Q. The movie shows you approaching state security surveillance agents assigned to tail you and trying to talk with them. Why do that?

A. I always think we have nothing to hide, so I want them to know that. Normally people, when they are being followed, are being intimidated or they are scared. So I always say: “If you are looking for me, we can sit down to talk. You can even come to my office, I’ll just give you a table. You’ll see whoever I see, and if I travel, I will name you as my assistant, so whoever I meet, you will also meet. So tell your boss that this is an opportunity to get a close look at this very dangerous guy named as a subversive of state power.”

Q. Here in the West confrontations like that, just like everything else you do, are seen as a type of performance art. Is this an accurate assessment?

A. I wouldn’t say it’s a form of performance art. It is expression, but not one designed for a show. It’s dangerous, it’s very frustrating, and it’s real life. It’s a way to survive, and it’s a way to announce yourself to those people. Because you don’t want them to look at you as scared. Most people would just give up, and that makes the power unshakably strong. I’m trying to tell the workers or the young people you can insist on your own rights.

Q. So at this juncture do you consider yourself to be primarily an artist or a political activist?

A. I’m not very conscious of or think about either position. I lead my life, which is quite dense, with all kinds of political and social concerns and a lot of so-called cultural or art activities. They integrate with each other, that’s always kind of necessary for me. It’s like when you walk, you breathe, but you’re not necessarily concerned about breathing. But when you walk under difficult conditions, like climbing a mountain, then you realize you have to catch your breath. So my activities are more or less like that.

Watch a trailer of the documentary:

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, activists, Ai Weiwei, documentaries
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Li Ning (李凝) the Body Art Guerrilla Group, Made-in-J Town (凌雲焰肢體游擊隊), are among one of the most interesting groups. Recently, they released three action art performances from 2008 through Youtube. The year of the Beijing Olympics - 2008 – dissent voices in the country faced the harshest repression. The 11-year imprisonment of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, because of his Charter 08 initiative, is the most well-known example. These videos from 2008 give a glimpse into the resistance culture among young people in China.

[…] 2008 is the year of Beijing Olympic. In order to show the strength of the country, demolition had taken place in all major cities. Even though Jinan was not the hosting city, the scale of demolition and re-development had been huge. Li Ning and Body Art Guerrilla Group, Made-in-J Town, produced a short video showing the Olympic Torch relay in Jinan and the demolition. In the video, Li Ning performs the flesh and blood in the demolition scene, which creates a sharp contrast with the propaganda of the torch relay.

See Li Ning’s works (Warning: NSFW):

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, art, artists, contemporary artists, forced demolitions, freedom of expression, Shandong
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Hu Jia is an old friend of Chen and among the first people he met after fleeing to Beijing. A champion of democracy and political freedom, Hu, 39, was arrested and sentenced to three and a half years in prison on subversion charges before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

[…] “I’ve always told the authorities, we’re playing the game of cat and mouse — but I am the cat,” he added.

Inspired by the likes of Hu and Chen, analysts see a trend of more people in the younger generation — armed with legal knowledge and Internet skills — joining the ranks of human rights activists at a time when mass discontent over problems like a widening income gap and rampant official corruption simmer beneath the surface.

Former English teacher He Peirong — known by her online name Pearl — was so touched by Chen’s story that she became involved in the plan to rescue him from his village to Beijing. Police in her hometown of Nanjing detained her for a week after Chen’s escape in April, but she says she feels no regrets.

“As we become more educated and better off, I think our political conscience will become stronger, as more people wake up to stand up for their rights,” she said, adding that police had warned her not to go to Beijing during the Party Congress.

The article also describes the current situation of Chen’s mother, brother and nephew, Chen Kegui, following the younger Chen’s arrest. See more on Chen Guangcheng via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Chen Guangcheng, chen kegui, Dongshigu, Hu Jia, human rights activists, leadership transition, Shandong
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

A story Monday by the Xinhua news wire reported that a senior security official had recently been “inspecting a security ‘moat’ project created in areas encircling Beijing for the congress’ smooth holding.” There was apparently no water involved, just a lot of police.

The story quoted Zhou Yongkang, a standing committee member who oversees domestic security, as urging authorities in Beijing and surrounding regions to form a “solid defense . . . thus creating a safe, orderly, auspicious and peaceful environment for the successful holding of the 18th National Congress.”

Amnesty International released a statement last week that gave an idea of what that might mean: More than 100 activists have been rounded up so far.

“The police have placed dozens of activists under house arrest, forcibly removed individuals from Beijing and have closed down the offices of community groups in attempts to suppress peaceful dissent,” the group said. “Scores of activists are believed to be held in ‘black jails’ across the country. . . . Hotels, hostels, basements of buildings and farm centers have all been reportedly used as black jails.”

A major thrust of the campaign has been to block petitioners from reaching the capital. The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips visited Lü Number 3 Team Village on the outskirts of Beijing:

Lu is home to around 700 permanent residents, many of whom supplement their incomes by renting shoddily built shacks to aggrieved men and women bound for Beijing to seek assistance from the central government.

“I don’t care who the tenants are, as long as they pay,” said the owner of one of dozens of cramped guesthouses, who rents rooms for 10 yuan (£1) a night or 200 yuan (£20) a month.

But the village’s once-crowded guesthouses stand largely empty this week after police and security forces moved in to weed out potential troublemakers ahead of the highly sensitive leadership transition.

The state media has dubbed the crackdown the “zero petitions” policy. A report in the Global Times newspaper last month claimed”petitioning cases” in Beijing had fallen 12% since August, after 10,000 detentions.

Activists already in Beijing have faced house arrest or strong pressure to leave the city. From Gillian Wong at The Associated Press:

The crackdown has extended to lawyers such as Xu Zhiyong. He said Beijing authorities have held him under informal house arrest since mid-October, stationing four or five guards outside his apartment in Beijing around the clock.

[…] Even dissidents’ relatives have come under pressure. Beijing activist Hu Jia said he was warned by police to leave town, and that even his parents told him that police had told them to escort him to his hometown.

“My parents said to me: ‘Hu Jia, you don’t know what kind of danger you are in, but we know,’” he recounted in a phone interview from his parents’ home in eastern Anhui province. “They said: ‘Beijing is a cruel battlefield. If you stay here, you will be the first to be sacrificed. Don’t do this.’”

Also pressured to leave Beijing was writer Wang Lixiong, whose Tibetan wife Woeser had already left for Lhasa. Wang wrote in a New York Times op-ed, translated by Perry Link:

The Communist Party has, for the sake of its own meeting, asked that my wife leave me and that I leave my elderly mother, who is too old to live without someone to care for her. Incidentally, she joined the Communist Party in 1947 (two years before the founding of the People’s Republic, and a time when joining was still dangerous) and did so in order to oppose the reigning Nationalist government, which she saw as “lacking humanity.”

Now, I want to ask her, “What do you think of the humanity of the Communist Party today?” but cannot bring myself to inflict on her the pain that the question would bring.

I have replied to State Security that a party conclave is no reason to disperse a family. They, in turn, threatened that if I refused to leave, things would become “uncomfortable” for me. They did not say how. I have decided to wait at home and see. What does a party that vows before the entire world that it follows the rule of law have in mind for my discomfort?

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, activists, Amnesty International, CCP, dissidents, Global Times, house arrest, Hu Jia, perry link, petitioners, security crackdown, stability preservation, Wang Lixiong, Woeser, Xu Zhiyong, Zhou Yongkang
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

At the end of December, on the day of the Laba Rice Congee Festival, when Chinese families typically eat congee, a type of rice porridge, Mr. Song wanted to deliver some congee to the petitioners. I told him that if he distributed it in the evening, I could go with him. But he said that in accordance with Northern custom, the congee should be eaten at lunchtime and so Mr. Song did it on his own. On his way, he was stopped by the police, and the porridge was confiscated. On the day of the Lantern Festival, which marked the end of the annual Chinese New Year holiday, Mr. Song was detained once again, because he gave the petitioners glutinous rice dumplings.

[...] After the coldest months of the winter had passed, I contacted Mr. Song and learned that he’d turned his focus toward rescuing petitioners who were being illegally detained in the infamous black jails, ad hoc detention centers that were set up in hotels to hold “troublemakers” from outside of Beijing until they could be returned forcibly to their hometowns.

[...] After the escape of the blind, barefoot lawyer Chen Guangcheng from his farmhouse in Shandong Province, where he’d been under illegal house arrest, Mr. Song took an even more dangerous risk. He drove to Dongshigu, Mr. Chen’s village, and helped the wife of Mr. Chen’s nephew, who had also been arrested, to escape to Beijing, where she went into hiding to avoid being abused by the local government.

Song's lawyer Liang Xiaojun gives a detailed account of their meeting in a detention center before Song's disapperance. From Yaxue Cao at Seeing Red in China:

I asked how he had been taken to custody and what the interrogation had been like. He spoke fast and clear: He was seized by policemen in the morning of May 4th while waiting in Beijing South Railway Station for a petitioner who had called and asked for his help in what now looked like a premeditated trap. He was then interrogated by policemen from Fengtai District Public Security Bureau and Beijing Headquarters respectively from the afternoon to early next morning. And as Xu Zhiyong predicted, it was about his visit to the black jail in Beijing set up by Chenzhou municipality, Hunan (湖南郴州) and his rescue of petitioners there, but also his online posts to help the petitioners. He was also asked his relationship with Xu Zhiyong—how he met him and how he became a volunteer for Citizen. On May 5, he was charged with “provoking disturbances” (寻衅滋事罪) and transferred to the Fengtai detention center.

[...] After that I was taken up by other obligations. I felt that Song Ze would be released soon, because, legally I couldn’t think of anything that he could possibly be convicted with. His detention was based on charges of “provoking disturbances” (寻衅滋事) as defined by Article 293 of China’s Criminal Law. They refer to the followings: beating another person at will; chasing, intercepting or hurling insults to another person; forcibly taking or demanding, willfully damaging, destroying or occupying public or private property; creating disturbances in a public place. As far as I could see, Song Ze had simply done what a citizen should have done, and he displayed no behaviors punishable by law.

Looking back now, I was too optimistic.

[...] On June 12 I went to Fengtai District detention center again. The officer in charge of the case told me that Song Ze had been switched to residing under surveillance and taken away by people from Beijing PSB a few days ago. He said he didn’t know which department of the PSB they were from, nor did he know where they had taken Song Ze. All he could tell me was that Fengtai District was no long on the case anymore.

Xu Zhiyong also expresses his concern about Song Ze's plight and explains the operation of black jails and surveillance in China. Translation by Hannah at Seeing Red in China:

Black prisons are places where local governments illegally detain petitioners. If the petitioners try to go to the Prime Minister’s house or foreign embassies near Dongjiaominxiang (东交民巷), Wangfujing Street (王府井大街) or other places where they are not supposed to petition, they could be taken away by police. During the so-called sensitive time of Two Meetings each year, they could be apprehended just passing through Chang’an Street (长安街) and being found carrying petitioning materials. All these are labeled “irregular petitioning” and the petitioners who have been rounded up are sent to Jiu Jing Zhuang (久敬庄), the detention and deportation center run by the State Bureau of Letters and Calls. Jiu Jing Zhuang would order local governments’ Beijing offices to take away petitioners from their jurisdictions on the same day they arrive in Jiu Jing Zhuang. However, most petitioners cannot be dispatched back to their homes that same day. They must wait to be sent home, perhaps needing a few days or a few weeks, and this turns into a profiteering opportunity for some people.

People running the black prisons are those who have connections with officials in the State Bureau of Letters and Calls or local governments’ Beijing offices. They rent hotel basements, hire thugs, forcibly take the petitioners from Jiu Jing Zhuang, illegally detain them, and then order the local governments to come to get the petitioners and pay a fee for the latters’ stay. They fetch 80 to 200 RMB per petitioner per day.

[...] In reality, residing under surveillance is more formidable than imprisonment. According to the new Criminal Procedure Law, the authority may designate the location for residing under surveillance, but it shall notify their relatives. But China being China, Song Ze’s family has not received any notification. He can still meet with his lawyer when detained in the detention center, but it’s been more than 40 days since he was put under residential surveillance, no one has been able to see Song Ze; and the PSB has refused to answer any questions on his whereabouts.

See more on China's criminal procedure law and black jails via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, black jails, civil society, criminal procedure law, illegal detentions, lawyers, surveillance, Xu Zhiyong
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Li Zhonghe, 65, a retired construction worker, told Reuters he would have to keep his 40 to 50 pigeons in their coops when the congress starts.

“There are currently some extra restrictions, so we are not supposed to let the pigeons out to fly,” Li said, adding he did not know the reason why. “It’s this way every time there is a congress. I’m accustomed to it by now.”

Unlikely as it seems, pigeons, often raised as a hobby in China, have been used as a tool of subversion before. In the late 1990s, dissidents released pigeons carrying slogans written on ribbons tied to the birds’ feet in southern China.

The Beijing Carrier Pigeon Association said in an online notice two annual autumn races, originally scheduled during the congress, would be postponed until December. It did not say why.

The Wall Street Journal has published a series of photos showing the heightened security in Beijing, and The New York Times’ Andrew Jacobs has more on the government’s full-court press:

As this sprawling city of 20 million people steels itself for the 18th Party Congress, all sorts of potentially buoyant objects — balloons, homing pigeons, Ping-Pong balls and remote-control toy airplanes — are finding their way onto lists of suspicious items that could potentially carry protest messages and mar the meticulously choreographed political spectacle.

And this is just a tiny portion of the government’s rules and restrictions, circulated on the Internet but never officially acknowledged, that seem likely to make daily life especially challenging during the weeklong congress, which one provincial police department likened to a “state of war.”

In recent days, kitchen knives have been removed from store shelves, Internet access has mysteriously slowed to the speed of molasses, and international news channels like CNN and the BBC have disappeared from television sets in upscale health clubs.

As Jacobs reports, “hundreds, if not thousands” of dissidents have either been placed under house arrest or asked to leave Beijing. The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman caught up with prominent activist Hu Jia, who said he has been under tight surveillance for the past six weeks:

On 20 October, state security officers escorted Hu to a train station in Beijing and bundled him off to his hometown in Anhui province. Hu said the police threatened his parents with violence if he returned to Beijing before the end of the meeting.

“This has been way worse than the 17th party congress,” Hu said, referring to a similar event in 2007, while he was formally under house arrest. “At that time I was allowed to go out and buy things to eat. This time there’s just no way.”

Meanwhile, although state media published several cherry-picked comments from Sina Weibo users on Friday, David Bandurski of The China Media Project details the difficulty of finding microblog posts mentioning the congress:

Searches for “18th Congress” using both numerals and Chinese characters are blocked on Chinese social media sites. Apparently, it is possible to make posts using the terms, but it is not possible to see what others have posted unless you are following them. The goal, it seems, is to restrict conversation about the meeting while not outright banning the terms.

Searches for the terms yield a message that reads: “We’re sorry, results related to ’18th Congress’ cannot be found.”

See additional coverage of China’s upcoming 18th Party Congress, via CDT.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, activists, Beijing, dissidents, Hu Jia, microblogs, netizens, security
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

SPIEGEL: You’re expected in Washington for the opening of a major show of your work, and in Berlin to begin the professorship that the Academy of the Arts has offered you. But there is no mention whatsoever in the Chinese state media about you, your case and the fact that you’ve been barred from leaving the country.

Ai: Strange, isn’t it? Not a word about me in the gossip columns, and not a word on the political pages, and yet in a single night there were more than 500 articles about me in the rest of the world.

SPIEGEL: But with your lawsuit, aren’t you practically challenging the authorities to lock you up?

Ai: I don’t want to be trapped by that logic. Of course they’ll win against me in the short term, but not in the end, because they are weak. In fact, they’re so shy that they don’t even dare to discuss my case in public. I’ve seen shy girls, and shy little boys, too — but have you ever seen such a shy government?

Ai also expresses hope for the new generation of leaders set to take power early next year:

SPIEGEL: A new group of men will assume China’s leadership in a few weeks, the fifth generation since Mao, the generation of the princelings. It’s also your generation. Xi Jinping, the designated party leader, is only four years older than you.

Ai: And I became aware of that recently. I came across a photo showing my father, the poet Ai Qing, next to the father of Xi Jinping, the politician Xi Zhongxun. For quite some time, both followed similar life paths, both were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps we, their sons, could share a few experiences with each other. I believe that the new leaders know that they have to make great changes in this country. It’s impossible for things to remain the way they are.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, dissidents, Xi Jinping
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The move came after a court last week rejected an appeal from Mr. Ai in which he argued that tax officials should not be allowed to collect $2.4 million that the officials said the company owed in back taxes and penalties. Mr. Ai had already given the tax authorities $1.3 million as a bond, and he said he now expects the officials to keep that.

If the company shuts down, then it might not be required to pay the remaining $1.1 million. The officials revoking the company’s business license did not cite the tax case, but said the company had failed to complete registration requirements this year, according to Mr. Liu, who posted his message on Sunday.

Ai, who will likely miss several scheduled appearances in the United States this month because the Chinese government has still not returned his passport, told The Guardian that closing down Beijing Fake Cultural Development “could be an excuse not to give us a fine” and said he hoped the outcome could prevent similar swindling of Chinese citizens in the future:

“I think they want to back down to try and conclude this case. From the beginning they should not have had it; they were using very old tactics to punish someone and make up a crime to make people think ‘He’s a bad guy’ … That didn’t work and it backfired. I think it completely failed,” he said on Monday.

“Of course they didn’t like the fact it had gone on so long and could last longer.”

Ai added that he had mixed feelings about the long-running case.

“Of course we have lost the battle – they kept our [tax deposit]. But I think we have won the war. We gave people a clear understanding of what the Fake case was about and how they handled it,” he said.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, Beijing Fake Cultural Development, tax evasion, United States
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

“It’s an extremely shameless court,” Ai, whose 81-day detention last year sparked an international outcry, told reporters.

“It didn’t respect the facts or give us a chance to defend ourselves; it has no regard for taxpayers’ rights,” he said, adding he did not know whether now he had to pay to entire fine though he suspected he did.

Ai, 55, had asked the Chaoyang District Court to overturn the city tax office’s rejection of his appeal against the 15 million yuan ($2.38 million) tax evasion penalty imposed on the company he works for, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd, which produces his art and designs.

“From the Fake tax case (we) can see that there’s no fair justice in China,” Ai added.

CNN has more on the legal inconsistencies with the case:

The court directly ruled on the case without holding a hearing and failed to serve Ai sufficient notice of the ruling, according to Liu Xiaoyuan, Ai’s legal adviser, who accompanied the artist to court on Thursday.

“We submitted new evidence to the court after the first appeal,” Liu said. “According to regulations, there should have been another hearing, but there was not.”

“According to relevant laws and regulations, the court should send a formal written notification three days before the verdict,” Liu added. “But the court just gave us a call last night telling us there would be a hearing today,” he said, adding that no other members of Ai’s legal team were able to make it to the court on such short notice.

As is his habit, Ai relentlessly documented his day on Twitter and Instagram.

A survey of Ai’s work, titled “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” will open October 7 at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Authorities are still holding Ai’s passport, even though his probation ended June 21, and so he is unable to travel for the exhibit or for other planned events in the U.S. and Europe, he recently told the New York Times.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, tax evasion
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Chen’s prospective Taiwan visit offers a challenge to Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, who has built his administration around better relations with China, from which Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949.

[…] Chen’s good friend and a prominent rights lawyer in Beijing, Jiang Tianyong, said he welcomed the news that Chen would visit Taiwan next year, saying China has much to learn from the island in terms of lessons in democracy and rule of law.

“We are in general interested in its legal system and democracy of course is something that every Chinese citizen wants. Taiwan may not be exactly the path China will follow in the future but it has areas that we especially could learn from,” Jiang said by phone.

For more on Chen Guangcheng’s activities since leaving China, see ‘Chen Guangcheng’s Next Steps‘ on CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Beijing and Taiwan, Chen Guangcheng, human rights activists, legal system
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The North’s state news agency announced Mr. Ri’s visit with two, one-sentence dispatches – one last Tuesday saying he’d left for China and another on Saturday saying he’d returned.

On Sunday, China’s Xinhua news agency reported that Mr. Ri went to Jiangsu, the populous province just north of Shanghai that is the home of Nanjing and several other large cities. While there, Mr. Ri met with provincial officials as well as China’s minister of public security, Meng Jianzhu, triggering media speculation that Mr. Ri was discussing security arrangements for a visit by Mr. Kim.

Then on Monday, a delegation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China arrived in Pyongyang. The North’s state news agency said they were hosted at a reception led by Kim Yong Il, one of the 11 secretaries of the North’s ruling Worker’s Party.

The North’s report said that Mr. Kim told the visiting Chinese delegation that former dictator Kim Jong Il visited China eight times and that the new leader Kim Jong Eun “is deeply interested in the development of friendly relations with China.”

There has also been speculation about why Kim is planning a visit, The Telegraph adds:

Sources say Kim may ask China for food aid. Floods last week killed 88 North Koreans and destroyed homes and crops, according to the country`s state news agency KCNA.

The US cancelled an aid agreement with North Korea in protest over the country`s long-range missile test in April. The US State Department says it is in close contact with China over the situation in North Korea.

“When he travels to China, Kim Jong-un will be following a path well trodden by his father and grandfather,” said Michael Breen, author of Kim Jong-il, North Korea`s Dear Leader.

“The trip serves two purposes: securing Chinese aid following the flooding in North Korea and, to strengthen confidence in his leadership in Pyongyang – not, as one might expect, by the show of support from China – but rather by the exhibition of that peculiar North Korean skill of appearing to permit foreign powers the privilege of donating.”

Despite the summit between China, Japan, and South Korea to discuss trade and North Korea earlier this year, China’s relationship with South Korea seems to be under pressure as China denies the south’s claims of Chinese baby flesh pills. Aside from these claims, AFP reports South Korean activists are seeking an investigation of torture allegations against China:

A South Korean rights group said on Monday it would ask the United Nations to investigate the alleged torture of a Seoul activist detained in China after helping North Korean refugees there.

Kim Young-Hwan and three other people were arrested on March 29 and accused of endangering Beijing’s national security.

After the group were deported on July 20, Kim claimed he had been physically abused by Chinese security authorities. He gave no details but his colleagues said he was subjected to electric shocks.

The activist Kim is the former leader of an underground leftist party who met the then-North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung in Pyongyang in 1991. He later became a fierce regime critic and now works for a Seoul-based rights group.

According to The New York Times, the activists being held by China were being held because of their attempts to help North Korean refugees:

“They put a cattle prod, wrapped in electric coils, inside my clothes and placed it on my chest and back,” Mr. Kim told Chosun Ilbo, a mass-circulation daily in South Korea. “It felt like being continuously electrocuted.

“I could smell my flesh burning,” he said. “They also threatened several times to send me to North Korea.”

Chinese officials frequently raise the possibility of being sent to North Korea when they interrogate South Korean activists for helping North Korean refugees in China, according to activists who say they were tortured in China.

Another activist, Chung Peter, told the same TV Chosun program that “sleep deprivation” and “letting you hear the sound of torture from the next room” were standard interrogation tactics when he was held in China for a year and a half starting in 2003 for helping North Korean refugees.

As the activists bring their case to the United Nations against China, Seoul is also hardening its position towards China in this dispute, according to The Korea Herald:

Cho Tae-young, a spokesperson for Seoul’s Foreign Ministry, said the government will “actively support” Kim if he takes the issue to multinational agencies. The ministry will also direct its consuls in China to interview all 625 Korean inmates in the country to investigate whether they were abused. Regarding China’s denial, Cho said Korea does not regard it as an official response. Seoul demanded China reinvestigate the alleged torture of Kim after he was deported. The government is still awaiting an “official answer” through their diplomatic channel, he added

“We have requested from the Chinese government a strict reinvestigation, apology, punishment for those responsible and measures to prevent future abuses. And we will continuously raise the issue (until China responds),” spokesperson Cho told a news briefing.

South Korean ambassador to China Lee Kyu-hyung has asked for a meeting with a senior government official to explain Seoul’s position and the need for stringent fact finding, Cho said.

The Committee for the Release of North Korean Human Rights Activist Kim Young Hwan said last week that it filed requests in May and plans an additional appeal for an investigation into Kim’s confinement with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Geneva.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, human rights activism, Kim Jong-un, North Korea, north korean refugees, refugees, south korea, torture
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Xiao Yong has been an activist based in Guangzhou for the last few years. According to a friend of his with whom I spoke just a short while ago, he had traveled to many places in China to participate in rights struggles. While on trains, the friend said, he would engage travelers in conversations about freedoms and rights. And he had been frequently summoned by police to “hecha”, or to be interrogated, warned and threatened.

On March 30th this year, shortly after the Two Meetings (两会) in Beijing concluded where Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao once again spoke of the urgent need for political reform and called upon the people to push for it, Xiao Yong and a dozen or so others were on street in Guangzhou holding signs such as “No vote, no future”, “Hu Jintao leads the way to disclose assets” and more. Six were detained on allegations of “illegally gathering, marching or demonstrating,” including Xiao Yong. They were released after a month or so on probation.

[…] Xiao Yong made it clear in his calls that he wants to get legal assistance to challenge his case.

But Xiao’s demand for an attorney might not be met easily, as Pang Yong, a rights lawyer involved in the case, was also briefly detained. From AFP:

“I can’t say for sure that Xiao Yong was sentenced because of the Li Wangyang incident,” lawyer Pang told AFP, “but it appears that this is the case.”

[…] Xiao’s family was hoping to hire Pang to bring a case against the police over apparent illegalities in the sentencing, the lawyer said, but police broke up a meeting at the family home on Saturday and briefly took him into custody.

“The family wants to hire me, but they are getting too much pressure from the authorities, so we will have to wait to see if a lawsuit can be brought later,” Pang said.

Read more about Li Wangyang and civil society in China via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, civil society, dissidents, li wangyang, re-education through labor
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Speaking by phone, Ai said the ruling will ultimately come back to haunt the authorities. “I feel sad for them,” he said. “Young people know what is happening. We morally won the case anyway, and I’m very aware the government really feels paralyzed.”

Ai said he plans to move forward with more legal tactics to show the world how the government makes a mockery of China’s judicial system.

As for his fate, Ai didn’t sound too optimistic. “Maybe I have no future,” he said. “I just have to deal with what’s happening now.”

Today, award-winning filmmaker Alison Klayman’s documentary about Ai debuted in New York. The New York Times calls Klayman’s film, Ai Weiwiei: Never Sorry, a “classic case of being in the right place at the right time”:

“One of the hard parts of making a film like this is that you don’t know how the story ends,” said Evan Osnos, the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, who met Ms. Klayman just before she started the project. “If you’re making a film about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, you do know, and you structure the story accordingly. But if you’re making a film in real time about a guy who is going down an uncharted path, all you can do is hang on for dear life and see where it goes. To Alison’s credit she stayed with it, because she saw a story of real importance.”

Ms. Klayman said that among her objectives was to use Mr. Ai’s situation to show that not only are there “people interested in pushing the boundaries in China,” but also that “there are cracks for those people to maneuver in.” Citing his use of Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media to get his political message and artworks out, she added, “I do see China as a society with room for a lot of interesting things to be happening, despite the tough nature of authority.”

But she also captures the Chinese state at its most arbitrary and despotic, disregarding the rule of law and international human rights conventions to which it is a signatory. Officials in Shanghai, for example, invite Mr. Ai to build a studio there, then bulldoze it when he falls into disfavor: he responds with a party at the demolition site, serving river crab, whose name is a Mandarin homonym for the “harmony” the government tries to enforce.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, dissidents
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Li had been petitioning authorities for years to investigate the death of her son, who died suddenly in 2006 and was quickly cremated, Liu said. She never saw her son’s dead body.

She had wanted to enter Hong Kong to petition her cause at a march held to mark the anniversary of Britain’s 1997 handover of the territory back to China, Liu added.

Li was subsequently held in a hotel room in Hebei province in northeast China weeks later and, when her guards were dozing, the relatives sneaked her out of the building, Liu Weiping, a spokesman for the alliance, said late on Thursday.

“On July 17, at around 5:00 a.m., she managed to escape her hotel room with help from her relatives. They (police) are now pressuring her family to hand her over,” Liu said.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, detention, dissidents, Hong Kong, Li Guizhi
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Weibo user ylovey528 posted this message and image on June 14 in homage to Li:

ylovey528: Wen Jiabao: Sorry, I am too late.
ylovey528：温家宝：对不起，我来晚了。

From Right to Left:

For democracy, an ordinary man will rise and fall with the nation. Even if I am beheaded, I won’t retreat.
為民主，國家興亡匹夫有貴，我就是砍頭，我也不回頭。

Health is dear, life is dearer. Both can be given up for freedom.
溫飽誠可貴 生命價更高 若為自由故 兩者皆可失

Premier Wen has notoriously apologized for arriving late to the scene of many natural and man-made disasters, most recently after last July’s deadly train crash in Wenzhou. Just days before his death, Li told Hong Kong Cable TV “I won’t retreat, even if I am beheaded.” The last two lines are adapted from a poem by Sándor Petőfi, a hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848; even Chinese schoolchildren know these words:

Life is dear, love is dearer. Both can be given up for freedom.
生命诚可贵,爱情价更高;若为自由故,二者皆可抛

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, dissidents, li wangyang, sina weibo, Tiananmen, weibo, Wen Jiabao
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall