04 Apr 11 | Asia and Pacific, China
Outspoken Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has joined the ranks of other dissidents who have irked the government. He has simply gone missing.
Police detained Ai at Beijing Airport on Sunday, as he was en route to Hong Kong. His Beijing studio was also raided on the same day. He has not been heard of since, and there has been no comment from the authorities.
The 53-year-old’s disappearance comes amid heightened tensions in China with the authorities jumpy about the (albeit remote) possibility of any Middle East style protests spreading to the mainland. Several rights lawyers, activists and bloggers have either been charged or disappeared since February.
The western media is sounding a forbidding note about this latest development. While Ai has frequently wrangled with the authorities because of his efforts to push human rights — he’s been punched by provincial police, held under house arrest, and prevented from leaving the country — this is the first time he has been missing for so long. This is Time magazine’s pessimistic take on the situation.
His prominence owes itself to the fact that as a leading artist, he would be globally recognized even without his activism. And for so long that had also been a shield. By holding him, the Chinese authorities are reminding the nation that no challenger to the rule of the Communist Party should feel safe.
Read Index’s exclusive 2008 interview with Ai WeiWei here
29 Mar 11 | Asia and Pacific, China
The fear comes in not knowing. This is something Geng He, the wife of Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese rights lawyer who disappeared on April 10 last year, well knows.
Geng wrote a touching appeal in the New York Times today calling attention to her husband’s plight. “My husband has been tortured many times,” Geng wrote.
In 2007, officials subjected him to electric shocks, held lighted cigarettes up to his eyes and pierced his genitals with toothpicks. In 2009, the police beat him with handguns for two days. He has been tied up and forced to sit motionless for hours, threatened with death and told that our children were having nervous breakdowns.
It seems likely Gao was targeted because he took on many sensitive cases including fighting for victims of land grabs and because he wrote an open letter to the Chinese government calling them to end the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners (a banned spiritual sect).
To date, the Chinese authorities have refused to reveal where Gao is being held or even if they are detaining him.
Geng can only imagine the worst.
“I don’t know where he is, or even if he is alive,” she writes. If he has been killed, we should be allowed the dignity of laying him to rest.
Gao was awarded the the Bindmans Law and Campaigning Award last week. His wife, who fled China with their two children in 2009, accepted the prize in his place, you can watch her acceptance speech here
29 Mar 11 | Index Index, minipost
Liu Xianbin, a pro-democracy activist, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after a trial over charges of subversion of state that lasted only a few hours. Liu was arrested after publishing articles on the internet calling for democratic reforms. He has been imprisoned twice before; once for his role in the Tiananmen Square protests, and again in 1998 for 10 years on charges of subversion after he co-founded the China Democracy Party.
