Just when you thought it was safe to be a blogger. Well you may be right if you're speaking about the United States and/or any other western country - but in China - Wei Wenhua was beaten to death simply because he was taking a photograph.
Was he photographing a violent gang war? Was he perhaps leaking secrets out of the country?
No, it was none of these. In fact it wasn't for any reason that you might imagine. According to the Xinhua News Agency, Wei was beaten to death by city inspectors who were involved in a fracas with local villagers on Monday.
The Xinhua News Agency is the official press agency of the government (employing 10,000 people) in the People's Republic of China (PRC.) There is only one other, called the China News Service.
The Chinese internet chat rooms are filled with rage, with thousands of people expressing their anger at the killing of Wei, who was a forty-one year old executive of "Water Resources Construction Co."
Qi Zhengjun, chief of the urban administration bureau in the city of Tianmen, lost his job over the incident, Xinhua reported Friday. No details known as yet as to why he lost his job and what his involvement might have been. Police have detained 24 municipal inspectors and are investigating more than 100 in the violent death of Wei Wenhua.
The killing has also drawn the (angry) attention of an international freedom of the press group: Reporters Without Borders. In a statement, they said:
"Wei is the first 'citizen journalist' to die in China because of what he was trying to film."
"He was beaten to death for doing something which is becoming more and more common and which was a way to expose law-enforcement officers who keep on overstepping their limits."
While he was literally being beaten to death, the man who had been in the car with Wei - Wang Shutang, said that Wei was shouting that he would delete the pictures and hand over his phone. Another eyewitness said he could hear Wei scream:
"I surrender!"
Still this didn't stop the murderers, also known as "urban management officers" or cheng guan. The central Chinese province of Hubei was the world stage for this horror and all because villagers were protesting the continuation of waste being dumped near their homes.
When the trucks began unloading the rubbish anyway, a scuffle developed beween the city inspectors and the villagers.
Wei had been trying to record the protest by filming the violence on his cell phone, when more than fifty municipal inspectors turned and beat on him for five minutes. Five minutes would seem like an eternity to any person in such a situation. The blogger was dead on arrival at the Tianmen hospital.
The Northeast News web site has an editorial condemning the violence:
"It's no longer news that urban administrators enforce the law with violence ..."
"But now someone has been beaten to death on site. It has brought us not surprise, but unspeakable anger."
The latest news is that more than one hundred people are being investigated by the police and four have been detained."
