A Vigilante's Justice.(Brief Article)

Taking the law into one's own hands can be a dangerous business in China. Last spring, 38-year-old Sichuan native Huang Qi was a minor celebrity. The Web site he had founded to run photos and data about missing persons--including women sold as brides by underworld syndicates--was drawing a million users a month. State-run China Central Television had decided to profile Huang. Yet only days after he was filmed last June--and weeks before the program was broadcast--Huang went missing himself. Authorities have held him in detention, forbidden from seeing anyone except his lawyer, ever since. He now faces trial on charges of "agitating to overthrow the government" and "propagating separatist activities." In an especially Kafkaesque touch, Huang is also accused of revealing state secrets--whose CONTENTs have not been revealed to his own lawyer.

Huang's mistake may have been to place himself in the vanguard of two emergent forces in China--civic action and the Internet. Since official resources are limited, Beijing tolerates and even praises private efforts to locate ordinary missing persons. But authorities strongly discourage anyone asking too many questions about people who have gone missing in sensitive cases--those involving political dissent or the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, for instance--because almost inevitably they've been detained without trial. Huang may have crossed the line when his Web site did not delete online bulletin-board postings dealing with taboos such as official corruption, the party's witch hunt for Falun Gong followers and pro-independence activities by Muslims in western China. (Some items even cursed Chinese leaders by name, calling Li Peng a "turtle egg.") Perhaps ...