13 Jan 11 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
The studio of acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei has been demolished, a move the artist believes is due to his political activism. Ai Weiwei was one of the artists who helped in the construction of the “bird’s nest” in Beijing Olympics and has been a vocal critic of the Chinese government’s human rights record.
13 Jan 11 | Asia and Pacific, China
The sad death of jailed writer Zhang Jianhong went by with hardly a blip from the foreign media.
Zhang, 52, died 31 December in hospital while on medical parole from a rare neurological disease. He leaves behind a wife and daughter.
A few months into his prison term in Zhejiang province, Zhang, whose pen name was Li Hong, was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, a disorder in which the muscles irreversibly waste away. The prison repeatedly denied him medical parole until June last year, by which time he was completely paralysed and was kept alive by a respirator.
Zhang had been sentenced to six years for “inciting subversion of state power” in March 2007 for his work as a contributor to anti-Chinese government, pro-human rights media overseas including the Epoch Times and Boxun.
Radio Free Asia also reported that Chinese police warned his dissident friends not to publicly mourn Zhang.
Zhang had a long history of angering the authorities. In December 1989 he was sentenced to three years of Re-education Through Labour for publicly criticizing the Tiananmen Square Massacre. He briefly took part in the protests but left the Square on 2 June.
His contacts with the China Democracy Party also got him periodically in trouble.
In 2005, he founded Aegean Sea, a literary website which was closed down by the police the following year for its anti-government content.
Zhang was also a commercially successful freelance writer and poet, penning several novels and a popular TV show The Firm of Red Clothes.
He was a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) which released a statement mourning his death.
“ICPC considers Mr Zhang Jianhong as the most recent victim of contemporary literary inquisition in China and one of its worst cases in over 30 years,” the centre said.
“May his spirit live on,” said US-based Human Rights in China.
10 Dec 10 | News and features
On the eve of today’s Nobel ceremony, John Ralston Saul calls on China to listen to its real friends and free Liu Xiaobo
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24 Nov 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Sixty thousand websites deemed to host pornographic content have been shut down by the government since December 2009. The National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications also said some 1.6 million websites had been checked. The office revealed many of the offending websites were discovered through informants. Five hundred and sixteen informers have been rewarded with USD 79,000 since the crackdown started.
