15 Mar 12 | Magazine, Volume 41.01 Spring 2012
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21 Feb 12 | Asia and Pacific, China, Digital Freedom
A veteran Chinese pro-democracy campaigner based in Wuhan has been warned by state security police not to proceed with plans for a website aimed to promote “peaceful” reform. Qin Yongmin, who was freed from prison in November 2010 after serving a 10-year sentence for subversion, told Radio Free Asia he was surrounded by police last week as he came out of a computer store and taken to a police station. RFA reports:
“I had been planning to launch the ‘Peaceful Transition Advice’ website hosted overseas,” Qin said. “They told me that I absolutely could not do this.”
“They said that if I launched it in the morning, they would arrest me in the afternoon, and that they would pursue the harshest kind of punishment for me,” he said.
(…)
Police also questioned him about a meeting he held on Feb. 14 at a restaurant in Wuhan with two political activists from the Pan-Blue Alliance, a member of the writers’ group Independent Chinese PEN, and a number of petitioners, Qin said.
“They told me that meeting was the reason that they were very alarmed,” Qin said.
“We were on the second floor of the restaurant, and the police took over the entire third floor,” he said. “They told me that no matter where I went or whom I met with, they would know all about it.”
The report added that Qin had been placed under 24-hour surveillance by officials from his home district in Wuhan since his release, and subjected to searches of his home and confiscation of his keys and computer equipment. Fellow activists have said they have been forbidden from visiting the activist, who was involved in the 1981 Democracy Wall movement and attempted to register the Democracy Party of China in 1998.
14 Feb 12 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, minipost
Veteran Chinese dissident Zhu Yufu has been sentenced to seven years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” after he shared his poem “It’s time” over Skype. The court in Hangzhou, eastern China, sentenced Zhu following a trial hearing on 31 January. During the hearing, prosecutors cited the poem and messages the activist had sent online. In the poem, Yufu called on Chinese citizens to defend their freedoms. The court verdict said the crime deserved “severe” punishment.
21 Jan 12 | Asia and Pacific, China
The defection of Chinese writer and dissident Yu Jie last week revealed shocking allegations of torture and beatings more usually associated with rogue American troops in Iraq.
Yu, a close friend of imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo, is most famous for his mocking attack on the country’s premier, China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, published in Hong Kong in late 2010.
Yu fled with his family to the US on 11 January. Shortly after, he held a press conference in Washington and released a written statement on why he had chosen to defect. Below we pick out the most shocking of these claims.
Though I was physically in China, I became an ‘exile at heart’ and a ‘non-existent person’ in the public space.
Illegal house arrests, torture, surveillance, tracking, and being taken on ‘trips’ became part of my everyday life.
Several of the plainclothes officials came at me again and began beating me in the head and the face without explanation. They stripped off all my clothes and pushed me, naked, to the ground, and kicked me maniacally. They also had a camera and were taking pictures as I was being beaten, saying with glee that they would post the naked photos online.
They forced me to kneel and slapped me over a hundred times in the face. They even forced me to slap myself. They would be satisfied only when they heard the slapping sound, and laughed madly. They also kicked me in the chest and then stood on me after I had fallen to the ground.
The head state security officer told him:
If the order comes from above, we can dig a pit to bury you alive in half an hour, and no one on earth would know… If the central authorities think that their rule is facing a crisis, they can capture [all China’s dissidents] in one night and bury them alive.
While the post-Tiananmen Square period was a time when Chinese dissidents defected in their droves, there is still a steady trickle of Chinese who seek refugee status overseas. Some of them leave legally, while others, who are denied passports or the right to leave smuggle themselves out, usually via Vietnam. They include fellow writer Liao Yiwu, who has been living in Germany since 2011; Chinese diplomat, Chen Yonglin, who fled to Australia in 2005; and AIDS activist Wan Yanhai, who left for the United States in 2010. The wife of Chinese dissident human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, Geng He, has also been living in the US for the past two years. Her husband is currently serving a three-year prison sentence for violating probation rules, having been missing for more than a year.
