Li Yuanlong, who once worked as a reporter for the state-run Bijie Daily in the city of Bijie in Guizhou province, was taken to the airport along with his wife early Wednesday afternoon and “told to take a vacation” his son, Li Muzi, told China Real Time on Friday.

[…] The Bijie Public Security Bureau could not be reached for comment. A person answering the phone at the Bijie city government propaganda office said Mr. Li was traveling with his wife, citing messages posted to former journalist’s account on the web portal KDnet. “They are very happy now! That’s his own personal matter – why are you asking us?” the person said before hanging up.

[…] Li Fangping, a Beijing-based lawyer who has been keeping track of the situation, said that he had talked to Li Yuanlong when he was on his way to the airport. “I can confirm that he is travelling under control,” the lawyer, who is not related to Li Yuanlong, said.

“This is a way for (the local government) to maintain stability,” he added. “The public still wants more details, even though the local government has already dismissed the relevant people. Because Li Yuanlong is the main information provider, and because he was a reporter who has a lot of friends in the media, they authorities are afraid that people will continue to contact him in search of more clues or that Li might even leak out information about other instances of social injustice.”

Chin had previously explored why this story in particular resonated so deeply with the public. Also from China Real Time Report:

Stories of suffering children are always hard to stomach, but they tend to hit with particular impact in China, where the one-child policy and a strong belief in the family as the most basic unit of society have combined to imbue the young with an aura of unsurpassed importance. In this case, the impact of appears to have been amplified by similarities between what happened to the brothers and the Hans Christian Anderson short story “The Little Match Girl.”

The story, about a poor Danish girl who dies from exposure on New Year’s Eve after running away from her abusive father and trying to sell matches on the street, was once included in Chinese primary school text books as an example of the difficulties faced by the poor in capitalist countries.

[…] Cao Lin, a columnist for the state-run China Youth Daily, [wrote:] “At a time when we’re crowing about the rise of the nation and the creation of a moderately well-off society, to have five children die while seeking warmth in a trash bin is truly bizarre [….”]

Cao Lin was one of many in the state media to ask what had gone wrong, and who was to blame. Eight local officials were swiftly identified and fired. From Lin Xi at Global Times:

Eight local officials including two district chiefs in charge of civil affairs and education were dismissed or suspended from their duties by the Bijie municipal party committee on Monday because of the accident. Some people believe that these boys’ families and society should bear the primary responsibility for the accident instead of the officials. They think that it was the ignorance and indifference from the boys’ relatives and society which caused this tragedy.

However, the officials are not innocent because it is their duty to guarantee every citizen’s safety. The death of the five boys reflects management problems within government.

If the education system was better, these boys would have been taking lessons in warm classrooms instead of leaving school. If the assistance system was more active, they could have been found earlier and may have escaped death. Indeed, governments and officials have done nothing which directly caused this accident. However, it was the officials’ inaction which left the boys to die in the cold.

Many doubted, however that the sacking these eight officials had adequately addressed the root of the problem. From Rachel Wang at Tea Leaf Nation:

[…] As @bll2012 opined: “We are used to finding scapegoats when we encounter problems, then they give you a scapegoat! Then you shut up! You are so pathetic! Why not find the real cause: The failure of the social protection system.” Independent Chinese media Caixin (@财新网) also sounded a note of caution: “The tragedy in Guizhou did not only reflect management loopholes in Bijie alone, but also the defects of the mechanism protecting Chinese children’s rights. China is among the few countries that does not have a professional child welfare department. Administrative systems for child protection and rescue urgently need to be built.”

Therefore, according to the lawyer Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong was detained to prevent the damage from spreading any further. At The Daily Beast, Duncan Hewitt linked his treatment to the cases of Zhai Xiaobing (@stariver) and Ren Jianyu, and suggested—as did Charles Custer at ChinaGeeks—that while local government may be directly responsible, the political climate in which such actions are tolerated and encouraged is one of Beijing’s making:

Li’s detention echoes what is now a common pattern in China, in which sensitive individuals are removed from circulation at sensitive times, and held either under effective house arrest at home, or in what are known as “black [i.e. unofficial] jails.” During the run-up to the recent Communist Party Congress, rights groups say over a hundred people faced such treatment—including the well-known human-rights activist Hu Jia, who was only released from a three-year jail sentence last year.

In some cases the hard line taken against dissidents may be the choice of local authorities rather than necessarily being decreed from the center, says Professor Kerry Brown, executive director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney, but he adds that it is nevertheless a sign of the prevailing mood in Chinese political circles:

“The golden rule seems to be that no one gets bad marks for picking on dissidents and others labeled trouble makers,” he says, “while for those who are lenient, on the other hand, the risks if things go wrong are still high.

Furthermore, a Central Propaganda Department directive previously published by CDT suggested that Beijing, while allowing some coverage, had chosen to grant local government considerable control:

[… Y]ou may report moderately on the incident according to Xinhua wire copy and authoritative information released by the local government. Do not put this news on the front page, do not lure readers to the story, do not link to the story, to do not comment on it, and do not dispatch journalists to the scene.

Li, the primary remaining conduit of information on the case, had long been a thorn in the side of local authorities. In 2006, he was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly inciting subversion in a series of articles posted to overseas Chinese websites. From the Committee to Protect Journalists’ report on his trial in May 2006:

“Like many committed reporters in China, Li Yuanlong began posting his articles online after facing censorship at his newspaper,” CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said. “He is guilty of nothing more than expressing his criticism of official actions and should never have been brought to trial. We call for his immediate and unconditional release.”

Li reported for Bijie Ribao on rural poverty and unemployment in his native Guizhou province and had frequently been censored in recent years because of complaints by local officials embarrassed by his reports, according to the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights in China and CPJ sources.

[…] Li pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and his lawyer rejected the notion that his criticism threatened state authority.

“He only criticized wrongdoings of some Communist Party officials or local governments,” the lawyer told Reuters. “The Communist Party and state power is not the same concept.”

At EastSouthWestNorth, Roland Soong translated one of Li’s essays, On Becoming an American Citizen in Spirit, originally posted to exile site Boxun under the pen name Ye Lang (Night Wolf). In it, Li pecked at the raw nerve of China’s ‘crucifixion’ by foreign imperialists, defending former Peking University professor Jiao Guobiao‘s suggestion that it would have been better for the U.S. to “liberate” China from Communist rule at the end of the Korean War:

[…] If America really sent its soldiers to drive for Beijing, then this is more than ‘interfering internal politics of other countries’ and it is really the invasion by the ‘world police.’ I have been pondering why interfering in the internal politics of other countries and being the world police man have become terms of denigration that are natural and indisputable in “our” vocabulary. If your internal politics is a totalitarian regime covered up by dark curtains, then why should not the police in charge of maintaining world peace come and show you? As a common example, I am beating my wife and kids at home and someone else (such as the police) comes to stop me. I yell: “I’m beating my wife and my kids. What is this to outsiders? Why are you entitled to mind my family business?” Is that acceptable? As another example, a Chinese person falls into the river, or his house catches fire. There is an American on the side, but the patriots won’t let the Chinese person accept the help of the American. Instead, the Chinese person must wait for other Chinese to save him. The Chinese person will have to “sacrifice himself for the greater good.” Is this not the modernized version under the cover of patriotism of the old saying “It is a minor matter to starve to death; it is a major matter to lose your chastity”?

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Post tags: central propaganda department, china youth daily, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Times, Guizhou, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, jiao guobiao, journalists, Korean War, Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong, local government, local officials, Ministry of Truth, poverty, poverty alleviation, subversion, vacation-style treatment
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Li Fangping vanished Friday after leaving a meeting with a group that fights discrimination against people with hepatitis B. It was not known where he went, but his disappearance came as hundreds of people have been detained, confined at home, interrogated or simply vanished.

Li’s friend Lu Jun said Li contacted his wife Wednesday evening and asked her to pick him up in a north Beijing neighborhood.

The friend said Li said he wants to rest and does not wish to discuss the events of the past week.

Other lawyers and activists released in recent weeks have also declined to speak to the media, perhaps as a condition of their release and to avoid raising questions about their treatment while detained.

The AP report has more on Li Xiongbing as well:

Li’s release coincided with the disappearance of colleague Li Xiongbing, who called his wife Wu Haiying on Wednesday afternoon to say he would be away for a few days and not to be worried if she was unable to reach him during that time. The call was then cut off and Wu was unable to get subsequently get through.

“I am worried, because many of our friends have disappeared. Li Fangping’s wife also received a similar phone call during his disappearance. I think now it is (Li Xiongbing’s) turn,” Wu told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

Li Fangping was himself detained just as yet another rights lawyer, Teng Biao, was released from custody, in a move some called, “One In, One Out.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, defending rights, lawyers, Li Fangping, Li Xiongbing
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Around 5 pm local time on April 29, Beijing-based human rights lawyer Li Fangping (李方平) was kidnapped by unidentified individuals outside the offices of the health rights NGO Beijing Yirenping Center, of which he is a legal advisor. Li was able to speak briefly with his wife, telling her, “I may be gone for a period of time… can’t talk more.” Further efforts to contact him have been unsuccessful, and his whereabouts are unknown.

The news of Li Fangping’s abduction comes on the heels of reports that prominent human rights lawyer Teng Biao (滕彪) was released earlier that afternoon after 70 days of enforced disappearance . Teng Biao’s wife, who confirmed his return, said she could not comment on his health or any other details of his disappearance. While the timing of Teng’s release initially seemed to signal a positive response by the Chinese government to this week’s U.S.-China human rights dialogue, the disappearance of Li shortly thereafter quickly dampened any hope that pressure on human rights activists in China might be easing. These actions raise renewed questions about the limits of international pressure on the Chinese government, as well as the effectiveness of human rights dialogues.

“In recent months, and especially during this crackdown, we have seen that torture to enforce silence is becoming a frighteningly common experience for those disappeared or detained,” said Renee Xia, CHRD’s International Director. “The Chinese authorities, in the meantime, are resorting to an old trick, the revolving-door approach—one in, one out—to create the impression that things are improving.”

Li Fangping is a prominent Beijing-based human rights lawyer who in recent years has represented a number of high-profile victims of political and religious persecution, including, among others, Chen Guangcheng, Yang Chunlin (杨春林), Hu Jia (胡佳), and Zhao Lianhai (赵连海). He has faced frequent harassment from officials, and, on December 27, 2006, was severely beaten and suffered head injuries after he and another lawyer were assaulted en route to visit Chen Guangcheng in a Shandong Prison.

See also CDT posts on Li’s involvement in issues such as Green Dam Internet filtering and tainted milk.

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Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, crackdown, detention, Hu Jia, lawyers, Li Fangping, Teng Biao, Yang Chunlin, yirenping, Zhao Lianhai
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Teng Biao returned home on Friday afternoon but was not able to speak to the media, his wife, Wang Ling, said. She declined to comment on his physical or mental well-being.

Other lawyers and activists released after similar detentions have also declined to speak to the media, possibly as a condition of their release.

China Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong rights advocacy group, said earlier Teng disappeared on 19 February and officers searched his home, seizing two computers, a printer, articles, books, DVDs and photos of another rights lawyer, Chen Guangcheng.

Teng, a law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, was among dozens of lawyers and activists across China who have vanished, been interrogated or detained for subversion as the Chinese government, apparently unnerved by events in the Middle East and North Africa, moved to prevent dissent.

Meanwhile, an expert on China’s role in the Korean war, who was jailed for more than a decade for spying, will be released in June after his sentence was reduced further, a human rights group said.

The intermediate court in Guangzhou cut the sentence of scholar Xu Zerong by a third, slicing five more months from his 13-year term, said the Dui Hua Foundation in San Francisco.

These developments do not appear to mark the start of an easing-up in the ongoing crackdown, however. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders network dryly noted on Twitter that the authorities seem to be operating on a “one out, one in” basis:

Human rights lawyer Li Fangping abducted in Beijing around 5pm local time by unidentified men in front of the office of Yirenping, an NGO.

See also: more on Li Fangping’s disappearance, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, crackdown, detention, lawyers, Li Fangping, Teng Biao
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A Chinese lawyer has demanded a public hearing to reconsider a government demand that all new personal computers carry Internet filtering software, adding to uproar over a plan critics say is ineffective and intrusive.

Li Fangping, a Beijing human rights advocate who often embraces controversial causes, has asked the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to allow hearings on the “lawfulness and reasonableness” of the demand, which takes effect from July 1 and was publicized only this week.

“This administrative action lacks a legal basis,” Li wrote in a submission to the ministry that was sent to reporters by email on Thursday.

A statement from five groups sent by email said the software threatened to cripple access to many of the gay community websites that have flourished in recent years.

“We need to demand not just the lifting of this software decree, but also an end to restrictions on gay publications,” Wan (Yanhai) told Reuters. “This is about opposing censorship.”

Update: From the Wall Street Journal, “‘Green Dam’ Creator Seeks To Reassure That He’s Not Out To Censor China’s Web“:

The government mandate to ship all PCs in China with a filtering software called Green Dam-Youth Escort has caused quite a stir. Bryan Zhang wants to tell everyone that they needn’t worry.

To try to reassure observers that Green Dam’s function is purely to block pornography and other content inappropriate for kids, Zhang, founder of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, one of the two companies that developed Green Dam, gave a step-by-step demonstration of the software for The Wall Street Journal.

Zhang said that even users who have the software on the hard drive of their new PC would need to use an installer program to activate it. When they do so, they have the option of registering the software by providing some personal information. Users are given a standard password, which they can change, that enables them to access the program’s settings or turn it off.

He showed how parents can turn on or off filtering for five categories of content: “adult/ pornography,” “extreme adult/pornography,” “violent games,” “homosexuality,” and “illegal activities/drugs.” Zhang said that “illegal activities” includes, but isn’t limited to, gambling. Users can also opt to turn on or off the notifications that appear when a Web site is blocked by Green Dam.

Also, bloggers in China who have accessed copies of the software reveal that the filtered words and phrases contain more political content than pornographic, according to another report in the Wall Street Journal:

Shi Zhao, a prominent blogger from Beijing, said he and other bloggers and programmers found several data files that included Chinese phrases such as “6-4 massacre” — a reference to the Tiananmen Square military crackdown on June 4, 1989 — and “the celebration of Tibetan people.”

There are two kinds of keyword documents in the software: one is related to pornographic content, and the other related to political content, he said. “The documents related to political stuff are very big — much, much bigger than those related to pornographic content,” he said.

Mr. Shi posted his findings in a document online that has since been widely circulated on blogs and Internet forums, fueling concerns in China about the program.

© jleung for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Green Dam, Internet filtering, Li Fangping, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Wan Yanhai
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The most daring recent action is a document called Charter 08, signed by 300 prominent Chinese citizens in December. It amounts to a manifesto calling for democracy and genuine rule of law to replace China’s often corrupt, one-party system. The petition is snowballing on the Internet — it has more than 7,000 signatures — despite government efforts to censor the issue.

Lan Zhixue and two other lawyers last month also established the Institute of Democratic Society, a non-profit organization whose website proclaims “fair, reasonable and legal; dare to think, speak and act.”

“We don’t care about ourselves, our liberty or death,” Lan says. “We want to do something for the ordinary people. There are more public interest lawyers like us now, though not as many as we would like.”

Another lawyer, Li Fangping, hopes the fear of social unrest will force the government to make changes.

Rejecting court cases about the contaminated blood and tainted formula fuels “growing distrust of the people’s court system,” Li says.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Charter 08, Lan Zhixue, legal system, Li Fangping, rule of law
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Li Fangping, a prominent human rights lawyer, is busy organizing victims of the poisoned infant formula scandal rocking China and offering pro bono help. But he is not planning to sue Sanlu, the formula manufacturer – not yet.

A case that in the United States would attract swarms of lawyers eyeing the prospect of millions of dollars in damages is primarily a political, not legal, issue in China.

For reasons to do with China’s still-developing law and its authoritarian political system, lawyers are treading carefully around the Sanlu incident, in which four babies have died and nearly 53,000 suffered kidney problems after drinking adulterated powdered milk.

The government is seeking to forestall legal repercussions by pledging free medical care for all babies affected by the tainted milk. Mr. Li is holding his fire until he sees how fully that pledge is kept.

“We are still waiting to see how the government’s compensation policy works,” he says. “If consumers accept it there will be no need for a lawsuit” against Sanlu.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Li Fangping, milk contamination, rule of law, Sanlu
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