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Once a week, Chinese activists Sophia Huang Xueqin and Wang Jianbing gathered friends and acquaintances, mostly just to talk.
At Wang’s one-room apartment in central Guangzhou, attendees would share experiences about working in China’s nonprofit, being LGBTQ, or preserving mental health when they are marginalized by vision. of Chinese Communist Party society.
Sometimes the group just watched a movie, went hiking, or played mah-jongg or a board game. It was intended to be a safe and inclusive space to support each other or talk openly about ideas banned in public discourse by state censors.
Now, in part because of these meetings, Huang and Wang are facing a charge of “inciting the subversion of state power.”
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Nearly nine months after his disappearance, the case of “xuebing” – a fusion of the names used by his supporters – has become an example of how far the Communist Party will go to stifle divergent ideas from the his. Now, 33 years after the crushing of the Tiananmen Square demonstration, the authorities are making sure that these movements never start.
Beyond a high-profile campaign to crush the public defense of pro-democracy activists and human rights lawyers, China’s security status is increasingly devoting resources to controlling the privacy of socially active people with views he considers problematic.
Human rights activists criticized the visit last week of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to China, where she only made cautious criticisms of a mass internment campaign in Xinjiang. . Huang and Wang’s supporters expressed frustration with Bachelet speaking at Guangzhou University, just minutes away from where Wang used to live, and praised the “youth movements and actions that challenge discrimination, injustice and inequality.” “, but they did not raise the issue publicly.
Since the couple was arrested in September 2021 a day before Huang flew to Britain to study, Chinese police have questioned dozens of individuals who attended weekly meetings, sometimes traveling around the country to locate them. or picking up people on the street. , close friends of the couple told The Washington Post in interviews. The interrogation usually lasts 24 hours.
The individuals, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, say there is no basis for considering the subversive meetings. In the process of being questioned, however, it became clear that this was the conclusion that the police had reached. A friend said interrogators used photos of events in early 2021, suggesting they had been overseeing the group for more than half a year before arresting Huang and Wang.
Police called the meetings an attempt to subvert the state “a complete invention,” said a close friend of Huang who attended the meetings. “They are complete bulls … coming from their own paranoia.”
“We were just making friends and talking about topics ranging from how hard it is to be gay or how many sleepless nights we’ve had this week and how hard it is to find work,” he said.
Neither the national nor Guangzhou branches of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security responded to requests for comments sent by fax.
The opacity of the Chinese legal system, especially for cases involving national security, means that the exact nature of the prosecutors’ case against Huang and Wang is still unclear, even for their lawyers. Wang’s lawyer was able to meet him for half an hour in April for the first time. Huang’s lawyer’s request to meet with his client or see the prosecutor’s case against her was denied, and authorities cited coronavirus prevention measures.
Both had previously worked on issues considered sensitive by the Chinese state. A prominent feminist, Huang had gone from journalism to activism throughout the #MeToo movement while supporting women in presenting stories of sexual harassment and assault. Wang worked in non-governmental labor rights organizations that supported workers suffering from work-related illnesses.
It is unclear to what extent his activism is also considered a motive for the subversion charge. In 2019, Huang was detained for three months after writing articles about protests in Hong Kong against the imposition by Beijing of a stifling national security law. But friends say the police mostly seemed interested in the nature of the weekly meetings, as well as any international events they attended or the foreign funding they might have received.
Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese state of security has stepped up efforts to prevent dissent before it can take root. The loopholes in surveillance that have allowed previous generations of activists to gain strength are increasingly being filled with new campaigns calling for police surveillance in the face of any signs of emerging threats to national security and social stability.
In previous administrations, the movements could often gain some degree of public traction before the arrests. When on Saturday 33 years ago the Chinese military bloodily put an end to the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, his legacy lived on characters such as Liu Xiaobo, who helped write and promoted a manifesto known as Letter 08, which in 2008 urged an end. to the one-party government.
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After the document obtained thousands of signatures, Liu was jailed for “inciting subversion” – the same crime of which Huang and Wang are accused – shortly before winning the Nobel Peace Prize. His death from liver cancer in 2017, while under the watchful eye of Chinese security guards, sparked an outpouring of mourning from Chinese liberals.
A subsequent “rights advocacy” movement largely abandoned calls for democratization in favor of the demand for basic civil liberties for the oppressed. Lawyers and activists advocated for victims of forced evictions and the spread of HIV by impure needles or practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
Once again, these efforts were crushed in repression that culminated in an extensive campaign launched on July 9, 2015, when dozens were arrested overnight.
Since then, the government has tried to protect itself from both the resurgence of older movements and the arrival of a younger generation such as Huang and Wang, which focuses more on preserving personal dignity and individual well-being.
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Human rights lawyers are now struggling to take on sensitive cases because of an increasingly delicate control system that has been built up in recent years, according to Mina Huang, a Chinese human rights lawyer. He is also concerned that the normalization of data tracking during the pandemic will make the situation worse.
“The work done by Huang Xueqin and Wang Jianbing was very significant. It gave young people a space to become aware of this time and of our situation,” he said. The authorities are afraid that the younger generation will become active. “
According to the couple’s friends, the idea of starting a move was far from their heads when they attended meetings at Wang’s apartment. Many, including Wang, were struggling with depression and anxiety at a time when civil society was under attack.
Taking tea, wine and fruit provided by Wang, they discussed their personal struggles along with the problems of the day. “It wasn’t about how to respond. It was about how we understood what was going on. Because we thought we didn’t have room for any kind of activism,” said a friend.
Another friend lamented the authorities ’direct intolerance of communities operating out of their control. “But not all meetings are about the CCP. Not everything is about you.”
Pei Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.