{"id":42089,"date":"2014-09-07T16:53:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-07T16:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=42089 "},"modified":"2014-09-07T16:53:00","modified_gmt":"2014-09-07T16:53:00","slug":"42089-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=42089","title":{"rendered":"China Targets Family, Friends to Coerce Activists"},"content":{"rendered":"
September 4, 2014 5:39 PM<\/div>
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The Associated Press’ Didi Tang reports on the pressure applied to friends and families of activists and others who find themselves at odds with the authorities.<\/div>
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Xiao Yong used to hold up placards at protests, demanding that China’s leaders declare their assets in a call for political transparency and accountability. But he stopped after men began following his father around and urging him to persuade his 39-year-old son to drop his activism.<\/div>
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“I started to dread that my father’s health would deteriorate because of this,” said Xiao, a former employee at a state electrical utility in the southern city of Shaoyang. “The government was working on my family members, talking to them and instilling fear in them.”<\/div>
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To deter political and social activists, Chinese authorities routinely target their family members, friends and associates, pressuring them to be unwilling agents of persuasion or penalizing them directly.<\/div>
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[…] Sometimes they use more menacing tactics, such as blocking children from their schools, stripping spouses of employment and placing relatives under investigation for fraud. [Source]<\/div>
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Other reported cases include the house arrest of Liu Xia, wife of imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, and the imprisonment of her brother for fraud; violence and other reprisals against the family of U.S.-based legal activist Chen Guangcheng; persistent pressure on the wife and daughter of activist Hu Jia; the interrogation of Tibetan writer Woeser’s 72-year-old mother; obstruction of the lives of recently released rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng’s family; and the targeting of rights lawyer Teng Biao’s relatives.<\/div>
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Continue reading the original article<\/a>.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>&#8220;I started to dread that my father&#8217;s health would deteriorate because of this,&#8221; said Xiao, a former employee at a state electrical utility in the southern city of Shaoyang. &#8220;The government was working on my family members, talking to them and instilling fear in them.&#8221;<\/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-42089","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\/42089","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=42089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42089\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}