Scenario in PRC

Laws and Regulations

The Haier Case
The nature of the lawsuit between Haier Group, a household electrical appliances manufacturer, and Chen Yi-cong, a 25 year old financial analyst of www.fayhoo.com, a financial news website, was similar to the case MAX case. However, this case had created more discussion concerning the essence of defamation: how to differentiate libelous content and sole opinion?

On July 9, 2002, Chen received the summons from the court. The Haier group indicted him for libeling and infringing the interests of Haier. The indictment said that on March 25, 2002, Chen's article named "The truth of Haier" was posted on the website of www.enet.com.cn, using an anonym. The article was then republished in a financial magazine named "Wealth Today". The plaintiff claimed that this article contained fake and fictional content and requested Chen to delete his article from the Internet, retrieve all the "Wealth Today" issues that contained his article, make an apology publicly, pay all the fees for this lawsuit and a compensation of RMB 300,000 to Haier (Daynews.com, 2002). However, the plaintiff did not sue the magazine and the host of www.enet.com.cn.

It was believed that what triggered Haier to take legal actions might be related to another an article of Financial Times, a UK financial newspaper. On June 25, an article in Financial Times adopted Chen's and another Chinese analyst's point of view. Fewer than two weeks later, Haier had put the case to court.

Chen said that he had never thought of being sued because of this article. He claimed that his article was originally posted in a BBS but his friend reposted it to the "Wealth Today". He did not think that the content of the article was libelous but only his own opinion. He exemplified two sentences that Haier found libelous and claimed that they were not libelous at all. One example is the first sentence of the article: "Maybe Haier was glorified too much and therefore people will become suspicious as usual." Chen claimed that he already used the term "Maybe" and undoubtedly there were people who are suspicious toward Haier. Another example is a sub-header named "Unsuccessful Multiple Strategies". Chen claimed that the word "unsuccessful" did not certainly means "failure" and the meaning of "multiple strategies" was very broad and vague, which meaning could be different subject to different persons.

Unexpectedly, the case was settled only 40 days later. On August 16, 2002, the plaintiff and Chen were mediated by the court and reached a settlement (Sun & Ng, 2002). It was believed that it was because Chen had the better chance in this case. Though this case was over, the impact was still in many Chinese Internet users' heart.