“Given
the proliferation of rumors, and the speed at which they circulate
online, the government realized that measures like deleting posts and
shutting down microblog accounts had lost their effectiveness. So it
began a campaign to prosecute bloggers. On Sept. 9, the Supreme People’s
Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate issued a ruling stipulating
that defamatory reports, if reposted more than 500 times on the
Internet, are a crime worthy of punishment.A
few days later, Yang Hui, a 16-year-old boy in Gansu Province in the
northwest, became one of the first to fall afoul of this new rule. After
challenging online the official explanation for a local man’s death, he
was detained for seven days on charges of stirring up trouble. Only
after an outcry, mostly online, was he freed.“