No German Respect for Thuggish China

China rage as Joshua Wong meets German foreign minister
By Hui Min Neo with Poornima Weerasekara

Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong has met Germany’s foreign minister as he carries abroad his call to support the growing pro-democracy movement in the former British colony, a meeting slammed on Tuesday by China as “disrespectful”.

Posting a photo of himself and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on his Twitter account, the 22-year-old said they spoke on the “protest situation and our cause to free election and democracy in HK”.
Beijing reacted angrily at their meeting during an event organised by Bild daily, saying “it is extremely wrong for German media and politicians to attempt to tap into the anti-China separatist wave”.

Joshua Wong and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. 

Wong, a prominent face in Hong Kong’s growing pro-democracy protests, planned to hold talks with other German politicians during his visit to Berlin.
The activist’s visit came on the heels of Merkel’s trip to China, where she stressed Friday that the rights and freedoms of people in Hong Kong “must be guaranteed”, after meeting Li Keqiang in Beijing.
Ahead of her three-day visit to China, demonstrators in the semi-autonomous city appealed to the German chancellor to support them in her meetings with China’s leadership.
Wong himself had written an open letter to Merkel, seeking her backing.

‘Hong Kong the new Berlin’
Germany has emerged as a country of refuge for a number of Chinese dissidents in recent years, including Liu Xia, the widow of Chinese Nobel dissident Liu Xiaobo.
In May, two former Hong Kong independence activists were granted refugee status in Germany in what is one of the first cases of dissenters from the enclave receiving such protection.
Wong had arrived in Berlin late Monday after he was briefly detained in Hong Kong just before his departure to Germany following an error in his bail conditions from a previous detention.
He was among several prominent democracy advocates held late last month in a roundup by police as the city reels from more than three months of unprecedented pro-democracy protests.
Bild reported that Wong turned up late at the event it organised, but was still able to meet Maas at the gathering.

A protest on Sunday. 

In a brief speech at the event, Wong vowed to “protest until the day that we have free elections”.
“If we are now in a new Cold War, Hong Kong is the new Berlin,” he said, referring to the post-war split between communist East Berlin and the democratic West.
“‘Stand with Hong Kong’ is much more than just a mere slogan, we urge the free world to stand together with us in resisting the autocratic Chinese regime,” he added.
Wong was due to hold a public discussion on Wednesday evening at Humboldt University in Berlin and later travel to the United States.
He launched his career as an activist at just 12 years old and became the poster child of the huge pro-democracy “Umbrella Movement” protests of 2014 that failed to win any concessions from Beijing.
Wong has previously been jailed for involvement in those protests.

China's State Gangsterism

Barging into your home, threatening your family, or making you disappear: Here's what China does to people who speak out against them

By Alexandra Ma
The Chinese Communist Party has long sought to suppress ideas that could undermine the sweeping authority it has over its 1.4 billion citizens — and the state can go to extreme lengths to maintain its grip.
In just the past few years, the government has attempted to muzzle critics by making them disappear without a trace, ordering people to physically barge into their houses, or locking up those close to critics as a kind of blackmail.
Even leaving China isn't always enough. 

The state has continued to clamp down on dissent by harassing and threatening family members who remain in the country.
Scroll down to see what China can do to people who criticize it.

1. Make you disappear.Li Wenzu holds a photo of her husband, detained human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, while protesting in front of the Supreme People's Protectorate in Beijing in July 2017.
Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer who defended political activists in the past, has not been seen since he was taken into detention three years ago.
He was taken away in August 2015 alongside more than 200 lawyers, legal assistants, and activists for government questioning. 

Three years later, he remains the only person in that cohort who still isn't free.
Nobody has heard from him since. 

His lawyers, friends, and family have all tried contacting him, but have consistently been denied access, Radio Free Asia reported.
The lawyer's friends and family, and other lawyers, have tried visiting him, but to no avail. 

His wife, Li Wenzu, has been routinely harassed by Chinese police for protesting Wang's detention, according to the BBC.
His wife recently received a message from a friend saying that Wang was alive and "in reasonable mental and physical health," but was denied further information when she contacted authorities.

2. Physically drag you away so you can't speak to the media.

A woman being taken away by police after she tried sharing footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing on July 26.
A woman was dragged away by men in plainclothes after she tried to share footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing with journalists on the ground in July.
As the woman was trying to share images of the scene with journalists, a group of men took her across, claiming it was a "family matter," according to Agence France-Presse reporter Becky Davis who witnessed it.
The woman claimed she didn't know any of the men. 

You can watch the whole scene unfold in this video.
China was trying to cover up news of the explosion. 

Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, reportedly wiped all posts about it in the hours following the incident, before allowing some media coverage of it later on.
While it remains unclear who the men were and why they took the woman, Davis said it is common for plainclothes police to act as "family members" and take people away.
Read more: 'I do not know that man. I didn't do anything!': A woman who tried to share footage of the explosion near Beijing's US Embassy was forced into a car and driven away

3. Put your family under house arrest, even if they haven't been accused of a crime.Portraits of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia displayed at a protest in Hong Kong in June 2017.
China has kept family members of prominent activists under house arrest to prevent them from traveling abroad and publicly protesting the regime.
In 2010 Liu Xia tried to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of her husband, Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist who at the time was imprisoned for "inciting subversion" with his protests.
She wasn't allowed to go and was placed under house arrest with 24-hour surveillance. 

She had no access to a cell phone or computer, even though she hadn't been charged with a crime.
She was allowed to leave the house in 2017 to attend the sea burial of her husband after his death from liver cancer, before being sent to the other side of the country by authorities so she wouldn't see memorials held by supporters in Beijing.
Liu Xia was detained in her house for eight years in total. 

She was released to Berlin in July after a sustained lobbying effort from the German government for Liu's release.
Still, she is not completely free: Xia is effectively prevented from appearing in public or speaking to media for fear of reprisal from Beijing. 

She fears that if she does, the government will punish her brother, who remains in Beijing, her friend Tienchi Martin-Liao told The Guardian.

4. Threaten to kill your family and forbid them from leaving China.Anastasia Lin, whose family in China is being punished for her activism against China.

Even when dissidents leave China, they are not safe. 

Chinese expats and exiles have seen family members who remained in China pay the price for their protest.
One example is Chinese-Canadian actress Anastasia Lin, who repeatedly speaks out to criticise China's human rights record.
She told Business Insider earlier this year that her uncles and elderly grandparents had their visas to Hong Kong — a Chinese region that operates under a separate and independent rule of law — revoked in 2016.
Security agents also contacted Lin's father saying that if she continued to speak up, the family "would be persecuted like in the Cultural Revolution" — a bloody ten-year period under Mao Zedong when millions of Chinese people were persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured.
Shawn Zhang, a student in Vancouver who has criticized Xi Jinping online, told Business Insider earlier this year that police incessantly called his parents asking them to take down his posts.
The family members of five journalists with Radio Free Asia — a US-funded media outlet — were also recently detained to stop their reporting on human rights abuses against the Uighur minority in China's East Turkestan colony.
Read more: China uses threats about relatives at home to control and silence expats and exiles abroad

5. Take down your social media posts.

A woman surrounded by Chinese paramilitary police on a smoggy day in Beijing in December 2015.

Chinese tech companies routinely delete social media posts and forbid users from posting keywords used to criticize the government.
Censorship in China has soared under Xi Jinping's presidency, with thousands of censorship directives issued every year.
Posts and keywords are usually only banned for a few hours or a few days until an event or news cycle is over.
In February, popular chat and microblogging platforms WeChat and Weibo banned users from writing posts with the letter N when it was used to criticize a plan allowing Xi to rule without term limits.
Read more: Planting spies, paying people to post on social media, and pretending the news doesn't exist: This is how China tries to distract people from human rights abuses

6. Remove your posts from the internet — and throw you in a psychiatric ward.Dong Yaoqiong live-streaming herself defacing a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, China, on July 4.

In July, Dong Yaoqiong live-streamed herself pouring black ink over a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, while criticizing the Communist Party's "oppressive brain control" over the country.
Hours later, she reported seeing police officers at her door and the video — which can still be seen here— was removed from her social media account.
She has not been seen in public since, although Voice of America and Radio Free Asia reported that she was being held at a psychiatric hospital in her home province of Hunan, citing local activists.

7. Barge into your house to force you off the airwaves.Sun Wenguang in his home in Jinan in August 2013.
Sun Wenguang, a prominent critic of the Chinese government, was forced off air during a live phone interview with Voice of America in early August.
The 83-year-old former economics professor had been arguing that Xi Jinping had his economic priorities wrong, when up to eight policemen barged into his home, and forced him off the line.
His last words before he got cut off were: "Let me tell you, it's illegal for you to come to my home. I have my freedom of speech!" 

You can listen to the audio (in Chinese, but subtitled in English) here.
The father of Dong Yaoqiong, the woman who defaced the poster of Xi, was also interrupted while live-streaming a video calling for his daughter's release.
In the recording, which can be seen here, a man purporting to be a plain-clothed police officer can seen entering the premises, demanding to take Dong's father and his friend away, and ignoring their questions about whether the man had a search warrant.

8. Trap you in your house, and detain people who come to see you.

About 11 days after Sun Wenguang, the dissident Chinese professor, was interrupted on his call, he was found locked inside his own home.
Police had detained him in his house and Sun told two journalists who went to interview him that police forced his wife to tell people he had gone traveling to avoid suspicion.
He added: "We were taken out of our residence for 10 days and stayed at four hotels. Some of the rooms had sealed windows. It was a dark jail. After we were back, they sent four security guys to sleep in our home."
The journalists, from the US government-funded Voice of America, were detained immediately after the interview. 

Their whereabouts are not clear at this point.
Read more: A renegade Chinese professor who was forced off-air while criticizing the government was locked in his apartment and told to make up a story that he left town

9. Forbid you from leaving the country.Ai Weiwei in London in September 2015, two months after his release from China.
Ai Weiwei, the prolific Chinese artist and avid critic of the Chinese government, was blocked from leaving China for four years.
Authorities claimed he was being investigated for various crimes, including pornography, bigamy, and the illicit exchange of foreign currency.
He was detained for 81 days and charged with tax evasion, for which his company was ordered to pay 15 million yuan ($2.4 million). 

His supporters claimed the tax evasion charges were fabricated.
The government took away his passport in 2011 and refused to give it back until 2015. 

He then immediately flew to Berlin, where he now lives.

10. Intercept your protests before they even begin.Police surrounding a group of people preparing to protest in Beijing on August 6.
A group of protesters had been planning a demonstration in Beijing's financial district over lost investments with the country's peer-to-peer lending platforms.
Many of those platforms had shut down due to a recent government crackdown on financial firms, causing investors to lose some tens of thousands of dollars in savings.
But the demonstration, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on a Monday in front of China's banking regulatory commission, never materialized — because police had already rounded up the protesters and sent them home.
Many demonstrators who arrived in Beijing earlier that day found police waiting for them at their bus and train stations, before sending them away.
Peter Wang, who planned to take part in the protest, told Reuters: "Once the police checked your ID cards and saw your petition materials, they knew you are here looking to protect your [financial] rights. Then they put you on a bus directly."
Becky Davis, AFP's reporter in Beijing, described seeing more than 120 buses parked nearby to take the protesters away.
Other protesters seen traveling from their home towns to Beijing to take part in the demonstration were forced to give their fingerprints and blood samples, and prevented from traveling to the capital, Reuters said.
Activists told The Globe and Mail that the police found out about the protest by monitoring their conversations on WeChat.

Activists say we are now seeing 'human rights violations not seen in decades' in ChinaSurveillance cameras in front of a giant portrait of Mao Zedong in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 2009.

China has a long history of suppressing dissenting views and actions. 

But Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said the number of people being targeted and the extent of their punishment has worsened under Xi's rule.
"While life for peaceful critics in modern China has never been easy, there have been times of relative latitude," she told Business Insider.
"Eleven's tenure is most certainly not one of those times — not just in the numbers of people being targeted, but in the use of harsh charges and long sentences, and in the state's adoption of rights-gutting laws.
"Add to that the alarming expansion of high-tech surveillance and mass arbitrary detentions across East Turkestan, and you've got a scale of human rights violations we have not seen in decades."
The United Nations recently accused China of holding one million Uighurs in internment camps in the western colony of East Turkestan. 


Does the Chinese Communist Party care that people know what's going on?
Probably not.

Richardson said: "The Chinese communists will keep treating people however badly they want unless the price for doing so is made too high for them — clearly this calculus finally changed recently for them with respect to Liu Xia," referring to the activist's wife who was released to Beijing after eight years of house arrest.
"That's why relentless public and private interventions on behalf of those unjustly treated is critical — to keep driving up the cost of abuses many people inside and outside China find unacceptable," Richardson added.
But there's a catch, says Frances Eve, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders. 

While the Party has released political activists due to public pressure in the past, it has kept family members in China to make sure the activists don't speak out.
Eve told The Guardian in July: "The Chinese Communist Party has become more immune to international pressure to release activists and let them go overseas, coinciding with its growing economic clout.
"Nowadays, on the rare occasion it does allow an activist to go abroad, it's with the sinister knowledge that their immediate or extended family remains in China and can be used as an effective hostage to stifle their free speech."

Taiwan is the kind of society that Liu Xiaobo envisioned for China

What a New Sculpture Reveals About Tensions Between China and Taiwan

By SUYIN HAYNES/TAIPEI

A sculpture of the Chinese Nobel peace prize recipient Liu Xiaobo who passed away one year ago can be seen outside City Hall on July 13, 2018, in Taipei, Taiwan.

Artist Aihua Cheng has worked feverishly for the past four months in her scenic Baisha Bay studio on Taiwan’s northern coast. 

For her latest project, the oil painter and sculptor read the extended works of the late Chinese Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo—while creating a three-part sculpture dedicated to the writer and dissident, who died as a political prisoner last year. 

“I completed the work just yesterday,” she told TIME, shortly before her creation was shown to the public for the first time outside Taipei’s city hall on July 13.
Titled I Have No Enemies, Cheng’s piece incorporates a line drawing of Liu looking out over a bronze open book inscribed with his writings. 

“I hope that his books and thoughts can continue impacting China,” she says. 

Unveiled on the one-year anniversary of Liu’s death, the sculpture was planned by exiled democracy activist Wu’er Kaixi as a tribute to his former mentor. 

“Taiwanese people joining us in erecting this sculpture are telling China that we have not forgotten our values,” says Wu’er, who was forced to flee China after the Tiananmen Square protests and settled in Taiwan in 1996.
That message will resonate with many on this island, which began to embrace democracy after nearly four decades of martial law ended in 1987. 

The mainland still views Taiwan, an island of 23 million people that lies 112 miles off China’s coast, as its sovereign territory despite the island’s breakaway in 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War.
Supported by Reporters Without Borders, the crowdfunded sculpture project is intended to represent the ideals of freedom and democracy championed by Liu in his co-authored Charter 08 manifesto. 

Liu encouraged Chinese citizens to envisage a democratic future, “a modern means for achieving government truly ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

That document ultimately led to his arrest in 2009, his Nobel Peace Prize the following year and his imprisonment until he died from late-stage liver cancer.
But the commemoration of a Chinese dissident comes at a time when tensions with Beijing are already running high. 

Taiwan is struggling for international recognition as China ramps up efforts to isolate the island. 

The day after the statue was unveiled, the head of China’s Taiwan Affairs office released a statement saying that “the vain separatist attempts for ‘Taiwan independence’ will only lead to a dead end.” Add an unpredictable U.S. President and a snowballing trade war between the world’s two biggest economies into the mix and you have a cross-strait relationship that is more fragile—and perhaps more dangerous—than ever.
When the news of Liu’s death was announced last year, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen tweeted a statement expressing Taiwan’s hopes that Chinese people could one day “enjoy the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.” 

The statement, issued in both Chinese and English, was seen as an affront to Beijing—much like Tsai’s presidential victory in January 2016.
Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party promised “an era of new politics in Taiwan,” breaking with the Nationalist Party (KMT) government policy, which favored closer ties with China. 

Under the 1992 Consensus, China and Taiwan agreed that there is one China—allowing each other to disagree about the status of Taiwan. 

Tsai’s election changed that. 

Her party supports independence and refuses to acknowledge the Consensus. 

Since Tsai took office in May 2016, China’s dictator Xi Jinping has not met with her but has continued relations with the KMT opposition party.
The lack of any diplomatic relations with Beijing does not seem to have deterred Tsai.

“She will continue to build on the belief that democracy can be integrated into an ethnically Chinese society and the idea that Taiwan can be an example to China in this sense,” says Sheryn Lee, a lecturer in security studies at Macquarie University.
Taiwan looks like the kind of society that Liu Xiaobo envisioned for China. That makes tributes to him contentious. 

According to Reuters, supporters of him and his widow Liu Xia were pressured by Chinese authorities to not hold any commemoration events. 

And although Liu Xia was released from eight years of house arrest on July 10, the move came amid a growing crackdown on dissidents in China. 

A day later, China sentenced prominent democracy activist Qin Yongmin to 13 years of imprisonment for “subversion of state power.”
As well as quashing dissent at home, Xi’s newly consolidated grip on power has allowed him to increase pressure on Taiwan—just as Tsai is trying to strengthen her position ahead of midterm elections in November. 

“Beijing probably wants to remind the Taiwanese public that they are paying a price for supporting Tsai and her party,” says Richard C. Bush, former Chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, the island’s de facto U.S. embassy.
A visible reminder of that price is the ratcheting up of military actions in the Taiwan Strait. 

In April, Chinese state media reported that the navy held its largest ever military display in a spectacular show of force in the South China Sea as well as the first naval military exercises with live fire drills in the strait since 2015.
Analysts say such exercises signal Beijing’s intention to send a message to the U.S. amid rising trade tensions and closer ties to Taiwan. 

While the U.S. formally endorses the “one China” policy, it has had an unofficial relationship with Taiwan since 1979. 

And President Donald Trump has broken an un-precedented series of protocols since his Inauguration, such as accepting a congratulatory phone call from Tsai; passing the Taiwan Travel Act, which encourages U.S. officials to visit the island; and unveiling a new $250 million de facto embassy building in Taipei. 

“No one really expected the level of interference that Trump had. He broke all of the rules that have been set down with China-Taiwan relations,” says Lee.

These moves have also been accompanied by gestures of U.S. military support for Taiwan, right under Beijing’s nose. 

Last year, Trump approved a deal to sell Taiwan $1.42 billion worth of arms in a massive deal that was immediately condemned by China. 

On July 7, two U.S. warships passed through the Taiwan Strait—merely a day after Washington imposed tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese imports in the last shot fired in the superpower showdown.
Despite Trump’s seemingly strong commitment to Taiwan, the backdrop of a trade war has nevertheless worried local politicians. 

“We share the same fundamental values as the U.S.,” says Huang Kuo-chang, chairman of the pro-independence New Power Party. 

“But we are not so naive as to be unable to understand that sometimes we become the bargaining chip between China and the United States.”
China has also accelerated efforts to diplomatically isolate the island. 

Since taking office, Tsai has lost allies in Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and São Tomé and Príncipe, leaving only 18 others worldwide. 

“Some say that in a few years, the number of allies Taiwan has could drop to zero,” says Rwei-Ren Wu, a research fellow at Taipei’s Academia Sinica. 

A prominent advocate for Taiwanese independence, Wu was barred from entering Hong Kong to speak at a conference last year.
Taiwan aspires to be a member of the U.N., but is not officially recognized. 

In May, for the second year in a row, it was denied access to the World Health Organization’s annual assembly—a move denounced by both Tsai’s government and independent watchdogs as a surrender to pressure from Beijing.
That pressure has started to affect private companies. 

In recent months, airlines and retailers have clashed with Beijing over references to disputed territories, including Taiwan and Tibet. 

In January, authorities shut down the Chinese websites of Marriott International after it listed Taiwan as an individual nation; in May, Gap apologized for a T-shirt with a map of China that omitted Taiwan. 

Beijing has also demanded that foreign airlines edit references to Taiwan to reflect the island as part of the mainland. 

Dismissed by the White House as “Orwellian nonsense,” U.S. airlines including Delta and American now have a July 25 deadline to comply with Beijing’s line on the issue.
In Taipei, the memorial sculpture is accompanied by an empty chair, symbolizing Liu’s absence at the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony because of his imprisonment. 

Cheng acknowledges that a sculpture alone is unlikely to impact China. 

“But I think the words, the thoughts of Liu Xiaobo will,” Cheng says. 

The sculpture—previewed only briefly on July 13—is still waiting on permanent approval from the city. 

For Taiwan too, the road ahead looks uncertain. 

“There is no reason for us to be treated as second-class global citizens,” says Huang. 

“If our goodwill toward China is unilateral, what do we gain from maintaining the status quo?”

Liu Xia: widow of Nobel laureate arrives in Berlin after eight years under house arrest

By Lily Kuo in Beijing Philip Oltermann in Berlin

Liu Xia smiles as she arrives at Helsinki airport on her way to Berlin.

Liu Xia, the widow of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, has arrived in Berlin, having left Beijing after almost eight years of living under house arrest and days before the anniversary of her husband’s death.
At 4.49pm (1539 BST) on Tuesday a Finnair flight carrying the poet and visual artist touched down at Tegel airport in the German capital, where Liu is reported to be seeking medical aid.
Human rights activists and friends of Liu had confirmed her departure from Beijing earlier on Tuesday. 

According to Human Rights Watch, the German government negotiated Liu’s release.
“Ever since her late husband received the Nobel peace prize while in a Chinese prison, Liu Xia was also unjustly detained. The German government deserves credit for its sustained pressure and hard work to gain Liu Xia’s release,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch.
Chinese authorities have insisted that Liu, who was not formally charged with any crime, has been free to move as she wishes, but her supporters say she has been under de facto house arrest.
Liu’s husband, Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel prize in 2010 for his activism in China. 

He was jailed in 2009 for subversion, for his involvement in Charter 08, a manifesto calling for reforms. 

He died last year from liver cancer while serving an 11-year prison sentence.

People wait at Berlin airport to welcome Liu Xia. 

Patrick Poon, a China researcher for Amnesty International, said Liu had been allowed to leave China but her brother, Liu Hui, has had to remain in Beijing. 

He was convicted on fraud charges over a real-estate dispute in 2013, a case activists believed to be retribution against the family.
“It’s really wonderful that Liu Xia is finally able to leave China after suffering so much all these years,” Poon said. 

“However, it’s worrying that her brother, Liu Hui, is still kept in China. Liu Xia might not be able to speak much for fear of her brother’s safety.”

Liu Xiaobo, Nobel laureate and political prisoner, dies at 61 in Chinese custody.

Liu Hui posted on WeChat that his sister had flown to Europe to “start her new life”. 

He wrote: “I am grateful for people’s concern and assistance these past years.”
News of Liu’s release came one day after the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, met with Li Keqiang, in Bremerhaven, inviting speculation about whether the development was part of a broader diplomatic deal. 

China and Germany have in recent months become the two main targets of a US president threatening trade tariffs on industrial imports.
“Is Liu Xia’s release all about softening up the German chancellor, as one of the most important representatives of the liberal industrial nations, in order to form a joint front against Trump?”, wrote the German weekly Die Zeit. 

“It’s an ugly suspicion, but one that can’t be dismissed out of hand.”

“Of course I am very happy that finally she’s gained her freedom and could leave China, but this does not mean China has made any improvements on human rights,” said Hu Ping, a US-based editor and friend of Liu’s.
Since last year, activists, diplomats and friends of Liu have been lobbying especially hard for her release. 

Hu said Liu was told in May she may be able to leave in July. 

Li’s visit to Germany and the signing of $23.6bn (£1.98bn) in trade deals do not seem to him to be a coincidence. 

“This might be why she was able to leave now,” he said.
Another friend of Liu’s told the German news agency Dpa that Germany had been consistently lobbying for the artist’s release over the last four years and kept contact with her via its Beijing embassy. 

“Merkel’s visit [to China] in May was apparently crucial for the release,” the anonymous friend is quoted as saying.
Friends and advocates had been calling for Liu’s release so she could seek medical help for severe depression. 

In May the Chinese writer Liao Yiwu released a recording of a phone call in which Liu described the mental torture of her situation. 

“If I can’t leave, I’ll die in my home,” she said.
One of the last times she was seen in public was in July last year, when she scattered the ashes of her late husband at sea. 

While under house arrest, both of her parents died and she has been hospitalised at least twice for a heart condition.
Frances Eve, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said: “Hopefully she will be able to recuperate and receive much-needed medical care, but China is effectively holding her brother hostage so she may not speak out about her ordeal. The Chinese government has already shown its willingness to ruthlessly deploy collective punishment against their family.”

Qin Yongmin: Prominent Chinese dissident jailed for 13 years

BBC News
Chinese dissident Qin Yongmin, who is now 64, pictured in 1993
One of China's highest-profile democracy campaigners has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for "subversion of state power".
Qin Yongmin, 64, has already spent a total of 22 years behind bars.
Qin had "refused to cooperate with the court" and stayed silent throughout his trial, human rights lawyer Lin Qilei earlier told the AFP news agency.
The guilty verdict was confirmed online by the Wuhan City Intermediate People's Court, in central China.
Frances Eve, a researcher at the NGO Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said Mr Qin had been "prosecuted for his belief in a democratic China as well as his actions in advocating for human rights".
"Authorities have been unable to build a case against him despite three years of investigation," she added.
Qin is a co-founder of the China Democracy Party, and was handed a 12-year prison term in 1998 after trying to register it officially. 

A year later, while still in prison, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Qin was leading a pro-democracy group called China Human Rights Watch when he was arrested in January 2015. 

Its activities included organising discussion groups and criticising the government's policies online.
The verdict against Qin emerged a day after the widow of a dissident Nobel Peace Prize winner left Beijing for Germany.
Liu Xia, 57, had been held under effective house arrest in the Chinese capital since her husband Liu Xiaobo won the prize in 2010. 

There were no criminal charges against her.
Liu Xiaobo, a university professor turned human rights campaigner, was jailed in 2009 for inciting subversion. 

He died of liver cancer last year.

Liu Xia, Detained Widow of Nobel Peace Laureate, Leaves China

By Jane Perlez

Liu Xia, the widow of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo, at her home in Beijing in 2012.

BEIJING — The ailing widow of Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died of cancer last year under police guard, left China for Europe on Tuesday after a high-level diplomatic campaign by the German government.
Diplomats said Liu Xia, Mr. Liu’s widow, flew to Helsinki, Finland, on Finnair. 

Her final destination is expected to be Germany.
Ms. Liu’s brother, Liu Hui, posted a message soon after the flight took off saying she had left for Europe “to start her new life.” 

He thanked all the supporters who had helped win her release from years of house arrest and strict police supervision.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany raised Ms. Liu’s case directly with China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, during a visit to Beijing earlier this year, a gesture that underscored her opposition to China’s treatment of Ms. Liu and her husband, European diplomats said.
Ms. Liu, 57, had consistently asked to leave China since the death of her husband last July, and had pleaded to be freed from detention.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry told reporters at a regular news briefing on Tuesday that Ms. Liu had been granted permission to leave for Germany for medical reasons.
Her release by the Chinese government came one day after a human rights dialogue between European Union and Chinese officials in Beijing ended Monday. 

An annual summit meeting between China and the European Union is scheduled for next week in Beijing.
Ms. Liu was placed under police surveillance in 2010, the same year her husband was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for what the committee called “his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental rights in China.” 

He was not allowed to go to Oslo to receive the prize; Ms. Liu was also barred from attending the ceremony.
Mr. Liu, who was detained in 2008 after promoting a pro-democracy charter, died of liver cancer at age 61 while serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.”
Though he was being treated at a Chinese hospital, the government did not reveal his illness until it was in its late stages, and it would not allow Mr. Liu to travel abroad for medical care.
Ms. Liu has friends in Germany, and had asked the Chinese authorities to let her go there so she could receive treatment for depression.
In a recorded telephone call released in May by the Chinese dissident Liao Yiwu, who lives in exile in Germany, Ms. Liu said: “It would be easier to die than to live. Nothing would be simpler for me than dying in defiance.”
European diplomats had said over the last several months that China had left Ms. Liu in limbo as a show of resolve against Chinese human rights dissidents, despite aggressive efforts by Germany to press for her release.
After Ms. Merkel’s visit to Beijing in the spring, the Chinese authorities let the Europeans know that if Ms. Liu’s case was not publicized, her release would be possible, a European diplomat with knowledge of the case said.
In Hong Kong, at a makeshift statue of Mr. Liu that has become a fixture near the city’s Victoria Park, supporters of the couple expressed relief at Ms. Liu’s departure from China.
“What happened was tragic,” one passer-by, Katie Wong, said of the couple and their ordeal. 

“The both of them have helped China so much, I now wish for her to have a good, relaxing life with her newfound freedom.”

John Oliver's scathing Xi Jinping skit

Parody of Chinese dictator covered human rights abuses and memes comparing Xi’s figure with Winnie the Pooh
By Lily Kuo

Attempts to publish posts in China mentioning John Oliver’s name resulted in an error message. 

The British comedian John Oliver has been scrubbed from China’s version of Twitter after the host of Last Week Tonight ran a 20-minute segment satirising Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
New posts mentioning his name or the show have been blocked on the microblogging site Weibo.
Oliver’s scathing parody of Xi on Sunday covered human rights abuses, “dystopian levels of surveillance and persecution” of Uighurs in East Turkestan, the continued detention of Liu Xia, wife of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo who died last year in state custody, and online censorship, including memes comparing Xi’s figure with that of Winnie the Pooh.
“Clamping down on Winnie the Pooh comparisons doesn’t exactly project strength. It suggests a weird insecurity,” Oliver said.
Attempts to publish posts mentioning Oliver’s name or the name of the show resulted in an error message that the post violated “relevant laws, regulations, or violates Weibo community rules.”
Searches for Oliver’s name were not blocked on Weibo but the Chinese name of the show was censored. 

The most recent comments about Oliver or the show were on 14 June, before his segment on Xi aired, suggesting newer ones had been deleted.
Clips of the show, uploaded by users, were still online on video platforms but his most recent segment on Xi was not on Weibo or other social media platforms. 

Oliver’s name did not appear to be censored on other platforms like Douban or Zhihu, a popular question and answer forum.
In his take down of Xi’s China, Oliver also highlighted the expansion of the social credit scoring system, the elimination of term limits made earlier this year, and China’s heavy economic influence around the world.
“Under Xi Jinping China is becoming more authoritarian just as it has major plans for expansion on the world stage... China has significant economic leverage and it has been using that to silence criticism even when criticism is very much warranted.”
The show ended with a parody of an advertisement promoting China’s massive Belt and Road infrastructure project with children singing, “This is the China Xi doesn’t want you to see, and that’s the reason why you better watch this guy.”

Oriental Barbarians

Hear China’s totalitarian cruelty in this widow’s sobs
The Washington Post

Liu Xia, center, holds a portrait of Liu Xiaobo during his funeral in 2017. 

FOR AN example of gratuitous cruelty in the service of 21st-century totalitarianism, listen to the sob-choked voice of China’s Liu Xia. 

The widow of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and dissident Liu Xiaobo, Ms. Liu was recently recorded by a friend as she described her despair at being denied sanctuary in Germany and subjected to an endless continuation of the house arrest she has endured since 2010 — even though her husband died 10 months ago and she has never been charged with a crime.
“If I can’t leave, I’ll die in my home,” Ms. Liu told her friend Liao Yiwu, a writer who lives in Germany, in an April 30 conversation. 

“It’s easier to die than live. Using death to defy could not be any simpler for me.” 

In an earlier call, an excerpt of which Mr. Liao posted online, “Liu Xia was crying non-stop,” he said.
China punished Liu Xiaobo for his advocacy of peaceful democratic change in China with multiple imprisonments, including an 11-year sentence he was serving when he died last July, at 61, of liver cancer. 

Ms. Liu, 57, a poet and artist, has, if anything, been treated even more unconscionably. 

She has been confined to her home for more than seven years without access to a phone or computer, even as the government portrays her as a free citizen. 

Meanwhile, her brother was prosecuted and sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges in 2013. 

Mr. Liao says Ms. Liu, not surprisingly, has suffered from clinical depression for several years.
The regime compounded the abuse by encouraging false hopes of freedom. 

Germany has offered Ms. Liu harbor and medical treatment, and Mr. Liao and other friends said security officials repeatedly promised Ms. Liu that she would be allowed to leave the country. 

First she was told to wait until after last fall’s Communist Party Congress; and then until after the meeting of Beijing’s rubber-stamp legislature in March, where Xi Jinping consolidated his position as dictator for life. 

She waited, while the Germans and her supporters obeyed the regime’s demands that they remain silent.
“On April 1, before Liu Xia’s 57th birthday, the German Ambassador called her to convey Chancellor Angela Merkel’s special respects, and invited her to play badminton in Berlin before long,” Mr. Liao recounted. 

Yet five weeks later, the siege on her home remains unbroken, prompting the despair she expressed in the phone calls. 

Some of her frustration seemed directed at the German Embassy, which, she said, “keep[s] on asking me to do these documents over and over again,” even though she lacked the means to do so.
The real fault lies with a regime that appears bent on crushing the spirit of a woman simply because her husband was recognized for what the Nobel committee called “his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” 

That regime claims to offer a new model of greatness for other nations to emulate. 

But how great can it be if it so fears a 57-year-old poet who only wants to live out her life in peace?

Chinese Nobel laureate's widow ready to die in house arrest

Liu Xia, wife of the late human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, says she has nothing left to live for
By Lily Kuo

Protesters display a portrait of Liu Xiaobo and his detained wife Liu Xia. 

Liu Xia, the widow of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, has said she is ready to die in protest at being held under house arrest in China for more than seven years.
“Now, I’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If I can’t leave, I’ll die in my home. Xiaobo is gone, and there’s nothing in the world for me now. It’s easier to die than live. Using death to defy could not be any simpler for me,” she said, according to a phone call on 30 April, recorded by her friend and exiled writer, Liao Yiwu, and posted online.

'I live like a plant': Nobel winner's wife 'going mad' under Chinese detention.

Liu, 50, has been under house arrest since 2010 after her husband, Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel peace prize in absentia for his activism in China. 

Her husband, a civil rights campaigner, was jailed in 2009 for subversion and died last year from liver cancer while serving an 11-year prison sentence.
In an excerpt of the 16-minute phone call with Liao, Liu is heard crying and cursing. 

“I’m so fucking angry that I’m ready to die here … If I’m dead, it’ll all be done with.”
At one point, Liu cries for several minutes. 

In the recording, Liao plays the song Dona, Dona, from a Yiddish song released during the second world war about a calf being led to slaughter.
“Please allow me to use Liu Xia’s sobbing as its new lyrics,” Liao wrote. 

“Dona, Dona, give her freedom. Dona, Dona, please cry out loudly for her.”
Advocates have repeatedly called for Liu’s release. 

A former civil servant and a poet, she has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. 

Chinese authorities insist she “enjoys all freedoms in accordance with the law”, but her movements have been severely restricted and she lives under constant surveillance.
During this time both of Liu’s parents died and she has been taken to hospital at least twice for a heart condition. 

According to the rights activists, Liu has told her lawyer about having severe depression.
After her husband’s death, Liu’s supporters hoped she would be allowed to leave the country.
“First they told her to wait until the party congress was over; next they told her to wait until the conclusion of the ‘Two Sessions’ in Beijing in March of this year,” Liao wrote in his post on the US-based human rights site, Chinachange.org, citing legislative meetings held late last year and this year.
Germany and the US have both called on China to remove restrictions on Liu and allow her to leave the country. 

But activists say Chinese authorities are likely to keep her silenced to prevent her from becoming a symbol or rallying point for other dissidents.
“The cruelty the Chinese government has shown Liu Xia is a chilling signal for human rights defenders across the country that Xi Jinping’s regime does not care about international pressure. She’s never been suspected, charged or convicted of a crime, but has lived in a prison for eight years,” said Frances Eve, a researcher with the advocacy group, Chinese Human Rights Defenders. “Xi Jinping needs to let her go.”

Chinese State Hooliganism

EU, Sweden call for China to release detained publisher
AP

In this June 18, 2016, file photo, freed Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee stands next to a placard with picture of missing bookseller Gui Minhai, in front of his book store in Hong Kong as the protesters are marching to the Chinese central government's liaison office. Gui, who was secretly detained in China has been taken away by Chinese authorities again after being released into house arrest last October, his daughter said Monday, Jan. 22, 2018. 

BEIJING— The European Union on Wednesday joined Sweden in calling on China to immediately release a Swedish book publisher who was taken off a train in front of his country's diplomats by Chinese police four days ago.
The Chinese foreign ministry on Wednesday indicated Gui Minhai, the Hong Kong-based book publisher, and the Swedish diplomats who were with him may have been breaking Chinese law.
Gui was first abducted in 2015, one of five Hong Kong booksellers whose disappearances became a symbol of the extent to which China was willing to reinforce its hard line on squelching political dissent and a free press — despite international criticism.
The office of EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said it "fully supports the public statement and efforts of the Swedish government" on Gui's behalf.
"We expect the Chinese authorities to immediately release Mr. Gui from detention, allow him to reunite with his family and to receive consular and medical support in line with his rights," it said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallstrom said in a news release that China has given no clear explanation for Gui's detention. 

Sweden has already summoned China's ambassador in the Scandinavian country over the 53-year-old's case.
"We take a very serious view of the detention on Saturday of Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, with no specific reason being given for the detention, which took place during an ongoing consular support mission," Wallstrom said in her statement.
"We expect the immediate release of our fellow citizen, and that he be given the opportunity to meet Swedish diplomatic and medical staff," she said.
Wallstrom said the Swedish diplomats accompanying Gui had been "providing consular assistance to a Swedish citizen in need of medical care.
"This was perfectly in line with basic international rules giving us the right to provide our citizens with consular support," she said.
Gui had been running a Hong Kong publishing company specializing in tales about high-level Chinese politics when he disappeared from his Thai holiday home about two years ago. 

He had been spirited away by Chinese security agents to mainland China, where he later turned up in police custody. 

In a videotaped confession that was coerced, Gui stated that he'd turned himself in to mainland authorities over a hit-and-run accident.
He was released into house arrest in October in the eastern city of Ningbo, living in what his daughter Angela called a police-managed apartment.
His daughter told Radio Sweden, the English-language service of national broadcaster Sveriges Radio, that her father was on a train with two Swedish diplomats on Saturday when a group of police officers seized him.
She said her father was traveling to Beijing to see a Swedish doctor after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurological disease that he developed while in custody.
Gui's 2015 abduction reinforced rising fears that Beijing was chipping away at the rule of law in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese city that is promised civil liberties such as freedom of speech until 2047.
The books Gui and his colleagues sold at their Causeway Bay Bookshop were popular with visitors from mainland China, where such titles are banned.

Chinese authorities have a history of continuing to persecute political prisoners even after their release from prison and other legal strictures.
Noted human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng recently disappeared back into custody after five years of prison and three more years confined by guards at home. 

Liu Xia, the wife of the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, has been held a virtual prisoner for years despite never being charged.
Since her husband's death in July while serving a prison sentence, Liu has had virtually no contact with friends or family and the authorities will not say where she is currently being held.

France Should Spotlight China's Rights Crisis

Foreign Minister Le Drian Should Call for Releases, Announce Policy Review
Human Rights Watch

French President Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping attend a bilateral meeting in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017. 

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian should publicly urge respect for human rights in meetings with China’s new leadership, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the foreign minister. 

Le Drian is visiting China for the first time as foreign minister from November 24 to 27, 2017.
“French President Emmanuel Macron has explicitly committed to promoting human rights in China along with diplomatic and economic concerns,” said Bénédicte Jeannerod, France director. “Minister Le Drian’s visit is an important opportunity to publicly challenge the Chinese leadership over its rampant human rights violations.”
Human Rights Watch urged Le Drian to:

• Publicly call for the releases of political prisoners Liu Xia, Gao Zhisheng, Jiang Tianyong, and Wang Quanzhang;
• Express concerns about China’s increasing efforts to undermine international institutions that should help defend human rights, including the United Nations, Interpol, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); and
• Announce a review of all bilateral law enforcement cooperation.

“France has long been a defender of fundamental rights and liberties worldwide,” Jeannerod said. 

“In the face of an unreceptive Chinese leadership, Minister Le Drian’s visit will be a test of France’s commitment.”

Bookseller Gui Minhai 'half free' after being detained in China for two years

Hong Kong publisher who specialised in books about China’s political elite vanished from Thailand in 2015
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Earlier this week Chinese authorities claimed Gui had been released on 17 October although his daughter disputed that claim. 

A Swedish bookseller who spent more than two years in custody after his abduction by Chinese agents is now “half free”, a friend has claimed, amid suspicions he is still being held under guard by security officials in eastern China.
Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong-based publisher who specialised in books about China’s political elite, mysteriously vanished from his Thai holiday home in October 2015. 

He later reappeared in mainland China where he was imprisoned on charges relating to a deadly drunk-driving incident more than a decade earlier.
Gui’s disappearance – and that of four other booksellers, including one British citizen – was seen as part of a wider crackdown on Communist party opponents that has gripped China since Xi Jinping took power in 2012.
Details of Gui’s two-year detention have remained murky but he is understood to have been held for at least part of that time in the eastern port city of Ningbo. 

Earlier this week Chinese authorities claimed he had been released on 17 October, although Gui’s daughter, Angela, disputed that claim on Tuesday, telling the Guardian he had yet to contact her and appeared still to be in “some sort of custody”.
On Friday, after several days of uncertainty about Gui’s whereabouts, reports emerged that appeared to confirm his partial release.
Bei Ling, a Boston-based dissident writer and friend, said Gui was in Ningbo and living in rented accomodation. 

He said Gui held a 40-minute phone conversation with his daughter on Thursday night. 

However, Bei told the Hong Kong Free Press website that his friend was only “half free”.
Angela Gui told the Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK there were “many things that need to be clarified” about her father’s situation and declined to comment further. 

“She said she had received a phone call, but did not confirm it was from her father,” RTHK reported.
A spokesperson for Sweden’s foreign ministry said: “We have received reports from the Chinese authorities that Gui Minhai has been released and we’re doing our best to obtain more information.”
Activists suspect that rather than completely freeing Gui, Chinese authorities have moved him from a detention centre into what they call China’s “non-release release” system. 

Under this Kafka-esque system, regime opponents are nominally freed but in fact continue to live under the watch and guard of security agents.
“Non-release release” has been the fate of a number of those targeted as part of Xi’s campaign against human rights lawyers, which has seen some of the country’s leading civil rights attorneys spirited into secret detention before “reappearing” in a different form of captivity.
Bei told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post Gui had informed relatives he wanted to travel to Germany: “But for now, he is not sure if the Chinese authorities will allow him to leave China.
“He will only enjoy true freedom if he is allowed to leave China. If he cannot leave China, he could end up just like Liu Xia,” Bei added, referring to the wife of the late Nobel laureate who has also been living under the watch of security agents since her husband’s death in July.

Speaking on Tuesday, the bookseller’s daughter said she was deeply concerned about his wellbeing: “He has allegedly been released but it looks like he is still in some sort of custody... the fact that nobody can contact him and nobody knows where he is, legally constitutes an enforced disappearance, again.”

Exactly what happened to Gui and his bookselling colleagues and why they were targeted remains a mystery. 

However, in June last year, one of the other abducted men, Lam Wing-kee, claimed he had been kidnapped by Chinese special forces as part of a coordinated effort to silence criticism of China’s leadership.
Patrick Poon, a Hong Kong-based activist for Amnesty International who is following the case, said: “Definitely he is still under surveillance otherwise the whole thing wouldn’t be so mysterious.”
“We still need to see whether the authorities will allow him to go [to Germany] and it seems to me that he will still be under surveillance for some time before he is allowed to go.”
Poon said it was also unclear whether Chinese authorities had placed conditions on Gui’s release such as “not disclosing what happened to him during his time in detention [or] requiring him not to talk about his case when he leaves China”.

Rogue Nation: Where is Bookseller China ‘Released’?

The Chinese government has a history of lying about the condition of its political prisoners. 
www.hrw.org

Gui Minhai, the Swedish bookseller who was forcibly disappeared by the Chinese government in October 2015. 

Two years after Swedish national Gui Minhai vanished in Thailand on October 17, 2015, his whereabouts remain a mystery. 

Last week the Chinese government—which abducted Gui outside its borders and has detained him in China—told Swedish diplomats that Gui has been “released” after serving his sentence for an alleged traffic offense. 

Yet the Swedish authorities have not seen him, nor has his family. 

Gui may indeed have been freed – but until he is accounted for he remains forcibly disappeared.
Days after Gui’s “release,” a man claiming to be Gui called the Swedish Consulate in Shanghai, saying he would get in touch with them later because he wished to be with his sick mother. 

But Gui’s daughter says her grandmother is not ill, nor has she seen him.
Gui Minhai is the last of the five booksellers from Hong Kong Mighty Current Media who were abducted and detained in 2015 still missing. 

 One bookseller, Lam Wing-kee, revealed after his release that he was secretly detained and interrogated about the workings of the store, which sold books on the private lives of China’s top leaders.
The Chinese government has a history of lying about the condition of its political prisoners.

It claims that Liu Xia, the wife of late Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, is free, when the available information indicates otherwise. 

Twenty years after it took into custody the 6-year-old Panchen Lama—Tibet’s second most important religious figure—Beijing insists that he is “living a normal life.” 

Yet nobody else has seen or heard from him.
Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallström, tweeted this week that she welcomed the news of Gui’s release. 

But until Swedish authorities can fully ascertain that Gui has been unconditionally released—­that means a private visit—they should assume he remains disappeared and raise the matter directly with senior Chinese officials and in international forums.
This case has implications beyond one person’s freedom. 

The Chinese government has not only violated Gui Minhai’s fundamental human rights – it has done so across international borders. 

This should be a matter of grave concern not only for Sweden, but for all countries that care about the security of their citizens.

Rogue nation: UN tells China to release human rights activists and pay them compensation

Document rejects Chinese government claims that activists voluntarily confessed to their crimes at trials.

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Lawyer Xie Yang who has been detained by Chinese authorities as part of a crack down on human rights. 

The United Nations has demanded that China should immediately release prominent human rights activists from detention and pay them compensation, according to an unreleased document obtained by the Guardian.
The report, which has not been made public, from the UN’s human rights council says the trio had their rights violated and calls China’s laws incompatible with international norms.

Christian church leader Hu Shigen and lawyers Zhou Shifeng and Xie Yang were detained and tried as part of an unprecedented nationwide crackdown on human rights attorneys and activists that began in July 2015.
The operation saw nearly 250 people detained and questioned by police.
Hu was jailed for seven and a half years and Zhou was sentenced to seven years on subversion charges, while Xie is awaiting a verdict.
“The appropriate remedy would be to release Hu Shigen, Zhou Shifeng and Xie Yang immediately, and accord them an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations,” said the UN report seen by the Guardian, adding that Chinashould take action within six months.
The UN’s working group on arbitrary detention, which reviewed the case, rejected Chinese government claims the three men voluntarily confessed to their crimes at their trials and said their detentions were “made in total non-observance of the international norms relating to the right to a fair trial”.
The group is a panel of five experts that falls under the UN’s human rights council, of which China is a member.
While its judgements are not legally binding, it investigates claims of rights violations and suggests remedies.
China promised to cooperate with the group when it ran for a seat on the human rights council in August 2016, when it also pledged to make “unremitting efforts” to promote human rights.
The group’s report on the Chinese activists said the trio were subjected to a host of rights violations, including being denied access to legal counsel, being held in “incommunicado detention” and their families “were not informed of their whereabouts for several months”.
Their detentions were due to “their activities to promote and protect human rights“, the UN found, while the opinion also encouraged China to amend its laws to conform with international standards protecting human rights.
Although Xie was released on bail after a trial in May, his wife, Chen Guiqiu said her husband was far from a free man.
State security agents rented a flat across the hall from his and Xie has 12 guards stationed 24-hours a day outside his building.
Police follow him whenever he goes out and despite the constant surveillance, he has to prepare reports for state security agents every four hours on what he has done and who he has spoken to.
But Chen welcomed the UN’s report and said she felt vindicated.
“Of course, he didn’t commit any crime, his arrest was completely illegal and I’m glad the UN, a very objective party that represents the international community, can see that,” said Chen, who fled to the US earlier this year.
“I hope this will put pressure on China and make them think twice the next time they consider arresting people on political charges.”
“Paying compensation would show the government admits they harmed our family, that they were wrong to subject us to more than two years of continuous harm,” she added.

During his detention, Xie was beaten and forced into stress positions, with one interrogator telling him: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant.”
Ambassadors from countries including Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, wrote to China’s minister of public security in February, voicing concerns over the torture and calling for an independent investigation.
“The working group’s opinion cuts straight through the government’s lies and shows that the arrests were always about retaliation against lawyers for protecting human rights,” said Frances Eve, a researcher at the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
“The government put enormous resources into their propaganda campaign to smear human rights lawyers as ‘criminals’, deploying state media, police, prosecutors and the courts.”
During the course of the panel’s investigation, the Chinese government said the men were jailed not because “they defend the legitimate rights of others” but rather they have “long been engaged in criminal activities, aimed at subverting the basic national system established under the China’s [sic] constitution”.
The UN rejected this claim.
Hu was arrested for leading an underground church, which works outside the government-sanctioned system.
He previously spent 16 years in prison for distributing leaflets on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent bloody crackdown.
Zhou is a prominent human rights attorney who founded the Fengrui law firm that was at the centre of the 2015 government “war on law”.
His firm represented dissident artist Ai Weiwei, members of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong and a journalist arrested for supported protests in Hong Kong.
The UN’s working group on arbitrary detention previously told China to release Liu Xia, the wife of the Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died in detention in July.
Liu Xia has been under house arrest since 2010, when her husband won the prize, despite never being charged with a crime.

Liu Xiaobo's widow reappears in YouTube video

Liu Xia resurfaces for the first time since her husband Liu Xiaobo's funeral amid concerns about her fate.
Aljazeera
Liu Xia was last seen in government-released images of Liu Xiaobo's funeral.

The widow of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has appeared for the first time since her husband's funeral in a video posted on YouTube, which is blocked in China.
Liu Xia's friends have raised concern about her fate, saying they have not been able to speak to her since her husband's sea burial on July 15.
She was last seen in government-released images of Liu Xiaobo's funeral.
"I am recovering in a province outside of Beijing. I ask you to give me time to mourn," said Liu in the minute-long video posted on Friday.
Dressed in a black t-shirt and black trousers, Liu Xia was sitting on a white sofa next to a coffee table while holding a lit cigarette.
"I will see you one day in top form. While Xiaobo was sick, he also looked at life and death with some distance, so I also have to readjust. I will be with you again when my situation generally improves," she said.
Liu Xia, 56, has been under effective house arrest since her husband, a prominent dissident since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, won the Nobel Prize in 2010. 

He was sentenced to 11 years in jail on subversion charges in 2009.
Friends of the couple raised questions about whether Liu Xia made the comments in Friday's video out of her own free will.
"It is certain that she was forced by the authorities to make this video," Hu Jia, a Chinese dissident and friend of the couple, told the AFP news agency on Saturday.
"How can anyone who does not even enjoy freedom express her will freely?"
The name of the film-maker, the place and date of filming, were not specified, but it would be unusual for the video to be released without the knowledge of the authorities. 

Plainclothes security agents guard Liu Xia's Beijing apartment.
Jared Genser, Liu Xia's lawyer, who has filed a complaint to the United Nations, has accused the Chinese government of her "enforced disappearance".
Chinese authorities have said that Liu Xia was "free" and have told diplomats who asked about her whereabouts that her lack of communication was due to her desire to mourn in peace.
Before the death of her husband, Liu Xia had told diplomats and friends that she wished to leave China should Liu Xiaobo be released.
Liu had requested to receive treatment abroad after his terminal cancer diagnosis, a wish that friends believe was in reality for his wife's sake. 

The government, however, refused to release him.
He died aged 61 while still in custody at a Chinese hospital on July 13, becoming the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1938.

Chinese Torture

Pro-democracy activist was beaten by Chinese agents who stapled his skin for being 'unpatriotic'.
Aljazeera
Lam said he earlier received a warning phone call from Chinese intelligence.
A prominent member of Hong Kong's Democratic Party said he was beaten and "stapled" by Chinese agents in Hong Kong before being dumped on a remote beach.
Howard Lam, a key pro-democracy activist in the former British colony, told reporters on Friday he was confronted by men speaking Mandarin -- spoken in Beijing but not widely in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong -- outside a sports store.
Lam said the men took him away, interrogating him and stapling his skin 21 times for being "unpatriotic" in a nine-hour ordeal.
He was knocked out and eventually found himself dumped on a beach in Hong Kong's remote Sai Kung district.
Hong Kong's police commissioner, Lau Wai-chung, told media he was taking Lam's accusations seriously and they were attaching great importance to investigating the case. 

The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of China's State Council were not immediately available for comment.
The attack comes as hostility to Beijing has spiralled in Hong Kong and the battle for full democracy has become a defining issue for the city of 7.3 million people.
Hong Kong became a "special administrative region" of China in 1997 and has been governed under a "one country, two systems" formula that guarantees a range of freedoms not enjoyed in China, including a direct vote for half of the 70-seat legislative assembly.
But activists say those freedoms have come under threat with meddling by Communist Party rulers in Beijing.
In July, Hong Kong's high court expelled four pro-independence politicians from the city's legislature after invalidating their oaths of office, in what was seen as the clearest indication of direct intervention by Beijing.
The 2015 abduction of several Hong Kong booksellers, who sold publications critical of China's leaders, by mainland agents also shook confidence in Beijing's promise of non-interference, activists say.

China tortured him for Lionel Messi photo

Lam said he was even warned in a telephone call not to give a photo signed by Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi to the widow of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Nobel laureate who died from cancer last month.
Lam had previously said on Facebook the football star had sent him the photo for Liu, who was reportedly a fan. 

As it arrived after Liu's death, Lam had said he would try to send it to his wife, Liu Xia.
It was not immediately clear how they knew of his plans to give her the signed Messi photo.
Pro-democracy politicians, academics and political activists worry that Hong Kong is becoming more like mainland Chinese cities, where the internal security services join forces with police to crush dissent.
Xi Jinping swore in Hong Kong's new leader Carrie Lam last month with a stark warning that Beijing will not tolerate any challenge to its authority in the city as it marked the 20th anniversary of its return from Britain to China.