A Chongqing man has received a one year labour reform sentence for mocking party leader Bo Xilai in a microblog post, in which he referred to Bo as “Mr Erection”. From Oiwan Lam at Global Voices Advocacy:
Mr erected shit some stool and asked Wang Lijun to eat. Wang Lijun handed over the stool to the Prosecutor, the Prosecutor handed over to the court and the court handed over to Lawyer Li Zhuang. Li zhuang said, this stool is too stinky, who has made the shit, eats it himself.
The microblog is a satirical story about Bo Xilai’s crude campaign against corruption in Chongqing city and his scapegoat lawyer Li Zhuang, who was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment in 2010 for “inciting a client to fake testimony” when he was acting as a defending lawyer for a convicted gangster from Chongqing back in 2009. The public in general believes that Li’s arrest and conviction was a direct order from Bo Xilai and that Li was being framed.
The above mentioned microblog was posted by Fang Hung, a 49-year-old retired civil servant in Chongqing on April 21, 2011 when Li Zhuang’s second charge was still on trial. Chongqing police demanded Fang to delete his post on the next day and detained him in the police station. On April 24, the police and labour education committee decided to sentence him to one year labour education under the charge of “fabricating fact and disrupting the social order”. By the time Fang’s son received the labour education notice on April 25 and it was already too late for him to hire a lawyer and appeal for the decision. According to the police regulation, the appeal has to be filed within 48 hours upon the labour education document was released.
