he makes a good point. I remember the whole furor about Chinabounder well, as it happened just after i moved to China. I remember being amazed at the sheer volume and degree of venom kicked at this guy for basically having sex with a bunch of girls and writing about. Big whoop. But over the past year or so, I've been even more amazed at how stories of abuse are routinely dismissed, played down, and even retracted at the website I work for, while they'd follow the Chinabounder story till the freaking cows came home.

Are any other countries different? Even in countries with a free press the abuse stories of the poor/abused/unwanted are routinely ignored. A rich family's daughter is kidnapped in the US and it's in the news for a week because that rich person would complain about the news, and influence others. The same is true in China... unfortunately the corruption in China is much worse.

Also it's something they can openly complain about without having to fear the government.

Would you complain if it meant your job in a country without jobs? Where I live school leaders routinely eat at an expensive restaurant, across the street they can see people eating out of the trash. It's not that none of them care, they know where they will eat tomorrow if they do care in public.

Just another example of China's raging inferiority complex in action.

@anon

Point taken.

You're right, caring in public is probably not what I would want to do if it meant I might lose my job.

But plenty of people *do* care, write, complain and expose others online, which is where most of the Chinabounder saga played out.

I work at a government-run website, and i guess I thought that, if anyone, *they* could run stories about company abuses of employees or other such problems without fear of retribution-after all, they have government backing, and the stories that were written/changed/retracted weren't about government organizations.

Wars, civil unrest, and social revolution have been triggered throughout history by the mere rumour of "them" sleeping with "our" women.

But a one-off murder, no matter how gruesome, is simply "news".

Chinabounder, in proclaiming not to understand this, shows (again) that he's just an ignorant schmuck. A guy, frankly, who couldn't get a date at a love-in, and whose substitute for "action" is a sad blog about how many women he's slept with in his imagination and how much they "loved it".

I'm reminded of the old personals ad joke:

"Man with 12-incher seeks gratuitous self-aggrandizement. Thanks for participating."

It also seems to me that the question raised by 'Chinabounder' is gratuitous.

The reason the internet community spent greater attention on his writings rather than the plight of those victims whose abuses get reported is the same as his. He is the answer to his question. Why give all one's energy to gratuitous stories about sexual exploits, when one could be putting the same attention to matters of life and death?

This is not to say he doesn't care about the girls he mentions, just that their deaths of these girls are simply another tool for him to use - an anecdote.

According to a comment on the Time China blog, Chinabounder is "that guy from Danwei"

Chinabounder is a very skillful troll. I have no doubt his stories are real (mostly real), and I have no doubt that he feels massively persecuted by the violent threats made to him. His most recent post is provocative nonsense- in another context, he'd be more than right. He knows the people who're threatening him don't care at all about violence in Chinese society. He can make a case for the blog being social commentary, but he and all his detractors are all too far removed from the issue of child-killing to make that kind of commentary.

Frankly, though, I feel that China could use less "harmony" and toughen itself to nonsense like this. The rest of the developed world, where China would like to place itself, has large groups of crazy people, whose ideas of honor and decency lead them to threaten (and to perform) acts of extreme violence. Yet, these societies are able to generally, if imperfectly, tolerate and restrain their own extremist elements. In fact, the whole project of the 20th and 21st centuries seems to be resolving the question of internal extremism.

anon wrote:

"Are any other countries different? Even in countries with a free press the abuse stories of the poor/abused/unwanted are routinely ignored. "

How do you know? Do you read online news from dozens of countries every day? In the US, a brutal beating death of a child at the hands of a family member would make the front page of the local news and a student killed by a teacher would make national headlines because it's so rare I cannot recall a single case off-hand. I googled "teacher arrested murder student" and "teacher killed student." I failed to find a single case of student homicide by a teacher, but there were dozens of cases of teachers murdered by students.

"Also it's something they can openly complain about without having to fear the government. "

Now that's a valid point.

"How do you know? Do you read online news from dozens of countries every day? In the US..."
--Sonagi

In the US, many serial killings barely make regional news (e.g. the one in Louisiana few years ago), while an astronaut get national coverage simply for driving 900 miles in diapers to stalk a love rival, and then only to be overshadowed by the death of a voluptous blond gold-digger from Texas. And how about out-of-proportion coverages about some Florida high school teacher sleeping with her student just because she looks like a super model? Have you seen any of the Chinese news web-sites? Even the official ones report about social problems regularly. I'm sure many aweful stories get left out, but I'm not sure it's significantly diff from the west.