Chinese Law Prof Blog by George Washington University Law School's Professor Donald C. Clarke is a must follow blog if you're interested in Chinese legal issues. This is a post from yesterday:

What's the value of a day of freedom?

The State Compensation Law provides (Art. 26) that "If a citizen's freedom of the person is infringed, compensatory payment for each day shall be assessed in accordance with the state average daily pay of staff and workers in the previous year." For better or for worse, this establishes a uniform national standard of compensation for lost freedom, no matter where you are or what your earning power is. (Better, because surely a poor person's freedom in subjective terms cannot be said to be systematically less valuable to him or her than a rich person's; worse, because in terms of actual lost earnings of which the wrongfully imprisoned person and his or her dependents are deprived, the poor person's freedom really is less valuable.) The Supreme People's Procuracy has just told us what the number is for 2007 (and hence will be used in 2008): 99.31 yuan (US$14.17) per day...

Compare that to the 73.3 yuan per day that Qin Zhongfei was awarded for his loss of freedom in the Pengshui SMS case.

As they say in the film Team America, freedom isn't free. But it sure is cheap.