Morning Clicks

Beijing's good legal news turns out to be fake news

The story that 10 operators of a 'black jail' run by a city in Henan were convicted in Beijing has gone from news-of-the-day to being declared fake news by People's Daily, with follow-up reports disappearing and a ruling in the case even yet to be delivered.

4-MIN READ4-MIN

Screenshot of the China Daily rebuttal captured by @gadyepstein.

Published: 8:03am, 3 Dec 2012Updated: 9:38am, 3 Dec 2012

Navigation: China abroad | China at home | Chinese media

Even People's Daily ran with this Beijing Youth Daily story that a Beijing court sentenced 10 people to prison for involvement in the illegal but widespread act of intercepting petitioners who travel to the capital with hopes to obtain justice outside the legal system.

The significance of the news was not lost on web editors across the country, many of whom ran the headline as top story this weekend.

China Daily contacted the court in question and received confirmation that such a case is currently under way but also learned a ruling has yet to be made.

Then the original report quickly disappeared from most major online news portals. Now reports of the Beijing court's denial have also begun to disappear - at least for foreign readers, as People's Daily continues to follow the story on its Sina Weibo microblog.

Legal scholar Xu Zhiyong has points out that while at least four lawsuits have been successfully brought against Beijing "black jails", verdicts in those cases were more for show than punitive and that vigilantes involved in attempting to free captives of those black jails have been arrested and even sentenced to 'reform-through-labour'.

Hong Kong-based China human rights research Joshua Rosenzweig adds: