Netizens shouldn't hesitate to expose corruption

• Source: Global Times
• [02:37 March 04 2010]
• Comments

By Wu Meng

To many, the habit of keeping a diary sounds like something from decades ago. It's something personal, private, and sometimes highly dangerous.

A few days ago, the chief of a tobacco administration bureau in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region got into serious trouble, which started with his good habit of keeping a diary.

The chief, surnamed Han, went through some unpleasant experience. At first his diaries were put on a website, in which he described details of sex with up to six of his female subordinates and colleagues. Within 24 hours after it was posted, the click figure on tianya.cn surpassed 200,000.

Even though the diaries on the website suppressed the real names, thousands of netizens soon used "human flesh search" and identified the leading players in his diary.

Under pressure from hundreds of thousands of netizens, Han was dismissed from his post. Some critics accused netizens of "overdoing the whole thing and pushing the boundaries too hard," on the ground that exposing Han's dairy and using human flesh search were immoral.

Of course, the critics are justified in saying it is inappropriate and that it crossed the line to publish someone's diary. But they missed the big picture. If there were "appropriate" ways that are more convenient and easy to expose such matters, publishing the diaries online would have been a last resort.

For a long time, netizens have been playing a critical role in exposing corrupt government officials. The online exposure, ironically, has become a driving force to push the anti-corruption movement among the government officials at all levels.