Mother forced to humiliate herself in publicity stunt to get treatment for her daughter
Guangzhou (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Xie Sanxiu walked on her knees for a kilometre down Avenue Guangzhou, in Guangzhou, to raise money to cure her 7-month daughter. Her story was posted on an online forum and donations flowed in. Now, it appears that her “shuffle” was made after she was asked to do it by the same website that advertised her plight. The stunt has outraged many.
Xie said that her daughter Shanshan, who was born in August, has a retinoblastoma, a form of eye cancer. An operation to treat the ailment would need 20,000 yuan. She posted her story on the popular Tianya.cn website but was able to raise only 400 yuan.
Eventually, an Internet user calling himself "Son of the Guangzhou rich" offered her 20,000 yuan if she walked for a kilometre on her knees along a busy Guangzhou street.
Xie accepted and in the afternoon of 22 March, she completed her walk, holding her baby in her arms, not far from the offices of newspapers. Many photographs took pictures of her during her march.
However, the mysterious Internet user disappeared and Shi Jinquan, the website content manager of the Tianya.cn forum, posted the story, provoking a deluge of angry messages against the deceitful “rich son of Guangzhou” as well as a wave of sympathy and donations in favour of Xie. Altogether, some 280,000 yuan were raised.
Now it turns out that Shi and the unknown rich man are one and the same, causing even more outrage. Shi has admitted that the whole thing was a publicity stunt.
An instant messaging conversation between Shi and Xie shows hat Shi told Xie to start the knee-walk from the office of the Nanfang Daily group and coached her in how to answer all sorts of questions.
Xie, who went from the status of victim to that of villain, told Guangzhou Daily that she was sorry for "hurting the media and society", but insisted that her daughter does have an eye cancer.
"I am not educated and know nothing about publicity stunts," Xie told the newspaper. "I'm not a great mother, as the media reported. I'm just a poor mother, a mother who told lies. I was just trying to save my daughter.”
She said she was grateful to all the people who wanted to help her child, but added that she did not expect Shi’s idea to have such a negative impact.
Although willing to return the money, she explained that she was a migrant worker from Jingzhou (Hubei) earning 2,000 yuan a month, and that she cannot pay for her daughter’s bill at the Children's Hospital in Guangzhou and the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Hospital. Despite her pleas, the treatment was stopped.
She and her husband had asked for help from the Civil Affairs Department, but received only a paper that acknowledged they were below the poverty line.
In a TV interview, Shi also apologised, but insisted that all he did was to raise money to pay for the child’s medical treatment. Still, he was fired and has become the object of angry messages from Internet users.
"In my personal research of internet communications, anger can easily attract attention, and opinions spread on a very large scale. This was a last resort,” he said.
"We feel cheated even though it was well meant. Please do not challenge kind people's moral bottom line," one Internet user from Hebei wrote on sina.com.
Another one from Guangzhou criticised Shi for "boosting his own publicity and damaging the social code by exploiting people's kindness".
People were more charitable towards Xie. For most, she is a poor mother who crawled on the street to save her child. For this, she deserves forgiveness.
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