Three years ago a physically disabled Chinese man unwittingly broke the law when he shot video of a military airbase in eastern China and uploaded the footage to his website. Huang Moumou's subsequent arrest and conviction for leaking state secrets is a surprising wrinkle in the tale of China's 'accidental spies.' Civilians with cameras are Beijing's preferred method of revealing military developments to the world. But only, it seems, when the civilians stick to the government's script.
In August 2009 Huang drove his handicap-access vehicle ' presumably a truck with a wheelchair ramp ' from his home in an outlying county to visit his son, a worker in Fuzhou. As he passed by the city's main military airfield, Huang pointed his cameraphone out the window and shot around a minute of video depicting 'signage, airport facilities and several military airplanes,' according to the press reports. A pedestrian reportedly warned Huang that filming was illegal, but he kept right on shooting.
Returning home, Huang uploaded the video to his blog. 'This is the first time I've seen airplanes, so I filmed it,' he wrote, adding, 'I'm not a spy!' Fifteen thousand people watched the video before police, alerted by China's web-monitoring Public Security Bureau, came knocking. On trial last month, Huang pleaded guilty, apologized and was handed a suspended 14-month sentence.
Officially, his crime was violating the Protection of State Secrets Law by videotaping six classified items. There's little doubt that the Fuzhou air base indeed houses sensitive Chinese hardware: As one of the coastal air bases nearest Taiwan, Fuzhou is home to S-300 long-range air-defense missiles and a wing of F-7 fighters housed in armored shelters. There's also a nearby army ground station for downloading satellite imagery. But whatever Huang saw, it must not have been that secret ' or he probably would have disappeared into a Chinese prison, never to be heard from again.
What's weird is this: The Chinese People's Liberation Army often welcomes bloggers with cameras nosing around seemingly secret facilities. Military hardware nerds called 'forumers' ' after the Internet forums where they post photos, videos and rumors ' are the PLA's main outlet for announcing new weapons developments. The Chinese army is known to tip off bloggers to the locations of new hardware and turn a blind eye to bloggers slipping through security fences. Some bloggers are even on the PLA payroll, receiving 50 cents for every post that reflects the government's position.
The end result is a propaganda love-fest that builds up that Chinese military's image at home and abroad. 'Military modernization is one of the very few issues in which the central government has near-universal support from the Chinese people and even the overseas Chinese community,' one forumer told me. The unveiling of the J-20, China's first stealth fighter prototype (depicted above), is a perfect example. Bloggers provided the world the first public images of the new plane in December 2010, drawing crowds to the J-20's home base in Chengdu and expressions of alarm from U.S. policymakers.
But the blogger army is on a deceptively short leash, as Huang's case illustrates. It's one thing to illegally shoot video of a new warplane that Beijing is in fact eager to show the world. It's quite another to document a facility the PLA would sooner keep under wraps.
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