14 DAY TRIAL // China has been, in recent months, home to a very unusual phenomenon, the appearance of on-line human flesh search engines, where people accused of various wrongdoings are listed, alongside their telephone number, national ID number and full address. The emergence of these engines was prompted by a Chinese woman, who committed suicide and left a blog entry behind, blaming her husband for an affair.
No more than a week passed before the man was listed on one of these engines, all relevant data attached. He was physically threatened, and the walls and door of his house painted with slogans that read "A blood debt must be repaid with blood." Wang Fei, the man in question, was publicly disgraced and lost his job shortly after that.
The Chinese have a very distinct way of handling people such as Fei, after millennia of professionally-organized kidnappings and murders, as well as plots and spy networks. Ancient China resembled a conspirator's nest, where everyone knew everything about everyone else. This legacy, coupled with the communist mentality that Mao Zedong implemented, of a people's struggle against oppressors, could account for the way people react to such cases.
The fact remains that these engines grow in number constantly, and it only happens in this Asian nation. Everywhere else, this type of movement would be banned instantly, but here it cannot be stopped, as people try to correct the flawed legal system in China. On-line vigilantes think that it's their duty to intervene when the police are helpless and so they've created solid communities, where sharing information about specific individuals is easy and accessible to all those interested.
It requires a great deal of coordination to pull off country-wide chases, as even people far away from the targeted individual join in with advice on how to proceed next. The vigilantes, as they were called, are normal people, who find that they have something in common with the victims of crimes such as rape, prostitution and other illicit relationships.