China vaccine scandal exposed as bloggers outwit govt

China vaccine scandal exposed as bloggers outwit govt

A Chinese vaccine scandal has laid bare a new challenge the Asian nation faces in its long-running battle for information control.

Blogs and online articles by independent writers are now capable of unleashing a storm of public fury.

The outrage over safety lapses by Changsheng Bio-technology Co Ltd in some of its China vaccines for children came six days after the issue was flagged in regulatory filings.

They were triggered instead by a July 21 article posted on the popular WeChat messaging platform.

Titled “Vaccine King” and posted to a WeChat account managed by former journalists, it critiqued business practices by Changsheng’s chairwoman.

It was read tens of thousands of times before being deleted the next day.

Even then, myriad links and copied versions circulated on China’s internet. Some netizens even used blockchain technology to preserve the story.

The enormous impact of the so-called “zi meiti”, or “self-media” article marks a threat to efforts by China’s ruling Communist Party to tighten its grip over content online.

“This is a guerrilla war. The government cannot tackle it just like it does traditional media,” said Fang Kecheng, a Chinese media researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.

The researcher added that while one zi meiti account could be shut down, many others would spring up in its place.

The article touched a nerve in a country already scarred by a long history of drug and food scandals. A day later Chinese social media was ablaze.

Mentions of “Changsheng” hit close to 100 million that day, according to a WeChat index that tracks popular key words, a 2,500 percent rise versus the day before.

One hashtag conversation about the scandal on popular microblog site Weibo has now been read over 820 million times.

For Shenzhen-listed Changsheng, judgement was swift.

Authorities launched multiple investigations, its chairwoman and 14 other people have been detained by the police and President Xi Jinping has called the China vaccine scandal “vile and shocking”.

The company, which has publicly apologized, has lost $1.9 billion or more than half of it market value since mid-July, and has flagged that it could be delisted.

“The China vaccine scandal came out a week ago and there was just a fine of several hundred thousand. After the ‘Vaccine King’ spread, 15 people including the boss have been detained,” one person wrote on Weibo.

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