Chinese justice activists

12-26-18    Chinese rights attorney

Wang Quanzhang, who has been held by the authorities for more than three years, stood trial for subversion on Friday in the northern city of Tianjin, in a process slammed by an international rights group as "a cruel charade."

  Wang, detained in July 2015 as part of a nationwide police operation targeting hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists, stood trial for "incitement to subvert state power" at the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court.

  "Defendant Wang Quanzhang, suspected of incitement to subvert state power, will today stand trial at the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court," the court said in a notice on its official website.

  "This trial will not be open to the public because it involves state secrets," the statement said. "The verdict and sentencing will be announced on another date."

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/chinese-human-rights-lawyer-tried-in-secret-12262018104855.html

………………………….……………………….……………………….………...........................................

12-26-18   Xie Yanyi, another 709 lawyer who was released on bail last year, said in an interview that he believed Wang Quanzhang was probably tortured during his years behind bars as he had heard him “screaming in pain” when they were both in the same detention centre.  https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/2179524/chinese-rights-lawyer-wang-quanzhang-court-final-case-2015

…………………………………………………….…………

12-13-2017  

Xie was disappeared along with hundreds of other lawyers and activists in the “709 Crackdown” in the summer of 2015 and placed under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location where he was beaten, starved, tortured and forced to take “medicine”.  He was incarcerated for 553 days, during which time his wife gave birth to their baby daughter and his mother died.  http://rsdlmonitor.com/starved-beaten-and-forcibly-medicated-xie-yanyis-story-of-rsdl-part-i-2/

……………………….………………………………………………......................................................

12-7-18   Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Friday handed down a three-year jail term to a musician who sang about late Nobel peace laureate and political prisoner

Liu Xiaobo.

  Singer-songwriter Xu Lin 

was sentenced to three years' imprisonment after the Nansha District People's Court in the provincial capital Guangzhou found him guilty of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble," his lawyer Liu Hao told RFA.

  Xu was detained last year after he penned songs in memory of Liu, who died in police custody of late-stage liver cancer in July 2017….

  Xu's wife, who gave only her surname,

Wang, said the hearing only took a few minutes, after which her husband was taken away again.  She rejected the charges and verdict, saying Xu had only written about factual matters.

"There will always be some people who stand up when faced with injustice," Wang said.  "Aren't we even allowed to leave a comment?  So what if we have a go at our leaders?  Are they going to charge me?"  She said the administration of President Xi Jinping is taking an ever-harder line with any form of public dissent or criticism.  "They seem to be heading back to the era of [late supreme leader] Mao Zedong.  What year are we in?" she said.  "This sort of thing would never happen in a democratic country."  She said Xu had likely received a harsher sentence because he had refused to cooperate with the authorities by producing a "confession," or by pleading guilty.

  Security was tight around the court buildings on Friday morning ahead of the hearing, with a strong police presence in the streets outside meaning Xu's supporters were unable to approach the building.  "They had set up a checkpoint on the left-hand turn you make to get here, so nobody could get anywhere near [the court]," Wang said.  "If anyone dared to hold up [a banner or placard], they would have detained them, and they wouldn't let anyone hang around there; they were chasing them away before they had even gotten close."

  Guangzhou-based rights activist

Huang Yongxiang said Xu's jailing was a further, serious blow to freedom of expression in China.  "If people can be detained just for making casual comments, then it shows things are getting stricter and stricter," Huang said.  "Of course, this is going to strike fear into the majority of people.  The suppression of freedom of speech will definitely result in more people censoring themselves," he said.

 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-jails-guangdong-musician-12072018114044.html

..........………………………….……………………….……….....................................................................…

  Shortly after Chen assumed power (in Xinjiang 2016) the entire People’s Square of Hotan saw an impressive show of military might, as it was filled with thousands of soldiers marching, yelling, and chanting allegiance to the Chinese Community Party and the state.

  For a year after that, every morning at 10:30, traffic was suspended and the “invading forces” would parade for an hour through the city’s main thoroughfares.  Sirens blaring and headed by a cordon of 50 motorcycles, over a thousand soldiers followed on foot in platoons, stopping every now and again to shout slogans.  Armored vehicles topped with enormous guns, personnel carriers, and trucks filled to the gunnels with soldiers followed up the rear slowly and menacingly as ordinary people anxious to go about their everyday tasks looked on, in silence, powerless and unprotesting.

  A year on, the daily parades have stopped, but the invading army has melted insidiously into a new world of ramped up monitoring and surveillance.  In this new reality, people are compelled to spy on each other; every movement, conversation and friendship group is monitored through compulsory phone checks and spying apps on mobile phones.  Stepping out of line, a blurred line whose boundaries are ill defined, could lose you your freedom, your children, your family and even your life itself.   https://thediplomat.com/2018/11/xinjiang-life-during-a-peoples-war-on-terror/

.……………...........................................