Hiring online influencers to post "pleading for justice"—are both sides breaking the law?
I'm ready to help translate your Chinese legal content into professional English for the Shenzhen Zhiming Law Firm website. Please provide the Chinese text you'd like me to translate.[Tip]After being ordered by a Shanghai court to pay more than 700,000 yuan in a housing lease dispute, Wang Yumei, a Shanghai resident, hired an online publicist from Nanjing to publish articles online to generate hype in an attempt to “air her grievances.” Because the results were unsatisfactory, she fell out with the other party and sued to demand the return of the publicity fees she had already paid. The Nanjing Gulou Court ruled that the conduct of both the plaintiff and the defendant was unlawful and that their purpose was not legitimate, dismissed the plaintiff’s claims, and also confiscated the 80,000 yuan in publicity fees collected by the defendant.
[Case]Wang Yumei is the daughter of the legal representative of a catering company in Shanghai. In 2010, the company and Wang Yumei became involved in a dispute with a Shanghai business company over a housing lease contract. Subsequently, the two parties engaged in first-instance, second-instance, and retrial proceedings at the Shanghai Yangpu District Court, the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, and the Shanghai High People’s Court. All rulings confirmed that the catering company was to pay the business company various fees of 73 yuan, and the business company was to compensate the catering company 23 yuan for losses. Wang Yumei believed the court judgments were unfair, and thus planned to expose the matter in the media to create a sensational effect, attract the attention of relevant authorities, and correct the “wrongful ruling.”
In January 2013, Wang Yumei was introduced to Gong Jianguo of a Nanjing-based internet company, where Gong Jianguo was employed. Wang Yumei reached an agreement with Gong Jianguo under which Wang Yumei entrusted the Nanjing-based internet company to promote articles concerning a housing lease contract case on domestic websites, and Wang Yumei paid a certain fee. Thereafter, through the company’s network of connections, Gong Jianguo published an article titled "Fire Escape Turned into Shops, Dispute over Legality of Lease Contract Arises" on 26 domestic websites.
After the article was published, Wang Yumei refused to pay the remaining balance, citing reasons such as the article published by the network company receiving lackluster responses and failing to generate any sensational effect. In May 2014, she filed a lawsuit against Gong Jianguo and his company with the Nanjing Gulou Court, requesting the rescission of the commissioned contract and the return of 80,000 yuan in remuneration by the network company.
The Gulou District People's Court held that Wang Yumei's conduct was improper in purpose and not in good faith. The defendant internet company's act of publishing news for remuneration constituted paid news, which is explicitly prohibited by the national press and publication authorities. Therefore, the acts of both the plaintiff and the defendant were illegal, disrupting social and economic order and harming the public interest. At the end of September, the Nanjing Gulou District People's Court dismissed Wang Yumei's claims and ordered the confiscation of the 80,000 yuan paid by Wang Yumei to the internet company. (Names in the text are pseudonyms.)
(Yangtze Evening Post)
[Study of Law]Contracts must not harm the public interest. In civil law, civil activities should respect social ethics and must not harm the public interest. This principle has universal applicability in the field of civil law and can be applied to all branches of civil law.
For instance, in property law, the reasonableness of state expropriation and requisition is limited to the need for public interest; in the field of intellectual property, whether it is copyright law, patent law, or trademark law, all contain provisions on limitations of rights, the legitimacy of which stems from considerations of public interest; in the field of tort law, under German law, there is a general type of tort of “intentionally causing harm to another person in a manner contrary to good morals.” At the level of contract law, contracts that violate public interest will be declared invalid. Among them, Article 7 of the Contract Law stipulates that parties, when concluding and performing a contract, shall comply with laws and administrative regulations, respect social ethics, and shall not disrupt the socio-economic order or harm the public interest. It can thus be seen that the provisions of China’s Contract Law regarding public interest basically follow the approach of the General Principles of Civil Law.
It is worth noting that the General Principles of Civil Law of China also provides: “If part of a civil act is invalid and such invalidity does not affect the validity of the other parts, the other parts shall remain valid.” Therefore, if a contract contains content that harms the public interest, and such content does not affect the other content, the other content shall be valid. For example, when a factory introduces sewage treatment equipment, it includes in the contract a exemption clause stating that environmental pollution possibly caused by failure to use the equipment in accordance with the instructions shall be exempted from liability. This exemption clause shall be invalid due to harm to the public interest, but the other content, such as the introduction of the equipment and the price, shall remain valid and binding on the parties.
