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Unethical pundits fair game in net crackdown
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FOR Weibo, the glory days seem to be over, and now comes a dry spell.
China’s answer to Twitter stands to lose some of its buzz in the ongoing national crackdown on what the authorities call “fabricated online rumors.”
As a matter of fact, some “rumors” turned out to be well-founded and led to investigations and then the disgrace of individuals found at fault.
The crackdown is perceived by some foreign media as well-calculated humbling of weibo. What they fail to see is that this “news generator” is now morphing into a rumor mill, with all kinds of fabricated information disguised as well-researched, fact-checked news items.
Worse, it is being turned by some into a business, and business knows no ethics where there is no oversight.
A lot has been written about how shills are paid pittances to retweet fabricated or exaggerated messages that would garner their original posters handsome economic gains.
Recently, Dong Liangjie, a self-styled environmental expert, was arrested by Beijing police for fabricating and spreading news on environmental pollution, especially water pollution. Dong spread the falsehoods to help sell his company’s water filters.
Several years after its birth, weibo is no longer just a forum where people express themselves or a frontline in the battle against official graft, sex escapades and other transgressions.
It is increasingly manipulated by unscrupulous people like Dong who abuse public trust to deliberately mislead his audience on issues they feel strongly about, such as environmental degradation.
Heightened public environmental concerns make these bogus news items more devastating and causes panic.
Weibo demagogues
While Dong and some of his ilk have been made to pay for their remarks, the crackdown has significantly left out a handful of weibo demagogues.
The past October 1 Golden Week holiday has seen home prices soaring again after a temporary cooling-down period. In Shanghai alone, property prices skyrocketed 36.7 percent year on year. Despite the steep price increases, to the chagrin of many homeowner wannabes, some speakers and analysts are suggesting that the hike is fairly small.
One of the most brazen apologists for rocketing home prices is Dong Fan, a professor with Beijing Normal University. As the director of the school’s real estate research center, Dong has aired blatantly misleading views on property prices on many occasions.
Recently, he was again in the spotlight for asserting that “Beijing’s home prices will hit 800,000 yuan (US$130,764) per square meter in 25 years.”
His prognostication is reportedly predicated on the premise that property prices leap an average 15 percent a year, so at the current rate, it is only a matter of time before a home in Beijing is worth a whopping 800,000 yuan in square meter terms.
Needless to say, no government can afford to allow home prices in its capital city to grow tenfold or twentyfold in a matter of two decades, let alone China’s, which vows to prick bubbles and reduce staggering profits of the industry.
In an August 19 editorial, People’s Daily castigated the idea of promoting the real estate industry as an economic mainstay. On the following day, Dong had the nerve to twitter that the Party’s newspaper was “deranged, its criticisms inconsistent and ignorant.”
That was hardly Dong at his best.
In 2009, he noted that well-off Chinese need to be coaxed into buying property, to save the beleaguered pillar industry. Whoever buys a house is the savior of the whole society, he was quoted as saying.
ÔMistresses boost home salesÕ
To emphasize his point, Dong added that keeping mistresses could boost home sales.
What good could his incendiary views possibly serve other than to infuriate mortgage slaves and home buyers, insult public intelligence, and undermine the government’s efforts to restore some rationality to the property market?
His case for higher home prices cannot be easily justified by academic free speech, for it is comparable to some pundits’ defense of Wall Street fat cats.
After 2009 most pundits and politicians know it is politically incorrect and risky to explicitly advocate a bailout of some struggling banks. However, the Chinese public is strangely magnanimous to have tolerated Dong and his hogwash about the need to prop up developers for so long.
We don’t have proof that he has a mercantilist agenda, or that he is on some real estate developers’ payroll as “adviser,” which is occasionally the case with pro-business pundits. But given his previous remarks, developers indeed have found a friend in him. A friend of the developers, but no friend of the taxpayers who pay his teaching salary.
Dong’s stance runs counter to the widely applauded government line on reining in home prices.
This may not be grounds for publicly crucifying him, but for someone who willingly throws his weight behind the vested interests and keeps testing public patience, he should be made aware of the consequences of his demagoguery.
If we just let him continue his rants, Dong will only be emboldened to surprise us more, and inevitably do a bigger disservice to the nation’s economic policy.
It is notable that although popular momentum against exorbitant property prices is strong, the public lacks a weighty speaker who can powerfully represent their interests.
On the contrary, Dong and his ilk are active, aggressive and awash in money and fame. Unprincipled tolerance of their antics and hot air would be disrespectful of the voices and feelings of the underrepresented majority.
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