Doctors Close Ranks Around the Physician Sued for Criticizing China's Hit Medical Drama
As 'Small Town Remedy' ended its run to wide acclaim, the studio behind it filed a defamation suit against a doctor-blogger over his medical criticism — and hospital-association lawyers have offered to defend him for free.
China's most-watched medical drama ended its run this week with the kind of ending viewers reward: a finale praised for bookending the series with the countdown clock glimpsed in its first episode, and a star's closing post that drew nearly half a million likes. But the show's real coda is legal. Shanghai Linmon Pictures, one of the companies credited on 'Small Town Remedy', has sued the doctor-blogger who became the drama's loudest medical critic — and China's medical establishment is closing ranks around him.
The blogger, who writes under the name Baiyi Shanmao — the white-clad mountain cat — is a practicing physician whose commentary on the drama's medical details drew a broad audience, in the way this site has documented before: Chinese viewers now put their hit dramas under frame-by-frame professional scrutiny, and medical shows are held to the harshest standard. On October 30, Linmon commissioned the Beijing Xingquan law firm, and a case-filing record circulated on Weibo the next day: a civil first-instance defamation claim against the account.
Shanmao's response, in two posts that together drew more than 25,000 likes, was to call the suit a clumsy publicity stunt. His legal argument is precise: the drama's credited producers are CCTV, Linmon and iQiyi, and his commentary never touched Linmon's reputation by name — so the company suing him alone, and the wave of abuse that followed, is what he calls the actual defamation. He has retained counsel of his own.
The professional response arrived the same night. Deng Liqiang — a doctor-turned-lawyer who sits on the China Hospital Association's medical-law committee and helped draft the country's Physicians Law — contacted Shanmao to offer pro bono representation, with a promise that if a complaint ever arrived, the blogger would pay no legal fees. Deng's message, as Shanmao relayed it: going up against medical professionals on medical matters is a foolish move, and the professional associations would not stand aside. "We're not afraid," Shanmao wrote.
What is at stake reaches well past one drama. 'Small Town Remedy' is the autumn's biggest hit, and its standing rests partly on the credibility a medical audience lends it. If a studio can convert a physician's criticism of on-screen medicine into a defamation claim, every doctor-blogger annotating a drama learns the cost of doing it again. The suit is at the filing stage; the answer will be watched by both professions.