When local authorities fanned out this week into villages and factory towns around Guangzhou, they were not hunting criminals or political agitators. They were racing to deliver their vision of the truth—to “clarify the rumor about a clash between security personnel and a pregnant street vendor,” as the state press put it.

The town of Zengcheng had erupted in protests, with hundreds of migrant workers tipping over police cars, smashing windows, and torching government buildings. Police responded with tear gas and armored vehicles. It began on Friday evening, when Wang Lianmei, a twenty-year-old pregnant street vendor, and her husband, Tang Xuecai, had a run-in with security personnel who suspected that the couple had “illegally occupied the village’s road to sell goods,” according to the China Daily, a state-run newspaper. Word spread that police had injured the expectant mother and killed her husband, and by the middle of the night a crowd was pelting police with stones and bricks. By Saturday morning, the Party chief Xu Zhibiao had visited Wang at the hospital, and “brought a basket of fruit,” the state media pointed out. “Wang and her fetus remained intact,” the mayor declared.

It’s barely the middle of June, and this is shaping up to be an especially long, hot summer in China. There was rioting in another Chinese city last week, unrest in Inner Mongolia, and—rare for China—bomb attacks in two other cities. While it’s worth pointing out, as Jeremy Page does in the Wall Street Journal, that these show no sign of coördination, it’s also worth asking: How did China come to find itself trying to outrun rumors with baskets of fruit?

Hannah Arendt once identified the “peculiar kind of cynicism” that takes hold in societies in which truth has been sacrificed so thoroughly on the altar of politics. She called it:

the absolute refusal to believe the truth of anything, no matter how well it may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

Abetted by the Web, and addled by this “peculiar form of cynicism,” China is awash in rumors these days. Any more than before? That’s hard to measure, but it’s no longer difficult to understand how the confluence of rage and technology can allow the fate of a single street vendor to alter the course of history.

Roland Soong, the translator at the helm of EastSouthWestNorth, has kept an especially good tally recently of the ways that Chinese rumors have ignited. Last week, he noted the case of the middle-school student who leapt to his death from the sixth floor of his dormitory after a teacher barred him from taking the all-important end-of-school exam for being fifteen minutes late. At one point, the story had been forwarded more than thirty thousand times and attracted more than six thousand comments. In another case, a set of photos circulated that showed Henan officials throwing a child from a rooftop while evicting a family from their home. Both cases were false.

But as Soong points out, “As these things always go, the post that dispelled the rumor was forwarded far fewer times than the original rumor.” How did Sina, the Web site that hosts the discussions, deal with the rumors? By barring users who circulated them and blocking searches on terms such as “Zengcheng,” the site of the street-vendor flap. Those measures, it’s safe to say, are band-aids on a tumor. But recognizing the true source of the illness—the consistent, deliberate misuse of truth for political purposes—is out of the question, for the moment. So authorities will continue racing around in an attempt to shore up the existing system, in which “lies will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie.” And if that doesn’t work, there is always another fruit basket.

The township of Xintang in Zengcheng. Photograph: Reuters/Staff.