When WeChat replies are rude, officials scramble to apologize

The environmental protection bureau in Zigong, Sichuan province, posted a letter on its website on Wednesday apologizing for its response to a resident's complaint on WeChat.

Last week, the resident wrote to complain about the dust generated at a construction site outside a high school in Zigong, and to ask the bureau to handle the problem.

The reply: "Nobody would consider you dumb if you did not speak."

He wrote that the bureau lost face by responding to his complaint that way. The bureau compounded its harsh language in its next reply, saying that "face is given by others and lost by oneself".

The man uploaded screenshots of his complaint and the two replies from the bureau to the internet, resulting in an uproar.

Under mounting pressure from netizens, the bureau posted a letter of apology on its website in the early morning on Wednesday, blaming an "intelligent robot" for the two improper automatic replies. It promised to handle the dust issue.

An online portal run by the publicity department of the Sichuan Committee of the Communist Party of China - www.newssc.org - which had provided the technology for the bureau's WeChat account, also carried a letter of apology online on Wednesday.

Apologizing to both the bureau and netizens and pledging never to allow the same mistake to recur, the letter said the portal had shut the automatic reply function on the bureau's WeChat account.

Some netizens were dissatisfied with the letters of apology, suspecting the improper replies were from a person rather than a robot.

In a similar incident on May 2, Jiang, a primary schoolteacher in the Guichi district of Chizhou, Anhui province, complained on the WeChat account that the district government's subsidies for teachers in her schools were less than their counterparts in other primary schools.

She got a reply that "nobody would consider you dumb if you did not speak". Aghast, she sent her complaint again and received the reply: "I seem to hear mosquitoes making noise."

The next day, the district government said the improper replies were generated automatically and that it had made corrections.