Chinese Internet Pioneer Who Exposed Misdeeds Gets Heavy Prison Term

By Ian Johnson

Huang Qi in his apartment in 2013 in Chengdu, China. A Chinese court convicted him of disclosing state secrets.

A Chinese internet pioneer who once won Communist Party praise for using the Web to combat social ills was sentenced Monday to 12 years in prison — a further sign that the window for independent social activism in China has all but closed.
Huang Qi, 56, who spent nearly 20 years exposing local government malfeasance and brutality, and has already served eight years in prison, was found guilty by a court in southwestern China of “deliberately disclosing state secrets” and “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities,” according to the court statement.
In addition to the prison term, he was deprived of political rights for four years and fined 20,000 yuan, or nearly $3,000.
It was one of the longest sentences given to a rights advocate in recent years and followed calls for clemency by human rights groups, foreign governments and the United Nations. 

In light of Mr. Huang’s chronic bad health, including high blood pressure as well as kidney and heart problems, the nongovernmental organization Reporters Without Borders called the 12-year term “equivalent to a death sentence.”
Mr. Huang was most recently arrested in 2016 for “inciting subversion of state power,” which often carries a prison term of up to 10 years.

 The more serious charge of divulging state secrets, and its longer sentence, may have stemmed from his unwillingness to cooperate or confess, according to Patrick Poon of Amnesty International.
During a secret trial in January, Mr. Huang reportedly denied all wrongdoing and criticized the government, according to one associate who asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions.
“The authorities are using his case to scare other human rights defenders who also do similar work,” said Mr. Poon. 

“Due to his popular website and broad network of volunteers and grass-roots activists, his case is highly sensitive.”
Mr. Huang is one of several activists recently targeted for running human rights websites. 

One, Zhen Jianghua, who ran the Human Rights Campaign in China, was sentenced to two years last December, while another, Liu Feiyue, received five years in January for running the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch.
Mr. Huang’s 64Tianwang website was a ticker of social unrest.
He and his team of volunteers fielded dozens of phone calls a day, often from people appealing government decisions to expropriate their land. 

Many were engaged in street protests or presenting petitions to government agencies, and Mr. Huang’s team reported on their complaints and actions.
When he started his site in 1999, Mr. Huang and his former wife, Zeng Li, helped missing children and their parents unite.
In a 1999 profile, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, focused on a man who had disappeared after he followed the banned spiritual practice Falun Gong. 

Through the site’s efforts, the man’s family found out he had committed suicide.
While that story was in line with government priorities, the newspaper’s report also discussed other more sensitive cases that the site handled, including the kidnapping of rural children, which was rampant in the 1990s because of the government’s single-child policy.
The website’s name reflected its agenda. 

“Tianwang” means “heavenly web,” referring to the idea of heaven as a synonym for “justice.” 

The numbers 6 and 4 referred to the date of the site’s founding: June 4, 1999. 

But that date was also — not coincidentally, Mr. Huang said in later interviews — the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when pro-democracy protesters were killed in Beijing.
Soon after the flattering profile in People’s Daily, the site’s social edge sharpened. 

Eventually Mr. Huang paid a heavy price.
In 2000, the site reported on migrant laborers forced to undergo unnecessary appendectomies, and pay exorbitant bills at state-run hospitals. 

This also won government praise.
But later that year, the site began reporting on the violent suppression of Falun Gong, which included the beating deaths of followers in police custody. 

Shortly after that report, Mr. Huang was arrested and served five years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.”
He said he spent a year in solitary confinement, often sleeping on a concrete floor, which damaged his kidneys and led to regular dialysis.
Released in 2005, Mr. Huang reopened the site and won numerous human rights awards for his reporting of malfeasance, especially about the shoddy construction of schools that collapsed in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.
Those reports led to another prison stay, this time of three years.
He relaunched the site after his release, remaining optimistic that it was having an effect. 

In a 2013 interview, he said that the site was read by the country’s security apparatus, and that it helped publicize citizen grievances, applying pressure.
Mr. Huang also expressed optimism that the new government of Xi Jinping would be more tolerant of his work because of its avowed goals of promoting a transparent legal system and cracking down on corruption.
Mr. Huang said, however, that the struggle could be prolonged and costly. 

Comparing his efforts to those of American revolutionaries, he said the British agreed to negotiate only after Washington inflicted defeats on them.
“It’s like that with us now,” Mr. Huang said.

 “It’s only after pressure from the people that the government will change its opinions.”

China’s congress meeting brings crackdown on critics

By Louise Watt and Isolda Morillo

In this Monday, Feb. 27, 2017 photo, Ye Haiyan paints a watercolor painting in her studio on the outskirts of Beijing. Ye has resorted to advocating for the rights of sex workers and people with HIV/AIDS through painting after her blogs have been closed down, she has moved from city to city following harassment from authorities, and police told her to leave her latest home ahead of the annual meeting of China’s ceremonial parliament that opened Sunday.

BEIJING — Chinese authorities have shut down activist Ye Haiyan’s blogs and forced her to move from one city to another. 

Left with few options, she now produces socially conscious paintings to make a living and advocate for the rights of sex workers and people with HIV or AIDS.
Using calligraphy brushes, Ye creates images of naked women and sex workers alongside symbols such as the Chinese characters for equality, or paints roosters, a Chinese homonym for prostitute.
“I’ve started to understand that painting is also a form of expression and the natural reflection of my thoughts,” said Ye. 

She was recently evicted from her last home in an artists’ enclave on Beijing’s outskirts ahead of the annual meeting of China’s ceremonial parliament that opened Sunday.
Far from the pomp of the 10-day gathering at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Ye is among those caught up in an annual roundup of people the ruling Communist Party consider threats to the state, all to ensure the session passes without incident. 

Known critics are placed under tightened restrictions and ordinary people coming to Beijing with grievances are prevented from traveling or snatched off the streets of the capital.
This year’s meetings also come amid China’s broadest and most intense assault on civil society since nongovernmental groups were grudgingly allowed more freedom to operate more than a decade ago.
Since coming to power almost five years ago, Xi Jinping has shown little tolerance for dissent, and a sustained crackdown launched in July 2015 has seen hundreds of activists and independent legal professionals detained. 

More than a year and a half later, eight are still in detention or prison.
“It has been worsening every year since Xi Jinping came to power and this past year has been no different,” said Frances Eve, researcher at the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
Activists estimate that police arrested more than 100 people last year for exercising their right to freedom of expression, including Huang Qi and Liu Feiyue, who ran websites reporting on human rights abuses and critiquing government policies. 

A series of trials saw some activists convicted under vague laws against subversion and leaking state secrets, with prosecutors blaming unidentified troublemakers abroad for inciting anti-government activity.
China last year also passed a law tightening controls over foreign nongovernmental organizations by subjecting them to close police supervision.
“Promoting and protecting human rights is now considered a crime,” said Eve. 

Many of those convicted confess under duress, including torture by police, she said. 

While China’s high court forbids such practices, they are believed to remain common within a police force with broad powers to arrest, question and detain.
China routinely rejects accusations of human rights abuses, pointing to vast improvements in quality of life wrought by three decades of economic development.
The authorities rarely comment on activists such as Ye, who used to have thousands of followers online and her own nongovernmental organization advocating for legalized prostitution and offering advice on sexual health.
Her efforts, including protests against light sentences given to the abusers of schoolgirls, got her noticed by the public and, more ominously, the police, who she says pressured her to close her NGO and move several times. 

Worried about the impact on her 17-year-old daughter, she sent her to the U.S. last month to study with help from a U.S.-based filmmaker.
Ye says she’s gotten a boost from internationally famous artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who bought one of her paintings “depicting a fat woman, a sex worker wishing to earn a lot of money and go home to build a house.” 

Ai previously bought up her belongings when she was evicted from an apartment in 2014 and exhibited the household items — an old refrigerator, a washing machine, cardboard boxes — at one of his shows at the Brooklyn Museum.
Ye reluctantly left her studio on the orders of police last week. 

An officer reached at the Songzhuang Public Security Bureau on Monday declined to comment on the case. 

Ye said she went to stay with friends in the countryside and within days again ran into pressure to leave.
“The Communist Party secretary of the village told local residents not to rent to me because I’ve long been on the blacklist,” Ye said.
“They think that a person like me should be the target for ‘social stabilization,’” she added, using the government’s term for suppressing dissent.

Rogue Nation

Human rights lawyers in China beaten, arrested
By NOMAAN MERCHANT

Lawyers who defend human rights activists and dissidents targeted by China's communist government have increasingly themselves become subject to political prosecutions, violence and other means of suppression, according to a report released Thursday.
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of groups working within and outside China, identified six occasions last year that lawyers were beaten by plaintiffs, police officers or assailants hired by authorities. 

In more than a dozen cases, the report found, detainees were pressured to fire their own lawyers and accept government-supplied attorneys.
"The government is trying to give this impression that it's abiding by the rule of law," said Frances Eve, a researcher for the network. 

"In fact, it's just legalizing repressive measures."
Under Xi Jinping, China has widely suppressed independent organizations and dissenters, as well as lawyers defending people caught in its crackdown. 

The report says 22 people have been convicted since 2014 of subversion or other crimes against state security, including 16 last year alone.
Dozens of lawyers have been questioned or detained in an ongoing campaign against dissident lawyers known as the 709 crackdown launched in July 2015.
Wang Quanzhang, who defended members of the Falun Gong meditation sect banned by China, was charged with subversion of state power in January 2016 after previously being beaten and detained. His wife, Li Wenzu, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Wang is now under indictment and being held without access to family or lawyers.
"We have to wait until the sentencing to see him in jail," she said.
Four people associated with Wang's law firm, Fengrui, were convicted in August of charges that they incited protests and took funding from foreign groups.
China last year also passed a law tightening controls over foreign non-governmental organizations by subjecting them to close police supervision, a move critics called a new attempt by authorities to clamp down on perceived threats to the ruling Communist Party's control.
NGOs can be blacklisted if they commit violations ranging from illegally obtaining unspecified state secrets to "spreading rumors, slandering or otherwise expressing or disseminating harmful information that endangers state security."
Ordinary Chinese who share audio or video of a protest or other news event may be detained, and authorities can shut down phone and Web networks in response to perceived threats to "national security" and "social order".
Chinese Internet censors already exercise tight control with the so-called "Great Firewall" that blocks many foreign news sites and social media platforms.
Prominent activists have frequently been taken into custody without notice to their family or legal teams. 

One was Liu Feiyue, the founder of a website that detailed local corruption cases, veterans' issues, and allegations that perceived troublemakers were being detained in mental hospitals. 

After his disappearance in November, Liu's family was told he was charged with subversion.
Despite its well-publicized record, China was re-elected last year to the United Nations' Human Rights Council. 

But even as China reported its membership on the council through state media, it refused to let banned activists attend United Nations events, the report said.
When Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur for human rights, visited China in August, authorities forbade him from meeting several activists and tightly controlled his schedule. 

One activist who did meet with him, lawyer Jiang Tianyong, was arrested three months later and charged with inciting subversion of state power.
Eve, the researcher for Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said some activists believed after Xi became president in 2013 that they might find common cause over his stated goals of rooting out government corruption. 

But those limited hopes have not come to fruition, she said.
"It's gone completely the opposite direction," she said. 

"And it's a tragedy, because those are the kinds of alliances that can make real impact."
The Chinese foreign ministry did not respond to faxed questions.

Axis of Evil

Now China comes for the lawyers
The Washington Post

Human rights activist Jiang Tianyong. 
CHINA’S CRACKDOWN on lawyers and human rights defenders is not a single event but a rolling onslaught. 

Last month, three prominent rights activists were detained by police in separate provinces. 

What makes these detentions so pernicious is that China’s security apparatus has targeted the backbone of the rights movement: lawyers and defenders who represent the accused. 

The latest detentions are part of Xi Jinping’s broader campaign to snuff out opposition to the ruling party-state wherever it can be found.
Liu Feiyue, one of the activists recently arrested, started a website in 2006, Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch, or Minsheng Guancha. 

The website has documented protests, land seizures, detentions and other human rights violations that often go unreported by the official Chinese news media. 

Mr. Liu’s website, one of the few located on the mainland to courageously expose such stories, was blocked in China soon after it was launched. 

He was undeterred.
For two decades, Mr. Liu has been repeatedly detained, harassed and put under surveillance by the authorities. 

He was routinely taken in during politically sensitive events such as sessions of the Chinese party congress and legislature. 

But this time, the charges appear to be more serious. 

He was detained in mid-November in the central Chinese province of Hubei and police informed his relatives the charges were “incitement to subvert state power,” which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and is frequently used to silence journalists and dissidents. 

An unnamed volunteer in his group told Radio Free Asia that Mr. Liu is being prosecuted for accepting overseas funding to run his activities, but did not provide details. 

The overall crackdown has included new laws that impose sharp restrictions on foreign nongovernmental organizations that work in China.
Also detained recently was prominent lawyer Jiang Tianyong, a leader of the China Human Rights Lawyers Group, who disappeared Nov. 21 when he had been due to board a train from the city of Changsha in Hunan province to Beijing. 

He had been in Changsha attempting to visit the wife of a fellow attorney who was among those taken in a wave of arrests of lawyers that began in July 2015. 

Mr. Jiang’s clients have included the blind lawyer-activist Chen Guangcheng, now living in the United States.
Yet another rights activist, Huang Qi, the Sichuan-based founder and director of a human rights group called 64 Tianwang, was taken from his home Nov. 28 by police. 

He, too, has been detained and imprisoned several times for his work and his website is blocked inside China. 

A volunteer, Pu Fei, initially published news of his detention on Twitter, but that message was deleted and Mr. Pu has also disappeared.
Every effort must be made to speak up for those who are hustled away in the middle of the night. President Donald Trump has shown little interest in human rights, but after he takes office he should not remain silent about these cases, because silence only encourages more repression.