The usual goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town.
It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.
There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens.
The first most prominent case of SouSuo came into picture when a wang min called "Beacon Bridge No Return" found a clue in "Kitten Killer" case. For someone who are not aware, Kitten Killer was a case when a middle aged lady posted a video of her killing a kitten with her high heels.
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There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the
practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term
most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The
word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much
more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the
Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like
citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A
follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from
Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in
their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.
¶
The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China
saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.
Only six days after the first Mop post about the
video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in
Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao —
was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang
Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the
Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to
retirement and pay a pension until death. (Source - New York Times)
The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon.
Searches have been directed against all kinds of
people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials,
amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as
unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich
people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh
searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political
issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the
fault lines of contemporary China.
This could be called Red Guard 2.0.(Red Guard was Mao's tradition who during "Cultural Revolution" called young students as Red Guard and asked them to rise up against local officials who were bourgeois or corrupt)
In another case, the "wang min" got a government official lose his job and sent to jail when he was found smiling at the scene of a road accident that killed 36 people. After his photo was posted on Internet, people called for "Human Flesh Search" for him and he was found to be Mr. Yang, former head of the Shaanxi provincial work safety administration. It led to the exposure of Mr. Yang’s penchant for expensive watches and, eventually, a corruption investigation.
he was given a name on internet as Brother Watch.
He was given 14 years in Prison Sentence.
Another incident of "Human Search" involve a mid-level bureaucrat in the southern city of Guangzhou with the name "Cao Bin", he was online called "Uncle House" , after netizens found he has 22 properties.
It all started on October 8 with a post on Tianya, a popular online forum, which includes photographs of land registry records showing details of the properties ranging from a three-storey villa to a factory building.
The photos were accompanied by a short message which ended with the question: “How can an urban management official afford more than 20 properties?”
"Uncle House" sentenced to 11 years in Prison
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