China Scene: West

Quake prankster jailed for disturbing social order

Jia Zhipan, a college student in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province, was sentenced to a year and a half in jail recently for transmitting a false earthquake forecast.

Jia hacked into the Shaanxi provincial seismological bureau website on the evening of May 29 and issued a fraudulent forecast of the country's worst-ever earthquake in Wenchuan, (the county in Sichuan province that suffered an 8.0-magnitude earthquake on May 12) at 11:30 pm the next day.