[Rooters] Relatives of passengers missing in the sinking of a cruise ship on the Yangtze River have accused Chinese police of beating them when they sought more information on the disaster.Sucks to live in a dictatorship...
Scuffles between police and relatives broke out, according to video footage circulated on the Internet which showed police hitting and wrestling family members.
"I saw all of this unfold before my own eyes," Huang Jing, 43, who had family on the ship, told Reuters.
A woman who said her husband Qin Jianping, and father-in-law, Qin Zhengming, were on the ship said: "Why are they using taxpayers' money to bully us? Why are all these police here?"
Sucks to live in a dictatorship...
Police were not immediately available for comment.
Because they work for a dictatorship...
China's government often seeks to control information in the wake of high-profile disasters, concerned about challenges to its authority and hypersensitive about its image. Authorities at the site of rescue effort said the relatives could visit the area in organized groups but reporters and cameramen could not accompany them.
"I can't rule out that even among Chinese journalists there are people who want to smear the government," Hu Shining, Nanjing's deputy police chief, told the relatives who had walked with reporters in tow to try to get to the river's edge.
Zhan Jiang, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said China had made progress since it obscured the extent of the SARS epidemic in late 2002, but that CCTV and Xinhua still maintained their monopoly on sensitive stories.
"Other media cannot get access. This is a problem. You can imagine this is a result of the current system of stability maintenance," Zhan said.
A few of the relatives in Shanghai who were part of a news sharing chat group told Reuters they suspected police were pretending to be family members and were posting messages and photos, mainly about government rescue efforts.
"Why would a grief-stricken family member be posting such positive messages about what a great job government officials are doing in Jianli?" said one man whose mother is missing.