Chinese MeToo activist jailed for five years for ‘subversion’
Sophia Huang Xueqin was arrested the night before she was due to travel to Britain to start a Master’s degree at Sussex University
Richard Spencer, China Correspondent
Friday June 14 2024, 6.20am BST, The Times
Sophia Huang Xueqin’s incarceration has been called “an affront to freedom of expression and justice” by free speech groups
One of China’s best-known MeToo activists has been jailed along with a labour rights activist in a case which demonstrates the limits to freedom of association under President Xi.
Sophia Huang Xueqin was arrested the night before she was due to travel to Guangzhou airport in September 2021. She was flying to the UK to start a master’s degree at Sussex University on a British government Chevening scholarship.
Her friend, the labour rights activist Wang Jianbing, was arrested at the same time. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years imprisonment, supporters said after the court hearing on Friday.
The pair were held secretly for a month before their families were informed, and then put under house arrest for a further six months before being charged with “subversion of state power”.
Friends allege they have been frequently held in solitary confinement and been subject to abuse in prison.
At the court hearing in Guangzhou, the city on the Chinese mainland facing Hong Kong, Huang was sentenced to five years in prison and Wang to three and a half, the friends said. The court was closed to journalists.
Huang immediately said she would appeal. Wang was consulting his lawyer.
The pair were not accused of involvement in anti-government activity or protests against the Communist Party. However, they held weekly afternoon gatherings for those interested in social issues to meet and discuss how to take campaigns forward.
Another activist who attended the gathering told The Times that the meetings were to promote civil society concerns and would not have attracted the attention of the Communist Party so aggressively in the past.
But when the numbers of those attending began to rise, the party took it as a “warning”, the activist, who asked to be known as “Rio”, said.
“This entire crackdown and these arrests were totally unexpected,” he said. “People have asked us why we organised these gatherings if we knew we were going to be arrested. But we simply didn’t think we would be in trouble because of this.”
In the years before Xi’s rise to power, the party had begun to draw some distinction between expressions of public opinion that crossed its “red lines”, such as democracy, the status of Tibet, or the Tiananmen Square massacre on the one hand, and commentary on social issues on the other.
For a while, writings on gay rights and online exposés of sexual harassment were at least tolerated.
Xi, however, has gradually moved against any voices that contradict his conservative views of politics and society.
Peng Shuai disappeared for several months after making allegations against a party official
Huang, 36, wrote of her own experience about having to leave the newspaper where she trained because of harassment by an older man assigned to mentor her. She took up other cases and gained international publicity in the wake of the international MeToo campaign against abuse of women by powerful men.
She won support from Wang, 40, who had raised cases of work-place illness on behalf of workers.
However, the government became less tolerant after harassment accusations began to strike close to home. Peng Shuai, China’s star woman tennis player, claimed to have been coerced into sex by Zhang Gaoli, a former vice-premier and member of the inner circle of power, the standing committee of the politburo.
Peng’s social media post describing their relationship was removed and she disappeared for several months.
After Huang and Wang were arrested, the apartment where they held their weekly meetings was searched and their notebooks and papers taken away.
The police also brought in at least 70 people for questioning. The pair’s friends said they believed the police had searched closed circuit television cameras in the apartment complex and used facial recognition technology to identify the activists and friends who had attended the meetings.
“Rio”, 31, said he was lucky — he had just left the country to study for a postgraduate degree abroad himself. He had previously spent time in prison for campaigning for better conditions for China’s army of tens of millions of internal migrant labourers and their families.
He said he thought about 200 people had altogether participated in the gatherings at different times, sharing notes on how to deal with the authorities. “They clearly thought this was becoming a potential threat to stability,” he said. “Those 200 people mostly had some political awareness.”
Huang herself had previously been jailed for three months for “picking quarrels and provoking troubles”, a catch-all offence, after writing articles about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
The pair’s trial began in September, with no members of the public allowed to attend. They both denied wrongdoing.
Wang said he had no intention to subvert state power. “What I care about is the social issues concerning migrant workers with occupational diseases,” he said, according to the pair’s overseas-based support group.
Huang said: “The articles I wrote and the interviews conducted were all factual social phenomena. I did not distort the facts, nor did I use them to attack the government. Everything I do is not to incite subversion of state power.”
Guangzhou, China’s third-largest city and the heart of the Pearl River Delta industrial region, which also includes Hong Kong and Shenzhen, has traditionally been more liberal than the metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai to the north.
For years, its newspapers led the way in corruption investigations and reporting on social issues, even though they were published under the auspices of the provincial party branch.
Xi also appears determined to end this uneven imposition of censorship and other political controls.
The pair’s case won the support of overseas human rights groups — something no longer likely to bear much weight with the Chinese authorities.
“Huang Xueqin is a previous winner of the Index on Censorship Journalism Award,” the free speech group said. “Her incarceration is an affront to freedom of expression and justice. She must be unconditionally released now.”
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