2014-12-30
Students of a rural school sign their names on a banner which reads ‘Promote the spirit of the constitution, build a harmonious campus’ in Shandong province, Dec. 4, 2014.
AFP
A court in the Chinese capital on Tuesday handed a 12-month jail term to a documentary filmmaker after he made a film about constitutional government.
Shen Yongping was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for “running an illegal business” by Beijing’s Chaoyang District People’s Court after the country’s powerful media censors declared his film “an illegal publication.”
Shen’s film, “A Hundred Years of Constitutionalism,” tells the history of attempts to establish constitutional rule in modern China, many of which were thwarted by the ruling Chinese Communist Party in spite of promises by Mao Zedong to implement democracy after he took power.
According to a copy of the charge sheet posted online, the government’s Bureau of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, which administers tight control over media and publications, said 4,000 copies of the film found at Shen’s apartment were illegal publications.
Shen had made the film in the face of continual official interference and harassment, his lawyer said.
The filmmaker, who was initially detained in April, had no plans to make money from the documentary, which was completed a few months before China celebrated its first national Constitution Day.
Instead, he had been handing out DVDs free of charge, and had planned to post the documentary online as a free download, his lawyer Zhang Xuezhong told RFA.
“The charge is ridiculous, and has been cooked up out of nothing,” Zhang said. “He never made this film to try to make money; it was an act in the public interest.”
“He just wanted to strengthen people’s view of the Constitution, and he used an art form to depict the past 100 years of Chinese people’s struggle for governance by the Constitution.”
“I think that this judgment is wrong, because for illegal business to have taken place, there has to have been some profit from commercial activity,” Zhang added.
“Shen actually lost a lot of money on this film.”
