2013-09-25
Authorities in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan have detained at least six people and held a prominent rights activist and website founder overnight for questioning over a public protest in support of disgraced politician Bo Xilai, who was handed a life jail term on Sunday for corruption and abuse of power.
“Cai Linlin, who took part in the [pro-Bo] protest was taken away by police at around 10:00 p.m. [on Tuesday],” Chengdu-based rights activist Huang Qi, who founded the Tianwang rights website, said on Wednesday after his own release from questioning.
“And in the early hours of [Wednesday], six Chengdu police officers took away Yang Xiqiong, a farmer who lost land, as well as … Yi Qingxiu, Ao Yufen and Wang Fang.”
Fellow protesters Wang Hongyan and Chen Hong were also detained at the same time, said Huang, who was himself released by state security police in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Huang said he was questioned for several hours straight about a pro-Bo Xilai demonstration by land protesters outside the venue of the 12th World Chinese Entrepreneurs’ Convention, which runs from Sept. 24-27 in Chengdu.
The Tianwang Human Rights Center, which runs the website and provides advocacy support for citizens seeking to defend their rights through legal channels, condemned the detentions and called for the activists’ immediate release.
Huang said he had been warned off posting any information online about Bo Xilai, whose harsher-than-expected sentence handed down by the Intermediate People’s Court in Shandong’s provincial capital of Jinan on Sunday was the culmination of the biggest political scandal to rock the ruling Chinese Communist Party in decades.
“A total of seven police officers and state security police came and told me that I shouldn’t pay attention to the Bo Xilai case,” Huang told RFA’s Mandarin Service.
“They said I had put news on the Internet about the incident in which 16 farmers who had lost their land [to government seizure] held up placards in support of Bo Xilai.”
Bo supporters
While his naked ambition and strong-arm tactics clearly ruffled feathers in Beijing, Bo’s populist brand of politics won supporters across China among the Maoist left wing of the Party and among disadvantaged groups, some of whom have adopted him as a symbol of the oppressed.
Police in Jinan detained at least nine petitioners—ordinary Chinese who pursued redress and complaints against official wrongdoing—who had converged on Jinan for the trial, Huang said at the time.
Several hundred petitioners and Bo supporters from across China were held back from approaching the court buildings by a heavily policed exclusion zone 100 meters (330 feet) from the entrance.
They were joined by Maoists, who held public discussions about Bo’s welfare policies during his tenure as Party secretary in Chongqing.
Huang said he had refused to sign a slew of legal documents and statements presented to him during his detention on Wednesday.
“The police also searched my home and took away four computers, before taking me to the Wuhou branch of the Chengdu police department [for questioning],” he said.
Huang said he was questioned for three hours about the Bo-linked protest, which took place during an annual overseas Chinese business fair in Chengdu recently.
“At about midnight, the attitude of the police suddenly changed, and they told me to quit messing around with them,” he said.
“[They said] Bo Xilai was a convicted criminal … so I shouldn’t publish any news related to Bo Xilai.”
Life sentence
Many had expected Bo, the former Party boss of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, to get 15 to 20 years in jail, slightly more than his former police chief and right-hand man Wang Lijun had received in September 2012.
Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was handed a suspended death sentence in August 2012 for the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, prompting widespread speculation over the extent of her husband’s involvement.
But the feisty Bo refused to admit any guilt in court, retracting a confession that he said was signed under duress, and ridiculing witnesses for the prosecution, which called in its summing up statement for a “severe” punishment for the “princeling” son of a revolutionary Party elder and former Politburo member.
The 64-year-old Bo was sentenced to life in prison on the bribery charges, 15 years for embezzlement, and seven years for abuse of power, the Jinan court said on its verified account on the Twitter-like service Sina Weibo.
All Bo’s personal assets were ordered to be seized after he was found guilty of taking 20.4 million yuan (U.S. $3.3 million) in bribes, a sum which many familiar with his career said was greatly reduced from the likely actual amount.
Reported by Qiao Long for RFA’s Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
