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Fan detained over Internet postings insulting footballers
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-07-29 15:36
A 20-year-old Beijing football fan has received a seven-day detention for putting up Internet postings to humiliate rivals of the local club team Guo'an and trigger football hooliganism at events.
The man, surnamed Hao, will also be banned from watching live football games at all Beijing stadiums for 12 months, said Li Zhongyi, an official with Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau.
Hao was accused of running an online chatroom at Baidu.com, the most popular Internet search engine provider in China, since March to voice support of the Guo'an team but insult other teams and referees in the Beijing dialect, notorious in China as "Jing Ma", meaning Beijing swear words.
A typical Beijing swear word is abbreviated as "SB", similar in meaning to "sucker".
Hao's online chatroom soon drew dozens of netizens, who put up hundreds of postings. They would team up at venues in time for major events, holding a banner to declare they belonged to the "Jing Ma club" and openly insulting referees and footballers of the rival team, said Li.
Five others were penalized for helping to organize the "Jing Ma Club" and their punishment varied from warnings to fines, Li said without elaborating.
"Jing Ma" is one of the Beijing authorities' headaches, alongside pollution and congestion, in the run-up to the long-awaited Beijing Olympics set to open in a year.
"Clean up your act" is the message Beijingers have received as about 550,000 foreigners are expected for the Olympics, joined by 22,000 journalists.
"There will be 4 billion eyes on China," said Liu Qi, head of the organizing committee for the Beijing Olympics, at a pep rally earlier this week. He was referring to the expected worldwide TV audience.
"Everyone should be a good fan when watching the matches," he said. "We must be a friendly and professional audience."
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