My latest post on china/divide:

The topic is online lia­bil­ity for shar­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion and for gen­er­ally abu­sive behav­ior.

The lat­est devel­op­ment in this area of Chi­nese law con­cerns a pro­fes­sor who is slightly bent out of shape:

Cai Jim­ing, human­i­ties and social sci­ences pro­fes­sor at Tsinghua Uni­ver­sity, is suing China’s biggest Inter­net search com­pany, Baidu, for the per­sonal abuse posted by neti­zens on the company’s forum.

The trial began a few days ago in Haid­ian. Prof Cai has been the recip­i­ent of abuse due to his sup­port for the change in China’s hol­i­day sched­ule. If you recall, we used to enjoy a lovely 7-day May Day hol­i­day, along with the long hol­i­days for National Day and Spring Festival.

Prof Cai and his cronies in the gov­ern­ment changed to more fre­quent, shorter hol­i­days, so short that long trips back to one’s home town are more dif­fi­cult. Need­less to say, this did not go over well with a lot of people.

The entire post is here.