Charles Xue, an American businessman who once embodied the raucous energies testing Internet censorship in China, has returned to prominence as the opposite: a contrite prisoner endorsing the government’s determination to cleanse and control the Web. In a display recalling the Communist Party’s past ideological offensives, Mr. Xue was shown on state-run television on Thursday, repenting his misdeeds, endorsing the campaign against him and thanking officials for their mercy.
The Chinese Ministry of Public Security said Wednesday that Mr. Xue had been granted bail, nearly eight months after the police detained him in Beijing and charged him with having sex with prostitutes. Despite the sex charge, a torrent of official media reports at the time left little doubt that the government’s ire against Mr. Xue was prompted
by his presence on the Internet, where he attracted 12 million followers on Sina.com Weibo, a popular microblogging service similar to Twitter. Last year, he and other prominent personalities on Weibo became
targets of a government campaign to rid the Internet of what officials deem to be damaging and false rumors,
vicious slander and blackmail, and pornographic images.
The police said Mr. Xue’s contrition and illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease, justified releasing him without a trial. China’s central television network,
CCTV, showed him shorn of his goatee and repentant, and the website of People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, published a confession under Mr. Xue’s legal Chinese name, Xue Biqun. (Online, he used the pen name Xue Manzi.) Mr. Xue said fame and influence had gone to his head when he posted inflammatory but unfounded assertions, such as
about tap water contaminated with contraceptive chemicals.
“I became bloated with vanity,” Mr. Xue said in the confession. “Basically I did whatever I wanted and said whatever I wanted.”
He admonished other influential people on the Internet — popularly known in China as Big V’s for their verified online accounts on Weibo — to heed the lesson of his disgrace.
“I believe it was entirely appropriate that I was punished by the law,” he said. “I think these events were an agonizing lesson for me, and I hope that Big V’s and little V’s active on Weibo will take this as a warning that with every posting you must consider your responsibility to society.”
Mr. Xue, 61, also said that he had not considered group sex a crime because he “had lived in the United States for 34 years, and had been deeply influenced by Western values,” Xinhua, the state news agency, reported. Mr. Xue grew up in China and migrated to the United States, and he won fame in China as a canny investor in Internet and telecommunications companies.
For now at least, how much of Mr. Xue’s confession was heartfelt can only be guessed at. But the form it took was familiar. Since Mao’s time, extravagant accusations against the party’s ideological adversaries have often been followed by detention and then equally extravagant public confessions and endorsements of the official line.
On Thursday, Qin Zhihui, another target of China’s campaign to clean up the Internet, was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of spreading scandalous allegations, especially about the Chinese Red Cross Society and a wealthy young woman who flaunted an expensive lifestyle — sports cars, designer handbags and business-class flights — that she said was underwritten by a company affiliated with the Red Cross.
During a trial earlier this week, Mr. Qin, whose Internet name was Qin Huohuo, also offered his abject apologies, according to Chinese media accounts from the trial in Beijing. “I hope that my conduct will be a warning to others not to do the stupid things that I did,” he told the court.