The same day that Chinese President Xi Jinping said that human rights were respected and protected in his country, the wife of Cheng Yuan, an activist sentenced to five years in prison on the generic charge of subverting state power, received a letter from his husband in which he claimed that he had been tortured and forced to do forced labor during the first months he spent locked up in the maximum security wing of the prison. “They sent me there to try to force me to confess to a crime they had invented,” the letter reads.
Chen, founder of Changsha Funeng, an NGO dedicated to defending marginalized groups in some regions of China, such as people with disabilities or HIV carriers, was arrested in 2019 along with two other colleagues because his organization, according to the letter published by the police , had received funds from abroad, posing “collusion with hostile foreign forces” and a “threat to national security”.
Shi Minglei, Cheng’s wife, learned about the torture almost at the same time that the president of her country held a videoconference meeting with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, who was visiting last week. in China to tour the Xinjiang region, in the northeast, where governments and international organizations have been reporting for years the repression by the Chinese authorities against the Uyghur Muslim minority.
“Chinese people’s human rights have unprecedented guarantees. Deviating from reality and literally copying other countries’ models would not only not fit our local conditions, but would lead to disastrous consequences,” President Xi said. In summary: human rights are very good, but as long as they are treated with Chinese characteristics, because the Asian giant should not be judged – a vast country with 1.4 billion inhabitants, 55 recognized ethnic groups and a single-party government that makes and breaks your whim – with the western mentality.
If one were to judge, for example, by the data, it can be said that a decade ago, just before Xi Jinping sat on the throne in Beijing, there were six prison sentences for activists, according to the record of China Human Rights Defenders ( CHRD), an organization made up of human rights groups operating both inside and outside the Asian country. Last year, CHRD observers recorded more than 200 sentences.
Although many other cases of imprisoned activists who have not yet been sentenced do not appear on that list. Like Wang Aizhong, arrested last year in the southern city of Guangzhou on charges of “picking fights and stirring up trouble,” a vague offense often used by authorities to silence dissidents. Wang, who in 2010 founded the Street Movement, a citizen platform calling for the abolition of the one-party regime, but which was dissolved in 2014 when most of its members were arrested, was arrested after sharing criticism on social media about the pandemic controls.
These are some examples that help take the temperature of the human rights situation in China just as the calendar marks the 33rd anniversary of the always silenced Tiananmen massacre. There were hundreds of deaths that June 4, 1989. Perhaps thousands. Numbers of Beijing students who were killed by Chinese troops after spending seven weeks protesting corruption, inflation and pro-democracy were never known.
In China it is still a taboo subject. More than three decades of development and opening, three leadership changes and a pandemic, have not been enough for Tiananmen to stop being one of the most sensitive and intractable issues in a country where the president presumes to protect human rights while maintaining regimes such as the RSDL, an acronym that refers to the so-called “residential surveillance in a designated place”. It is an extrajudicial system introduced in 2012 that allows the Chinese police to isolate people accused of endangering national security, excluding lawyers from the process. A black hole through which many activists, dissidents and human rights lawyers have passed.
This is the case of journalist Sophia Huang (33 years old), who in 2018 became the most prominent figure in China’s MeToo movement by helping several plaintiffs in a sexual harassment case involving a prominent Peking University professor. . A year later, after writing in support of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, she was arrested for “provoking trouble”. Huang spent three months with the RSDL. Upon leaving her, she continued her activism until she disappeared on September 19, 2021. No one has heard from her since then.
Many human rights lawyers have also passed through the RSDL, such as Chang Weiping (37 years old). “The interrogations lasted six days in a row. They locked him in a room tied to a stool and from there he could not move during all that time,” said his wife, Chen Zijuan, in an interview with this newspaper. Chang disappeared in October 2020 and did not reappear until April 2021, when the police announced his arrest on a formal charge of “subversion of state power”. Two years ago this lawyer participated in a meeting with twenty Chinese activists critical of the communist regime.
As usual every June 4, access to Tiananmen Square is cut off for foreign journalists. Any commemoration of the victims is prohibited. Any reference to what happened on Chinese networks disappears within a few minutes thanks to the censorship machinery. Any public act of protest or remembrance can lead to prison.
They know it well in Hong Kong. For the third consecutive year, the authorities of the autonomous region have prohibited an annual vigil that began in 1990, where large crowds gathered in Victoria Park to, by the light of thousands of candles, remember the dead of Tiananmen and demand hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
“Over the past year, the Chinese authorities have intensified the harassment and persecution of activists for commemorating the massacre. In Hong Kong, they have arrested and prosecuted 26 people for participating in a vigil held in 2020 to honor the victims,” Yaqiu said. Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
“But history teaches us that President Xi Jinping’s repression will not erase the memory of Tiananmen from the minds of Chinese citizens,” says Wang, who also recalls that at the end of last year several Hong Kong universities withdrew several works that recalled what happened 33 years ago. The most famous of all, the “Pillar of Shame”, an eight-meter statue that presented 50 anguished faces and tortured bodies piled on top of each other, has its replica in Taiwan, the autonomous island that Beijing considers a separatist province, where This Saturday they will hold a vigil remembering the victims.
Conforms to The Trust Project criteria
