Global Business
References Environment Case
September 20, 1994
The force threw a cordon around Dabeiyao just before midnight and waited, waited and waited. At dawn it became obvious there would be no gang war or insurrection in the making.
Police tracked down the recipient of the call and cracked the case: He was a minor employee of a state enterprise_testing the new beeper his company had given him that day by sending a message to himself.
The fallout from this rather mundane urban incident has made headlines in a country where, despite technological progress and private economic clout, people still suspect that the ubiquitous state security apparatus invades electronic privacy.
For a start, the authorities had to assure the capital's 300,000 new beeper users that the nation's security agents were not censoring pager messages or eavesdropping on beeper transmissions.
If that was tough to believe, so was the official explanation that a zealous pager-service operator had wrestled with her conscience and alerted the authorities, despite a much-publicized guarantee that all messages would be respected as private.
The astonishing proliferation of beeper/pager and cellular phone systems is because of a commercial acumen by military authorities who own virtually all air frequency bands but have leased them out to private entrepreneurs.
This prompted one official party publication to lament recently that in case of war or invasion, the armed forces would not be able to communicate because all their channels were sure to be occupied by private chitchat and messages.
In fact, the beeper fiasco made China's authorities realize they never had issued legal limits or codes of conduct for those who use the airwaves with pagers or the 25,000 "official" cellular phones that have become a status symbol.
It was not the first time officialdom realized progress had outstripped China's cumbersome and antiquated legal infrastructure and people's ability to comprehend changes.
Millions of Chinese, with the help of satellite dishes marketed by state enterprises, have watched pirated broadcasts from foreign TV channels for years. The viewers never asked where these signals came from. Nobody explained this to them, just as China's sudden flood of motorists have never been told about right of way, how to pass other cars, or that mule-drawn carts should keep out of fast lanes on expressways.
The beeper message caused considerable official headaches, especially after public security agents tracked down the recipient of the call, Liu Yuping.
The problem, so said the authorities, was not that Liu had chosen a provocative text for his first venture on the air, but that there was not a single law under which he could be penalized.
"We can't even stop him from doing it again," said the police official who released the middle-aged man after interrogation.
A special committee is working out rules on what can be beeped through the air and - here is the crux of the matter - whether the state should charge a fee for those who pollute the atmosphere with their yak-yak.