sábado, 29 de diciembre de 2012

Beijing sex video scandal puts web site founder in spotlight - Business Mirror

Beijing sex video scandal puts web site founder in spotlight

BEIJING—Zhu Ruifeng fancies himself a Chinese version of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a citizen journalist who is plying his trade online.

In 2006 he started the People's Supervision web site, which breaks stories about official corruption in China. He has had a couple of scoops—one about the widespread use of expired vaccines and others about crooked party apparatchiks—but nothing that's gotten the reaction of a sexually explicit 36-second video released last week.

The video shows a paunchy Communist Party official in flagrante delicto with an 18-year-old woman in Chongqing. The woman, who recorded their encounter with a camera hidden in her purse, had been sent by a construction executive who hoped to use it as blackmail to get municipal contracts.

Interviewed at a Beijing bookstore where he was taking cover amid the media storm, Zhu said he was inspired by the recent 18th Communist Party congress, in which outgoing President Hu Jintao and his successor, Xi Jinping, loudly pledged to stamp out corruption.

"They are always repeating the same slogan about anti-corruption, but in the end they only take out their opponents," said Zhu, a skinny 31-year-old whose dark suit and striped tie made him look more like a salesman than an investigative reporter. "I want to find out whether the new president is really serious about corruption."

The video, shot in 2007 but covered up for years, has gone viral in China, attracting millions of viewers and thousands of unflattering comments about the physical appearance and sexual performance of the hapless official.

The man, Lei Zhengfu, who initially told Chinese reporters that "the video and the photos are fake, fabricated," was fired from his post as Communist Party secretary from Chongqing's Beibei district three days after the video's release.

The scandal appears to be linked to Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing party secretary whose wife was convicted of killing a British businessman with poison. Bo apparently learned about the video a few years ago and helped Lei cover up the potential scandal, arresting the young woman and the construction executive.

(Los Angeles Times/MCT)

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