Corrupt Chinese officials turn to paying ‘black’ PR firms who claim to help them vanish from sight, with all negative stories about them scrubbed from the internet

Corrupt Chinese officials turn to ‘black’ PR

In the middle of the biggest anti-corruption campaign for years, crooked Chinese politicians are paying to vanish from sight, with all negative stories about them scrubbed from the internet.

The black PR firms are claiming “We can clean your name from blogs, forums, news websites, Weibo [China’s version of Twitter], everything,”  Photo: ALAMY

By Malcolm Moore, Beijing

5:46PM BST 26 May 2013

“It does not matter how big or sensitive the story is, we can make it disappear,” promised a manager at Yage Times, China‘s largest and most notorious “black” public relations (PR) firm. Dozens of Chinese officials have been put under investigation in recent months, and Communist Party members at every level are genuinely worried, according to the children of two senior cadres. In particular, they fear the internet, where stories about corrupt officials often go viral, putting pressure on the Communist party to launch a high-profile investigation.In 42 per cent of this year’s corruption cases, the public has provided a tip-off, often on the web, said Zhang Shaolong, an official at the Party’s discipline unit.

As a result, the market for “black PR” is booming.

A quick search showed at least 30 companies have sprung up to offer government officials, shady businessmen and scandal-hit celebrities the chance to wipe their slates clean.

“We recently helped the head of a police bureau in Jieyang, Guangdong, delete a set of stories from the web, but I cannot tell you exactly who it was,” said a representative of one black PR firm that sells its services on Taobao, an online marketplace, under the title Geshigoufang.

“We can clean your name from blogs, forums, news websites, Weibo [China’s version of Twitter], everything,” he added. “It costs 13,000 yuan (£1,200) to have a story deleted from the People’s Daily website or from Xinhua,” he added.

“It is a bit more expensive because those are government websites. Also for the People’s Daily you have to show us the webpage you want to disappear and we have to ask the editors there whether it is too risky to delete,” he said.

Asked if their firm was busy, the employee said: “We have had 313 clients in the last 30 days”.

At another black PR firm, named Origin of Brightness, a man who named himself as manager Liu said that “companies, individuals and government use this as a form of crisis management. It is a good idea to keep those negative stories deeply hidden”. He added that business was going “quite well”.

At Yage Times, meanwhile, teams of employees scour the internet for incriminating articles and then cold-call the parties involved to ask if they require their services.

Deleting an article usually entails bribing either an editor at a website or a government official who can send a censorship demand.

Some firms have even gone to the lengths of creating fake government stamps in order to send formal censorship notices.

“The companies call around their connections and ask for deletions,” said one editor at Sohu, a Chinese web portal, who asked to remain anonymous.

“The bigger the media, the higher the price, but there is always some bargaining,” he added.

“The editors themselves only get a small share, most of the money goes to the bosses higher up. I know people who are doing it, and I was offered the chance myself, but I felt the risk was too high. Then again, in China every profession has its grey income.”

An editor at Xinhua, the state news agency, said she had heard of the practice but that it was “ethically bad” and “technically very difficult” to erase stories from Xinhua and that she had never heard of anyone doing such a thing.

Last July, Chinese police raided Yage Times and tried to shut it down, according to Caixin, one of China’s most respected business magazines.

Caixin said the previous year, Yage Times had made over 50 million RMB (£4.5 million) in profit.

The company made more than 60 per cent of its money from “government officials” in smaller Chinese cities, “including many police chiefs and county leaders”. Peak season comes just before China’s annual conference season in March, when officials often come under attack from whistleblowers.

However, the manager at Yage Times said the company had never actually closed.

“We just paused for a couple of days. How is it possible the police could arrest us?” he said.

“In fact, that piece of news was leaked to Caixin by a rival in order to destroy the company.”