14 May 12 | China
UPDATE: Chen Guangcheng’s relatives have described beatings by local authorities since the activist fled house arrest last month. His brother, Chen Guangfu, father of Chen Kegui was reportedly detained for three days, during which time he was beaten and interrogated.
Chen Guangfu described his ordeal to Hong Kong-based magazine iSunAffairs.com, telling them he was hooded and taken away from his home shortly after Chen Guangcheng escaped. He said: “They put me on a chair, bound my feet with iron chains and locked my hands with handcuffs behind my back,” he said. “They pulled my hands upwards forcefully. Then they slapped me in the face.”
Chen Guangcheng condemned the “pattern of abuse” against his relatives.
The nephew of blind Chinese activist and “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng has been arrested on charges of attempted murder. Chen Kegui faces charges ranging from 10 years in prison to the death sentence, after he brandished a meat cleaver at intruders searching for his uncle, who escaped from his 18 month-long house arrest in his native Shandong province last month.
Speaking to the Independent, Chen Guangcheng said his nephew had injured, but not killed, some of the intruders who broke into his house in Linyi, Shandong, to search for the activist.
Chen Kegui’s lawyers have come under pressure to drop the claim that Kegui acted in self-defence. His lawyer, Liu Weiguo, has been forbidden from talking to foreign media about the case. Other Chinese lawyers have branded the charges as “ridiculous”.
Chen Guangcheng, who was housed at the US embassy in Beijing following his escape, has said he fears his family would be subject to reprisals if they returned to Shandong. The blind self-taught legal activist, who is currently in a Beijing hospital awaiting permission to travel to the USA, criticised the “mad retribution” his family were experiencing.
Guancheng has told the Guardian that his brother was not allowed to leave his village, and his sister-in-law has been released on bail. His older brother’s family have had all of their phones confiscated, including mobiles.
Chen, noted for his efforts to expose forced abortions and sterilisations, spent four years in prison on charges of disturbing public order before being placed under house arrest in September 2010. Those attempting to visit him have faced harassment and beatings from officials.
Chen Guangcheng won the Index on Censorship whistleblowing award for his activities in 2007
09 May 12 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, minipost
Chinese micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo plan to introduce a “user-contract” in an attempt to control sensitive information on the site. The rules, which are set to be introduced later this month, outline do’s and don’ts for the site, including prohibiting posts which “spread rumors, disrupt social order, and destroy societal stability”. The new rules will also introduce a “community committee”, a group of registered users, who will implement the terms of service. Violation of these regulations could result in deletion, preventing reposting or disabling commenting.
08 May 12 | China
Al Jazeera English’s China correspondent, Melissa Chan, has been expelled from the People’s Republic after five years in the country.
The TV station’s English arm today announced it has closed its Beijing bureau after the Chinese authorities refused to renew Chan’s press credentials or grant a visa for a replacement correspondent. Chan, a US citizen, is said to be the first reporter in 14 years to be ejected from China.
During Chan’s five years in China she covered a vast range of topics, including environment, foreign policy, economics, social justice and labour rights. She produced several reports on China’s secret “black jails”, and in 2010 was blocked by Chinese authorities from visiting Liu Xia, the wife of jailed Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
It is still not entirely clear what prompted Chan’s expulsion, but according to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China(FCCC), Chinese officials had “expressed anger” at a documentary the channel aired last November. Chan was not involved in the making of Prison Slaves which investigated camps in which prisoners were said to be forced into manual labour.
“They have also expressed unhappiness with the general editorial content on Al Jazeera English and accused Ms Chan of violating rules and regulations that they have not specified,” the FCCC said in a statement on its website.
The group said it was “appalled” by the decision, calling it “the most extreme example of a recent pattern of using journalist visas in an attempt to censor and intimidate foreign correspondents in China”.
Findings from an FCCC survey point to Chan’s expulsion being part of a worrying climate for reporters in the People’s Republic. The group says that:
- Over the past two years 27 foreign reporters were made to wait for more than four months for visa approvals. Thirteen of these had to wait for more than six months and were still waiting at the time of the survey.
- Three requests presented in 2009 had not received a response, which in practice meant they had been denied.
- Twenty eight permanent postings or reporting trips had been cancelled since 2009 because applications for the required journalistic visas were rejected or ignored by the Chinese authorities.
- In six cases foreign reporters say they were told by the Foreign Ministry officials that their bureaux’ visa applications had been rejected or put on hold due to the content of the bureaux’ or the applicant’s previous coverage of Chinese affairs.
Praise for Chan’s work was widespread today. “She served as a voice for the voiceless, often putting herself in dangerous positions to get stories of injustice out in the open,” Charles Custer of ChinaGeeks said in a blogpost today, noting how much of Chan’s reporting focused on local stories rather than those of central government.
“Her removal is an embarrassment, the childish retribution of a government it seems is perpetually more concerned with silencing problems than with solving them,” Custer added.
Evan Osnos of the New Yorker was in agreement, arguing that the move “revives a Soviet-era strategy that will undermine its own efforts to project soft power and shows a spirit of self-delusion that does not bode well for China’s ability to address the problems that imperil its future”.
Mark MacKinnon of the Globe and Mail also highlighted the significance of Chan’s case for Chinese reporters:
This false freedom given to reporters working in China is much more important than Melissa’s case or the careers of any of the foreign correspondents based in China. What’s at stake is not only the outside world’s (already poor) understanding of this rising but paranoid superpower, but also the future of journalism inside China. Chinese journalists have told me that they watch the foreign correspondents with envy, wishing they could report about their own country as freely as we do. Our fight to do our job is intertwined with their fight to do theirs.
Al Jazeera said today that its media network will continue to work with Chinese authorities in order to reopen its Beijing bureau.
“We are committed to our coverage of China. Just as China news services cover the world freely we would expect that same freedom in China for any Al Jazeera journalist,” Salah Negm, director of news at Al Jazeera English, said in a statement.
04 May 12 | Asia and Pacific, News and features
Even before the internet, dissidents in exile were able to create networks that provided a lifeline to those back home, writes Index editor Jo Glanville
This piece originally appeared on Comment is Free
The desperate plight of Chen Guangcheng is a graphic illustration of how China treats its dissidents. Harassed and intimidated, Chen has spent the past seven years between prison and house arrest since he exposed the government’s forced abortion policy in 2005 (he was awarded the Index freedom of expression award for whistleblowing in 2007). House arrest is a common tactic in China for containing and controlling whistleblowers and activists. In Chen’s case, since his release from prison in 2010, it has meant a life of social isolation and fear. Other current well-known victims include Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser and Ai Weiwei, who famously attempted to turn China’s tactics on their head by installing his own in-house surveillance.
The week’s dramatic events echo the story of celebrated dissident Fang Lizhi, who died last month; Fang also took refuge in the US embassy following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and stayed for more than a year until China allowed him to leave. Fang was one of the most important influences on the Tiananmen generation of young activists and the authorities considered him “the biggest black hand behind the 4 June riots”. In exile in the US for the rest of his life, as well as pursuing his academic career as an astrophysicist, he remained active in speaking out for human rights in China along with other exiles of 1989, including Wang Dan.
The experience of exile for dissidents, despite the continuing possibility for influence, can bring another kind of isolation. “Homelessness, loneliness and despair have almost driven me to self-destruction,” wrote the poet Liu Hongbin on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. It is only through memory, he has written movingly, that he has made the journey home. Writer Ma Jian, who has written the definitive novel of the Tiananmen generation, Beijing Coma, while in exile, was still able to visit China regularly until last year – a measure of how far the situation has deteriorated. Chen’s desire for “a rest”, as he told Congress, is likely to be more than a short stay.
However, there are networks that can only be built from exile and that have always been a lifeline for dissidents back home, long before Twitter, SMS and Facebook revolutionised the possibilities of making revolution. Under editor George Theiner, a Czech dissident in exile in London, Index on Censorship magazine published the leading lights of Czechoslovakia’s pro-democracy movement in the 80s, most notably Václav Havel, as well as publishing and distributing Polish and Czech samizdat – a vital outlet for opposition activists. When Index’s founding editor Michael Scammell started publishing the most famous dissident of them all, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great man panicked: when he heard that his work was appearing so widely in English, he thought it was the KGB who was circulating his writing as part of a political provocation. But it was the first worldwide publication of much of his work in translation and an immensely important part of circulating the plight of dissidents in the Soviet Union.
Forty years on, Belarusian activists in exile have played a vital role in galvanising opposition to Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. Since the elections in 2010, following the mass arrests and imprisonment of the opposition, some of the leading lights of the pro-democracy movement have settled in London and Warsaw where they have helped to shape a successful European campaign alongside human rights groups. Natalia Kaladia, artistic director of the acclaimed Belarus Free Theatre, had to flee Belarus following her arrest and the intimidation of her family. In a campaign with Index, her new organisation Free Belarus Now, which she runs with Irina Bogdanova, sister of former political prisoner Andrei Sannikov, has helped to persuade Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas to stop doing business with Lukashenko’s regime.
While none would choose exile, Chen is reported as telling the US ambassador that “he wanted to be part of the struggle to improve human rights within China”, thanks to the internet it is now perhaps more possible than it ever was in the days of the carbon copies of samizdat to continue to exert an influence back home.
Jo Glanville is editor of Index on Censorship magazine
