The detention of a Beijing Twitter user, apparently over an online joke, is raising concerns among activists that authorities will keep their harsh grip on discussion long after the end of last week’s Communist Party leadership shift.
Beijing resident Zhai Xiaobing, known by his handle @Stariver on Twitter, was apprehended by police in Miyun county in northeastern Beijing on Nov. 7 and later taken to the Miyun Detention Center on charges of “spreading false terrorist information,” friends say.
A man answering the phone at the Miyun detention center on Wednesday confirmed Mr. Zhai was there and said he’d been detained because “he wrote a microblog post containing false information on the Internet.”
Friends say they believe “false information” refers to a tweet, posted by Mr. Zhai on Nov. 5 that took aim at the 18th Party Congress – a week-long political event that culminated last Thursday with the unveiling of the party’s new “fifth-generation” leaders — by imagining it as the setting for a new installment in the “Final Destination” horror film series. That tweet (in Chinese), roughly translated:
#SpoilerTweet# #EnterAtYourPeril# Final Destination 6 will soon hit theaters. The Great Hall of the People suddenly collapses, killing all but seven of the 2000 people meeting there. Later, one-by-one the survivors die in strange ways. Is this God playing games, or the Devil venting his wrath? What does the mysterious number 18 have to do with unlocking the gate to Hell? An earthshaking experience premieres globally on Nov. 18!
The Communist Party’s newly reconfigured Politburo Standing Committee, the group that essentially runs China, has seven members, including newly appointed Communist Party chief Xi Jinping.
Mr. Zhai works at an investment company and studied ancient Chinese literature at prestigious Peking University, according to friends. He interacts regularly with Chinese activists and dissidents on Twitter, which is blocked in China but accessible to those with the know-how to circumvent the country’s Internet controls.
Like many Chinese users of Twitter, he has used the taken to the service to criticize and comment on the Chinese government in ways that wouldn’t be tolerated by censors on domestic social media sites. Some of his criticisms, like the Nov. 5 “Final Destination” tweet, are wrapped in pop cultural or literary references. But others are more direct.
“The path of socialism with Chinese characteristics can only be smoothed out with tanks,” he wrote on Nov. 4 in a post mocking the Communist Party’s turgid slogans. “Only dwarves like Deng Xiaoping need to hold high the great banner of Deng Xiaoping theory.”
Despite existing outside the purview of Chinese censors, Twitter is closely monitored by China’s state security agents because of its popularity among dissidents, friends of Mr. Zhai’s say.
“Personally, I think they were probably watching him for a long time. The 18th Party Congress is a hypersensitive period, so they I think they used the opportunity of that tweet to grab him,” said Liu Yanping, an assistant to dissident artist Ai Weiwei and friend of Mr. Zhai’s.
The Beijing Public Security Bureau did not respond to requests for comment.
This isn’t the first time Chinese authorities have apprehended a critic for posting a joke on Twitter. In 2010, human rights activist Cheng Jianping was arrested on the eve of her wedding and eventually sentenced to a year in a labor camp for forwarding a sardonic tweet written by her husband that mocked an anti-Japanese boycott happening at the time.
Friends and advocates have launched an online petition calling for Mr. Zhai to be set free. If he isn’t released soon, his friends plan to hire a human rights lawyer to take up his case, according to Ms. Liu.
– Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin
