April 15, 2015
Feng Yuan, a women’s rights activist who was not jailed, waiting for the release of other activists outside a detention center in Beijing.
Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
Beijing—Though liberated from the confines of jail cells in western Beijing, the five young women’s rights activists who have won broad international support, including from Hillary Rodham Clinton and other political leaders, remain criminal suspects in the eyes of the police and the Chinese judicial system.
For at least one year, the women cannot travel without informing the police, their lawyers said. They could be detained again at any time or called into a police station for interrogation.
Any further activist campaigns or work with nongovernmental organizations could mean more jail time for them. On Tuesday, the husband of Wu Rongrong, one of the women, said in a telephone interview that he was not sure what Ms. Wu planned to do with the advocacy group she had founded in the eastern city of Hangzhou.
The women have been released on bail because prosecutors have not yet brought charges against them, as the police had wanted. But the continuing pressure and scrutiny on their activities means the security forces under Xi Jinping, China’s president and head of the Communist Party, have again tightened the vise around civic discourse and action, even over issues that do not overtly threaten the party.
More than any other case since Mr. Xi rose to power in late 2012, the ordeal of the so-called Feminist Five gives a clear look at the dyspeptic and hostile view that Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders have of civil society. It also reveals the lengths those officials will go to constrict grass-roots activism, even at the expense of international good will.
Public condemnations by American leaders and other prominent figures over the women’s detentions might have contributed to a high-level decision to release them on bail. But the Beijing police’s relentless push for criminal charges and the fact that the women were held for five weeks despite the international uproar show that the party was willing to tolerate China taking a hit to its global image in order to send a chilling message to Chinese activists, scholars and human rights advocates said.
“Since their actions were so successful in drawing public attention and in influencing public policy, the ‘sensitive’ label that will now be put on this type of campaign will likely set back China’s women’s rights movement, at least for some time,” said Maya Wang, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Sadly the five’s release does not indicate a change of view by the government towards civil society activists: It still treats them as criminals, rather than as partners in solving pressing social problems.”
