Citizens' Square

This is an in-depth investigative report on torture and violence at Masanjia Women’s Reeducation-Through-Labor Facility in Liaoning. The exposé has caused a stir in China and prompted urgent calls by the public to abolish this administrative detention system. The article in Lens Magazine has since been removed from its website (http://www.lensmagazine.com.cn/magazine/2013-04).

Tianxiagong, an anti-discrimination NGO based in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, had planned to host a seminar for public interest lawyers in Suzhou and signed a contract with the Suzhou Motai hotel (苏州莫泰酒店管理有限公司) to reserve Motai facilities for the seminar. When Motai refused to honor the reservation just before the seminar was to convene, Tianxiagong sued the hotel. During the trial, Motai argued that it canceled Tianxiagong’s reservation on the order of the Pishijie substation of Suzhou Public Security Bureau, and the police admitted to the order stating it was necessary to “maintain stability.” On March 18, 2013, the court ordered the hotel to pay Tianxiagong 21,570 yuan in damages, in addition to returning the original deposit of 5,000 yuan.

On April 1, 2013, in advance of the Qing Ming Festival, a group of independent intellectuals and participants in the 1989 Democracy Movement gathered in a funeral home in Zhengding County, Hebei Province, to pay respect to the victims of the government’s military crackdown on the Democracy Movement. This was the first time in nearly 24 years since the crackdown that citizens in China held such a public memorial to remember June Fourth victims. Also included in this posting is a eulogy signed by 22 individuals.

In this article, Beijing lawyer Xiao Guozhen provides a portrait of rights advocate Hou Xin, one of four individuals detained by police in Beijing, following their March 31, 2013 protest calling for disclosure of official assets. The other three individuals detained were Yuan Dong, Zhang Baocheng, and Ma Xinli. They were held at the Beijing No.3 Detention Center.

Ma Yalian (马亚莲), a Shanghai rights defender, went to Beijing to petition during the period of the Two Congresses, and had planned to protest on Tiananmen Square. But to avoid being harassed by the police, Ma had to hide at a friend’s home where she used her friend’s computer to send out the essay.

Based on real-life experiences and enacted by a group of petitioners and rights activists from Nantong, Jiangsu, this docudrama shows what typically happens to petitioners when they are detained—often in unofficial places of detention, black jails—without formal charges, and sometimes without notice to families.

Yao Cheng, a friend of Zhang Lin’s and the owner of the apartment in Hefei where Zhang temporarily lived, said in his article that the police came to search his apartment without legal permission and advance notice, and then kidnapped Zhang’s daughter.

Photos of Zhang Anni and Zhang Lin.

Lawyers for Wang Dengchao, a former Shenzhen police sentenced for 14 years in prison for “obstructing official business” and “embezzlement,” issued two complaints against 23 provincial and local officials.

In a series of text messages, Zhao Haitong, a Xinjiang resident, describes his beating by two unidentified persons after visiting veteran pro-democracy activist Qin Yongmin in Wuhan. Zhao suffered an asthma attack after the beating. Qin calls on the authorities to investigate the case and bring the perpetrators to justice in accordance with law.

In this message to HRIC (Chinese only), lawyer Tang Jitian (唐吉田) describes his detention and questioning by police in Shenzhen on February 1, 2013, when he tried to attend the appeals trial of a former policeman, Wang Dengchao. In 2012, Wang was sentenced to 14 years in prison after attempting to organize a public event on March 8 that year to commemorate the 87th anniversary of Sun Yatsen’s death and to call for democracy.

In this brief article (Chinese only), veteran Guangdong-based rights defender Guo Feixiong (郭飞雄) summarizes the points he made in support of Southern Weekly during interviews and exchanges with other participates made at a rally before Southern Weekly Guangzhou offices. The significance of the Southern Weekly protest, he writes, is that it is “the first wave of political change” in China since 1989, and that it is a political experiment led by grass-rooted rights defenders to demand a constitutional democracy.

On December 28, 2012, Wu Xuewei (吴雪伟) submitted this request (Chinese only) to the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress and Standing Committee to discipline the Shanghai Municipal Committee on the Administration of Reeducation-Through-Labor for unlawfully depriving Wu of his right to visit his wife, Shanghai activist Mao Hengfeng (毛恒凤).