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Death brings new channel of dialogue to life

By Wang Jingqiong (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-09 11:58

For the past eight years, Shi Yan, a resident of Yunnan province's Yiliang county, has been pressuring the police and knocking on all doors to find out the truth behind her younger brother's death.

After exhausting all of the family's money, Shi, now 35, said the circumstances surrounding the death of her brother Shi Xiaohua has raised many questions. To make matters worse, the killer is still at large and local police have provided no explanations over how he was shot the morning of Dec 20, 2001, at his Yiliang auto repair shop.

"I have tried everything. Sometimes I really want to give up," she told China Daily on the phone Wednesday.

"But every time I see my grieving parents and think of my poor brother, I push on."

This March, she tried posting her story on the Internet asking for help. Her plea garnered a great deal of attention within the online community - and has piqued the interest of authorities.

On June 10, the Yiliang police bureau posted a reply at China.com and bbs.clzg.cn, saying it has poured "a lot of effort" into the investigation of her brother's death.

"We understand how the family feels and we are sorry that we still have not found the killer," the posting stated.

"We want to apologize to the family and we also want to ask the family, as well as netizens, not to worry, as it is our responsibility to deal with crimes. The Yiliang police bureau will not give up on the investigation."

Shi Yan said now there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel.

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"Although they still haven't given any specific explanation in the posting and I know they did that mostly out of pressure, I am still encouraged," she said.

"At least they are communicating now."

"I was right to choose the Internet as my new platform and I am appealing to Netizens and the media to help me, to help my dead brother and my parents. There still is hope," she said.

Li Jianming, the director of the Yiliang police bureau, said that "there are a lot of factors that have still not been considered ... one being that this case has not been treated as a major investigation."

"The Internet is very popular now. If we do not reply to such doubts and questions, the only result is that the government and police will become more passive. As such, we are changing our way of thinking," Li said.

To address questions about the investigation as well as future cases, Wu Hao, vice-director of Yunnan's publicity bureau, said an Internet response system will be set up in government agencies in the province. The agencies will answer questions from citizens in posts from real spokespersons, the Southeast News reported Wednesday.

"The authorities should respond immediately to questions from Internet users," Wu said. "The Internet is more efficient than traditional letters and calls."

Steven Dong, director of Global Journalism Institute of Tsinghua University, said "multimedia" spokespersons are a necessary step to make local governments more transparent and informative in the age of new media.

"The idea of an Internet spokesman system goes hand in hand with the global trend that the Internet and new information sources play a more and more important role," he told China Daily.