By Star Chang, posted Jun 27, 2011 at 3:19 PM, 303 views,

An Independent Website to Disclose Bribery in China?

A new independent website to disclose bribery has emerged in China. It will allow Chinese internet users to report any instances of bribery and official corruption. The site was named as ‘He took the bribes’ ( Chinese translated ), and it is a non-profit public interest site that opposes corruption and greed and provides users with a convenient platform for reporting cases. Does anyone of you think that this type of ‘online justice’ can survive in China ? Definitely no, the site owner has already been ‘arrested’ by the authorities…

The heroic site ‘He took the bribes’ has been up for almost two weeks, it is remarkably new and it has already gotten more than 2 million page views. The site will examine and verify reports that are submitted by the Chinese internet users, weed out malicious and random reports, and in accordance with local procedures, submit them to the local prosecutors. After the local prosecution organs have confirmed those information, they will publicly publish the details of the story and the result of the cases.

‘He took the bribes’ plans to publish corruption cases, something the official government sites never attempted to do. As an independent site, it is not government affiliated, thus, its existence may already be threatened. The site claims that all reports will be confirmed by local government before being posted online, but we deeply believe the Chinese government will be very uncomfortable to allow such an independent site to publish reports about corruption, which is one of China’s most controversial issues, under any circumstances.

As for now, the site remains live, popular, and unblocked in China, but the latest news states that the owner of the site has already been taken away by the authorities, to carry out investigation. And the micro-blogging account they had set up at Sina Weibo has been terminated without any reason. At the moment, there are only 3 corrupt cases published online.

Can they really survive and keep rolling? We give our best wishes.

Source: tashouhuile.com via Penn Olson