Gao Yu
来自China Digital Space
高瑜
Your sentencing can destroy my health but it can’t destroy my spirit […] I believe China’s history will declare me innocent.
—Gao You, 1994
Gao Yu, born in Chongqing on February 23, 1944, is a journalist and dissident who has been repeatedly imprisoned for her writing and for her alleged sharing of state secrets. Since being released from prison for medical reasons and seeing her sentence reduced in November 2015, Gao continues to be subjected to heavy surveillance and interference.
At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Gao was attending Beijing's Renmin University, where she majored in literary theory. Ding Zilin, a former teacher of Gao's, told the South China Morning Post of Gao's risky decision to warn her of Red Guards' plans to publicly denounce and abuse her, and her subsequent allowing Ding to flea the city. "Fifty years on, she still has the same character. She hasn't changed," Ding told the SCMP in 2015, after Gao's arrest.
