{"id":33314,"date":"2013-04-03T23:49:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T23:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=33314 "},"modified":"2013-04-03T23:49:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-03T23:49:00","slug":"33314-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=33314","title":{"rendered":"Activists Held Over Transparency Protest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2013-04-02      <\/div>
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Two ladies, acting as mistresses, and a middle-aged man, posing as a sacked corrupt official, in a skit satirizing corruption in Shenzhen city, south China’s Guangdong province, Jan. 22, 2013.<\/div>
 Imaginechina<\/div>
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Authorities in Beijing have detained four activists on suspicion of “unlawful assembly” after they called on top officials to reveal details of their wealth.<\/div>
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Yuan Dong, Zhang Baocheng, Hou Xin, and Ma Xinli were taken to a police station in the busy Xidan shopping district of Beijing after they staged a public protest calling on officials to disclose details of their assets, activists said on Tuesday.<\/div>
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“We went to the police station [on Monday] to try to get them released, because the authorities must tell us what is happening within 24 hours [of detaining them],” said the wife of Yuan Dong, one of the detained activists, who gave only her surname Zhu.<\/div>
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“They told me that Yuan Dong is under suspicion of illegal assembly, and has been criminally detained.”<\/div>
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Yuan and three others had displayed banners which read “Officials, declare your wealth,” and “The China dream must be a daylight dream,”<\/div>
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in a reference to growing calls for a “sunshine law” which has yet to be commented on publicly by the leadership.<\/div>
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Large crowd drawn<\/div>
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Rights activist Zhang Shun said he had seen Sunday’s protest, which drew a crowd of around 200 onlookers.<\/div>
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He said around 20 police and security guards dragged the activists away and dispersed the crowd.<\/div>
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“From what I could see, they didn’t put up any sort of struggle or resistance,” Zhang Shun said. “The police said they were compelling them to come to the police station.”<\/div>
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Xidan, a busy shopping and business district a short distance from the headquarters of the Chinese leadership in Zhongnanhai, is no stranger to public protest. In 1978, it was the scene of a wave of publicly posted petitions and complaints that grew into the Democracy Wall movement.<\/div>
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Sunday’s detentions come amid a growing public campaign to pressure top officials of the ruling Chinese Communist Party to make public the details of their family wealth.<\/div>
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In December, more than 2,000 people took to the streets of Shanghai, marching along a main road in the downtown district and calling on officials to publicize details of their assets, income, and investments, as well as those of their spouses and children.<\/div>
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‘Sunshine law’<\/div>
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Prominent political activists including Beijing-based Hu Jia, Guangzhou-based rights lawyer Guo Feixiong, and literature professor and filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, have also signed a petition in favor of a “sunshine law” in response to an anti-corruption campaign launched by president Xi Jinping at last year’s 18th Party Congress.<\/div>
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“[The leadership], including Xi Jinping, is always talking about having officials declare their assets, but they’re all talk and no action,” Zhu said.<\/div>
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“And now that we citizens have taken this action, the police crack down on us,” she said. “We didn’t do anything destructive or violent; we just wanted to speak out.”<\/div>
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Online transparency campaigner Sun Hanhui said a number of rights lawyers have offered to defend the activists.<\/div>
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“Some lawyers have already agreed to represent and defend the case this morning,” Sun, who works in a law firm, said on Tuesday. “They are putting together a legal team, and eventually they will announce it.”<\/div>
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He said the activists should enjoy the right to freedom of expression under China’s Constitution.<\/div>
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“Their demands, for a system under which high-ranking officials declare their assets, were constitutional,” Sun said. “The Constitution says that citizens have the right to criticize and make suggestions to government.”<\/div>
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“Their actions were entirely legal and reasonable,” he said.<\/div>
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Reported by Qiao Long for RFA’s Mandarin service, and by Hai Nan for the Cantonese service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie<\/div>
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 <\/div>Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>the<\/span><\/a> <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>original article<\/a><\/a><\/a>.<\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/strong>
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<div>Yuan Dong, Zhang Baocheng, Hou Xin, and Ma Xinli were taken to a police station in the busy Xidan shopping district of Beijing after they staged a public protest calling on officials to disclose details of their assets, activists said on Tuesday.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}