Infidelity triggers Internet manhunt

Wang Fei’s infidelity deeply upset his wife.
She wrote of her distress in a diary, and then jumped from their 24th-floor balcony. Her family posted details of Wang Fei’s affair on the Internet, angrily blaming him for his wife’s suicide.
Soon, tens of thousands of Chinese web users knew about Wang Fei.
Many felt incensed, so they revved up a “human-flesh search engine,” which is what Chinese Internet users call their web hunts.
They appealed to fellow Chinese to ferret out information about the philandering husband and humiliate him.
They posted photos of Wang Fei, details about his job and his national ID number. Even his parents were drawn into the fray.
“Internet users went to the house of Wang Fei’s parents and painted a lot of nasty slogans, like, ‘You should pay back with blood for what you did!’” said Zhang Yanfeng, Wang Fei’s attorney.
The 28-year-old Beijing resident lost his job and found himself hounded frequently on the street by passers-by.
So he filed a lawsuit against three Chinese Internet portals and web sites to demand compensation for the damage to his reputation and livelihood.
The lawsuit, filed in March, has roiled the legal community. It touches on aspects of privacy and the balance between personal rights and the public’s freedom of speech that are relatively unexplored in China. In the past few days, it has also drawn demands for legal reforms.
 Internet manhunts are increasing, sometimes taking on a lynch-mob mentality with a slight echo of history.
 In the tumultuous era of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, paramount Communist leader Mao Zedong unleashed students and low-level cadres to purge the nation of “rightists” in a period of political upheaval. Then, students pasted “big character posters” on walls with their denunciations.
 Now, Internet users post their accusations on the web.
In April, Duke University student Grace Wang was vilified after she tried to seek a middle ground between pro- and anti-Tibet independence forces on the North Carolina campus. Internet users in China tracked down her parents in Qingdao, dumping feces at their doorstep and forcing them into hiding.
 Experts say the phenomenon is far wider than simple vigilante justice. In some cases, Internet users have banded together to expose fraud, knock down charlatanism or, in one case, to help the wife of a soldier deployed to an earthquake-devastated area of China.
In a nation where information is controlled, a thirst for greater flows of information is growing, and people sometimes band together to gather it.