Despite suggesting that, for the sake of her safety, she would be less outspoken online, Shanghai rights lawyer Li Tiantian has been tweeting at a ferocious rate since her reappearance on May 26th. A number of her posts describe her interrogation during the three months of her detention, the half-hearted initial cover story of a “hospital visit” having been completely discarded. Oiwan Lam has translated a selection of @litiantian’s tweets at Global Voices Online:
The kind of fear that you can describe is small, while the kind of fear you can’t speak of is the greatest. The mouse that praises the cat must be extremely afraid, I think. Just like some people will fall in love with the person he or she is afraid of, perhaps. Human psychology is complex, the good thing is that we all want to get rid of fear, and this is why we struggle. To compare different people’s responses to fear won’t solve the problem.
After I was detained, they searched my apartment and my boyfriend’s apartment. They searched everything. They even forced my boyfriend and his brothers and sisters to watch a video that showed me walking into a hotel with other men.
Even my boyfriend had no interest to know who I was having sex with. The police showed more concern. They identified the guys and wanted to document details like, who paid for the hotel? Who suggested to have sex? How many times? Who seduced who? They asked me to give all these details.
Since they really wanted to know the details and I was forgetful, I offered: If you really want to know, you can invite all these guys here, and I can do it all over again for your records. They said it wouldn’t be as good as an adult video and did not authorise it.
They said: you have strong sexual desire, once is not enough, you need twice at a time? I answered: I am a woman in my 40s. There is a saying about [the lust of] women in their 30s and 40s, right? Moreover, Shanghai guys are not good at this. If men are not selfish, sex can be easy. But when they perform badly, they have to do it again. Do you know why Shanghai women are so bossy? Because Shanghai guys are stupid and selfish, they can’t satisfy a woman. [Translator note: the security police were Shanghai men]
Li Tiantian’s Sina blog has been taken down, but both the translation and original text of her final post, “The Fable of the Hornet, the Bird, and the Tortoise”, are preserved on Siweiluozi’s blog. An earlier post describing her questioning by the Domestic Security Department in February, shortly before her long disappearance, was translated on CDT.
