02.03.08
The Death of Wei Wenhua
CNN ran a sad story a couple of weeks ago about a man killed in Hubei Province:
Wei Wenhua was beaten to death after he filmed a streetside fracas between villagers and authorities.
Police have detained 24 municipal inspectors and are investigating more than 100 in the death of Wei Wenhua, a 41-year-old construction company executive, Xinhua reported on Friday…
On Monday Wei happened on a confrontation in the central Chinese province of Hubei between city inspectors and villagers protesting over the dumping of waste near their homes.
A scuffle developed when residents tried to prevent trucks from unloading the rubbish, Xinhua said.
When Wei took out his cell phone to record the protest, more than 50 municipal inspectors turned on him, attacking him for five minutes, Xinhua said. Wei was dead on arrival at a Tianmen hospital, the report said.
It says something about the current level of unrest in China that, in my initial reading of the article, I saw “villagers” and “construction company executive” and assumed it was the former that killed the latter–perhaps because his company wanted to bulldoze their homes for a new housing development.
Also, what were fifty municipal inspectors doing there? Were they municipal inspectors or “municipal inspectors”?
Then there was this:
An international press freedom group, Reporters Without Borders, protested the killing.
“Wei is the first ‘citizen journalist’ to die in China because of what he was trying to film,” the group said in a statement.
It’s somewhat bothersome to me that Reporters Without Borders is calling Mr. Wei a “citizen journalist”. There’s no evidence this was ever going to get published. If I managed to record something like this I’d be very careful about publishing it, mainly out of fear for my own safety.
Moreover, I doubt Mr. Wei was the first “citizen journalist” to die for doing something like this. I have been forced to stop taking pictures on a number of occasions where someone just didn’t want his picture taken. In fact, Mul and I once got into an hour-long argument with guards at the Chinese Military History Museum in Beijing. Photography was allowed throughout the museum, but they were extremely annoyed that we had photographed the side display explaining the dangers of a certain “evil cult“.
Whatever happened to those pictures, Mul?
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