Social Stability - 103. page

China Youth Daily carried an article on the National College Entrance exam which will take place from June 7 to 10. Millions of students from around the country will participate. According to the article, starting this year, a number of provinces, including Hubei, Ganshu, Anhui, and Beijing, have decided to use the public security force to ensure security on fire safety, transportation, and medical needs as well as on cheating activities during the exam. In Beijing, a minimum of eight policemen are needed at each exam site. For the first time in history a special police unit will be responsible for transporting the exam papers to each location. Reports indicate that, in Beijing, the police department has been involved in cracking down on the sale of cheating equipment and on cheating activities that were organized prior to the exam. Meanwhile over one hundred medical emergency vehicles and over 300 medical personnel will be on call for medical emergencies.

Source: China Youth Daily, June 6, 2016
http://news.youth.cn/gn/201606/t20160606_8085569.htm

According to a Xinhua article, there will be 7.6 million college graduates in China this summer, a record high in history. The article said that these college graduates have lowered their expectations on the pay they will receive. The average monthly salary that these college graduates hope to make is below 5,000 yuan (US$764). Some of them expressed a willingness just to find a job first and then to be able to switch to the field of their major later. Many of them feel that there is a large gap between their expectations and reality. At the same time, their employers do not have a good understanding of their skills. The article also used statistics that found that 29.5 percent of the college graduates will find jobs in IT, the Internet, telecommunications and the electronics field; 16.1 percent will be in manufacturing and the auto industries; and 13.7 percent will be in the finance, banking, investment, and insurance fields.

Source: Xinhua, May 23, 2016
http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2016-05/23/c_129006028.htm

Chinascope recently reported on the death of Wei Zexi, the 21-year-old college student who died from a rare form of cancer after receiving allegedly effective treatment that he found on a Baidu website. Before his death on April 12, Wei wrote a lengthy post on a Chinese website detailing his plight.

Shortly after the news of his death, the Consensus Website, affiliated with a media company based in Beijing, published a blog article about his death. The author raised several sensitive points in the blog, examining the roles played by the parties involved, including Baidu, China’s leading search engine company; the Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps; the privately-owned Putian hospital system; and Chen Zhili, a former vice-chairperson of China’s top legislature. According to another blog, which has since been taken down at China’s leading portal Sina.com, Chen owed her career to Jiang Zemin, former secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). She was responsible for China’s highly controversial drive to commercialize education and its public health systems.

The Consensus Website blog author raised the question of how Baidu got to dominate China’s search engine market. Not only was Google’s China presence short-lived, but even a competing search product backed by the CCP’s leading newspaper, People’s Daily, did not have a chance when challenging Baidu.

The author then pointed out that the Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps, where Wei sought treatment, was not content with funding from the government. It resorted to increasing its revenue by partnering with Putian hospitals.

The author gave the reasons behind the rapid expansion of Putian, a privately operated chain of hospitals. The chain invited Chen to serve as its top advisor; it relied on paid promotions on Baidu; it opened and operated clinics in brand name public hospitals; and it sought support from top officials. 

One thing that these players have in common, observed the blog author, is that they are all good at packaging their true [profit-seeking] motives. In hospitals, and in the rhetoric of "connecting people with services" in Baidu, they used high-sounding slogans, such as "saving people’s lives" and "the world’s leading technology and medicine."

The author is optimistic that, with the advent of social media, such outright dishonesty in misleading the public can hardly be sustained. In Wei’s case, two female journalists were able to raise awareness of Wei’s misguided treatment through Weibo (i.e. mini-blog) and WeChat (a popular mobile messaging service), completely bypassing traditional media.

Sources: The Concensus Website
http://www.21ccom.net/html/2016/zhoushuo_0504/3868.html
Blogs at Sina.com
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_70282b520102wbr2.html                                                                                                                                                                                        

The death of Wei Zexi, a college student from Shaanxi Province, who received false information from Baidu on treatment for his cancer, has stirred up a big anti-Baidu wave in China.

Wei Zexi had synovial sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. When he searched on Baidu, the search engine showed him that the Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps offered effective treatment. Wei decided to forego another treatment which had some, but not very high chance of a cure, and went with the Armed Police Corps Hospital. His family spent 200,000 yuan (U.S. $30,000), depleting the family’s entire saving and even borrowing money, for the treatment.

It turned out that the Baidu search result for the Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps was a paid advertisement. The hospital was, in fact, making a false claim. However, since the hospital paid Baidu a large fee, Baidu displayed its claim among the top search results. As Baidu did not differentiate between its paid ads and its regular search results, it misled Internet users into thinking paid ads were authoritative results.

The Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps had been widely collaborating with "Putian doctors." "Putian doctors" are people from Putian City, Fujian Province, who may or may not have had a medical education, but claimed they were doctors and rented hospital’s offices to offer medical services. "Putian doctors" count for 80 percent of the private medical practices in China.

The hospital’s treatment offered no help to Wei Zexi who eventually died on April 12. Before his death, he posted his story on the Internet. A wave of public denunciation of Baidu for its lack of moral standards flooded the Internet and the media.

The State Internet Information Office led an investigation over Baidu’s role in this death incident. It recently required Baidu to carry out the following corrections:

1. Overhaul all its commercial services for the medical practice industry. Take offline any information violating regulations, and do not promote any medical institution that does not have proper medical practice qualifications.

2. Change its search ranking algorithm from paid fee based to reputation based; add a mark to indicate those that are paid ads; and limit paid ads to less than 30 percent per result page.

3. Establish a netizen’s rights protection mechanism. Speed up the process to handle Internet users’ cases; immediately put a stop to all information that violates the law, regulations, or netizen’s rights; compensate netizens for their losses due to inaccurate ads on Baidu.

The Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps was ordered to stop all services to the public immediately. It was also ordered to make the following corrections:

1. Immediately stop cooperating with Shanghai Claison Bio-tech, which offered the cancer treatment solution to Wei Zexi.

2. Overhaul all false information and medical advertising. Review the medical qualifications of every medical practitioner and take proper actions.

3. Punish medical practitioners involved in Wei Zexi’s case, including revoking the doctor’s certificate and taking legal action.

4. Carry out legal and disciplinary education; improve the hospital’s management.

Sources:
1. BBC Chinese, May 9, 2016
http://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/china/2016/05/160509_weizexi_investigation_second_hospital
2. Xinhua, May 20, 2016
http://news.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2016-05/10/c_128973832.htm

Xinhua published an article reporting that, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD), a guideline will soon to be issued to regulate China’s real estate brokerage industry. The article claimed that there has been disturbing conduct in this industry. For example, inappropriate commission rates are charged and the actual information about the house that is on sale is being covered up or falsely presented. The Ministry plans to regulate the industry to ensure that information is accurate, comprehensive, and timely; that there is an online authorization of the contract agreement; and that the escrow fund, the record keeping, and the personnel management are handled properly. The first round of the regulatory effort will take place in brokerage firms in cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.

Source: Xinhua, May 8, 2016
http://news.xinhuanet.com/house/bj/2016-05-08/c_1118823946.htm

A report that the National Bureau of Statistics released revealed that over 2.7 million farmers-turned workers are still owed the wage payments they earned. 

Radio Free Asia reported that, in Xincai County, Henan Province, on April 18, 2016, a group of people used force to demolish a church. They buried Li Jiangong and his wife Ding Cuimei while they were still alive because they tried to defend their church.

"The demolition team consisted of local villains. They drove trucks to knock down the church’s walls. Li, who was in charge of the church and his wife stood in front of the wall. One of the demolition team shouted, ‘Bury them alive. I will take the responsibility if someone dies.’ Then a bulldozer pushed both of them into a hole and covered them with earth. Mr. Li managed to dig himself out a few minutes later. By the time other people got Ding Cuimei out, she had stopped breathing."

"After seeing the death, the manager of the demolition team claimed he was sick and went to a hospital. Police said that they arrested two suspects, but it may take one or two years for this case to go to court."

"The church was built in 2007. Its members raised the money, bought the land, and built it. It had about 200 members. The government approved the construction. Because of its convenient location – it was close to a highway – some (powerful) people wanted to take over the land; they resorted to force to move the church off of the land."

Source: RFA, April 18, 2016
http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/shehui/ql1-04182016111213.html