

 http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/chinese-youth-sues-over-alleged-police-torture/

11/15/2013
11:58AM