2014-12-22
Chinese police try to stop photos being taken of the Jingxi Hotel as the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee holds it’s secretive Third Plenum in Beijing, Nov. 12, 2013.
AFP
Authorities in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan are preparing to try an octogenarian writer on public order charges and for “running an illegal business” after he criticized a former senior official in the ruling Chinese Communist Party, his lawyer said on Monday.
Huang Zerong, 81, widely known by his pen name Tie Liu, was detained by police at his Beijing home in September on suspicion of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble.”
He was later also charged with “running an illegal business” and transferred to police detention in Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu, his defense lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan told RFA.
He said the authorities now look set to proceed with his trial. “The case was transferred to the state prosecutor’s office on Friday,” Liu said. “I hadn’t been expecting this.”
Tie’s wife Ren Hengfang said she had been handed a travel ban following her husband’s formal arrest in October.
“They informed me in mid-October that I wasn’t allowed to leave the country,” Ren said. “We, his family, are doing whatever we can, but all we can do is wait.”
“How could we not be worried? He is so old,” she said. “But what’s the use of worrying; he can’t see us and we can’t see him.”
Ren said she had planned to take the couple’s two-year-old granddaughter to her mother in the United States, but has now been unable to do so.
Meanwhile, Liu said the case should never have been transferred to Chengdu in the first place.
“It should always have been processed in Beijing, because he was a long-term resident in Beijing,” Liu said, adding: “[He] had always expected to be released on bail.”
He said previous attempts to start a prosecution had been delayed after prosecutors told police there wasn’t enough evidence against Tie Liu.
“I think it is likely that they will now indict him,” he said.
