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