China rights website founder held over 'state secrets': Amnesty
China rights website founder held over 'state secrets':
Amnesty
December 21, 2016
Chinese dissident Huang Qi has been detained by police
for the third time this year, according to Amnesty International (AFP
Photo/FRED DUFOUR)
The founder of one of China's few websites dedicated to
reporting human rights abuses has been formally arrested for "leaking
state secrets", Amnesty International said Thursday -- the latest blow in
a broad crackdown on activists.
Huang Qi ran the website "64 Tianwang", named
in part after the bloody June 4, 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protestors,
for nearly two decades.
Its headlines -- "Village Officials Stab
Campaigner", "Gangsters Detain Protestor" -- are rarely seen in
ordinary Chinese media, and the content is blocked on the mainland.
The site was awarded the Reporters Without Borders
(RSF)-TV5 Monde Press Freedom Prize in early November. Twelve years ago, he
received RSF's "Cyber-Dissident Prize."
Just weeks after receiving the most recent prize, Huang
was detained by police in his hometown of Chengdu, the capital of the
southwestern province of Sichuan, according to Amnesty -- his third detention
this year.
Last Friday, his family received official notice that he
had been formally arrested for leaking state secrets to overseas entities, the
campaign group said.
It remained unclear whether he had access to a lawyer,
Amnesty China researcher Patrick Poon told AFP, stating that Huang was "at
risk of torture and other mistreatment".
"He may have been targeted because of the
international attention he and his website received" from the RSF prize,
Poon said.
Huang's arrest might also be intended as a warning to
websites chronicling grassroots activism in advance of a controversial new law
set to impose restrictions on foreign NGOs operating in China, which will come
into force in January.
The law gives police wide-ranging powers over overseas
charities and bans them from recruiting members or raising funds in the
country.
"I'm quite worried that the government is trying to
send a signal to organisations that they believe to have foreign links,"
said Poon, noting that authorities had detained Liu Feiyue, founder of the
Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch website, around the same time as Huang.
President Xi Jinping has overseen a wide-ranging
clampdown on civil society since assuming power in 2012.
But Huang's struggles to continue his work date even
further back.
In 2000 he was jailed for five years, the first ever
Chinese "cyber-dissident" to be imprisoned for online activism.
He was imprisoned again for a further three years in 2009
for reporting on low-quality school buildings that collapsed in a massive
earthquake the previous year in Sichuan which claimed 87,000 lives.
He had been physically abused while in jail, Huang told
AFP during an interview last year, but stated that he nevertheless felt that
authorities now appreciated his coverage, as the exposure of injustices
committed by local officials dovetailed with an anti-corruption campaign also
launched under Xi.
"The top levels of government no longer think of me
as a threat," he said at the time. "They even see me as useful,
because I expose a lot of cases which they don't know about."
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