2015-09-04
A voter fills his ballot during rare village committee elections in Wukan, in Guangdong province, in a file photo.
AFP
Authorities in the central Chinese province of Hubei have detained grass-roots election expert and former independent People’s Congress deputy Yao Lifa at the school where he teaches, fellow activists told RFA.
Yao was taken away by police at his school in Hubei’s Qianjiang city on Thursday, as the ruling Chinese Communist Party leadership gathered in Beijing for a massive military parade marking the end of the war with Japan 70 years ago.
Xu Qin, of the China Human Rights Observer group, said Yao isn’t picking up his phone, and had responded briefly to a WhatsApp message sent on Thursday with the words, “It’s not convenient for me to talk for a few days.”
“Not convenient” is frequently used by Chinese activists to indicate that they are in custody or under close surveillance by the authorities.
“It looked as if they hadn’t yet confiscated his phone,” Xu said. But he said Yao had already been under close surveillance by police, making his ‘disappearance’ a concern.
Yao, 57, is an outspoken constitutional expert and a long-time civil rights and political activist, who was elected to the Qianjiang municipal People’s Congress in 1998 as a rare independent candidate, where he used his platform to criticize government policy.
Xu said he had recently been involved in a discussion group on the popular chatroom QQ, and had been planning a video lecture for the group on the topic of standing as an independent candidate.
“We have already run this four times in the past, every Thursday, and it has been a great success,” Xu said. “Everyone wants to hear what he has to say.”
“But after the second time, he lost his freedom and was put under house arrest,” he said. “The authorities took him a long way out of town for a meal, and told him not to do those lectures any more.”
Repeated calls to Yao’s wife’s cell phone rang unanswered on Friday.
Past run-ins
In September 2011, Yao suffered multiple injuries after almost a month of secret detention and torture, his wife said at the time, following his release.
Yao, who inspired a national movement to field independent candidates in this year’s government controlled People’s Congress elections, also reported being starved in the detention center.
