Last November, the Chinese Communist Party arrested Fan Yiping, Fan Wencheng, Lai Jianjun, Qiao Lianhong and Wei Yanni on suspicion of “subverting state power. Overseas Chinese media reported that Fan Yiping, a second-generation official, was previously arrested by the Guangzhou State Security Bureau and is currently being held in Guangzhou’s Huadu Detention Center.
According to Light Media, Fan’s Family received a notice of arrest from the Guangzhou State Security Bureau on Jan. 27. The notice said Fan was arrested on Jan. 7.
The newspaper quoted informed sources as saying that at noon on Nov. 12 last year, eight Guangzhou public security officers raided Fan Yiping’s apartment and took him away. On the following day, Fan Yiping was admitted to hospital and later sent to a designated residence for residential surveillance. Later, Fan Wencheng, Lai Meijun, Qiao Lianhong and other pro-democracy activists disappeared one after another. Lai’s wife later received a notice from the authorities stating that her husband had been charged with “subversion of state power” and was to be placed under “residential surveillance” at a designated residence.
A month later, Guangxi human rights activist Wei Yanni was also arrested by the authorities, believed to be related to the “11-12 Guangzhou subversion of state power case”.
According to the report, Fan Yiping graduated from a military medical university and worked as a surgeon before entering business as the owner of a Food trading company. He comes from a family of Communist Party cadres, and his father was the secretary general of the Guangdong government. In 1998, Fan Yiping was sentenced to three years in prison for receiving Wang Bingzhang, who had secretly returned to China, and then helping Wang Xizhe, a dissident, to go into exile in the U.S. On the eve of June 4, 2014, the Guangzhou authorities sentenced Fan Yiping to 15 days of administrative detention for provocation and search. On the eve of June 4, 2014, Guangzhou authorities placed Fan Yiping in administrative detention for 15 days and searched his apartment.
Chen Chuangchuang, the current director of AFA, told Radio Free Asia earlier that Wei Yani and Fan Yiping were previously the focus of state security surveillance and did not have the potential to commit acts of subversion against state power. The arrest of Wei Yani many days after the four men were arrested is inconsistent with the Chinese Communist authorities’ usual fast-track approach to handling cases. He speculated that the Guangzhou State Security Bureau most likely lacked evidence in expanding the case of the four previously arrested, leading to Wei Yanni’s implosion: “The CCP often runs subversion cases by saying that a group of people are together and it gets worried. Organized opposition groups are the ones the CCP hits hardest in its crackdowns. This looks like Wei Yanni was discovered when the case was being expanded, and if the NSA had known about it from the beginning, it wouldn’t have taken so long to make the arrest.”
The newspaper quoted informed sources in Guangzhou as saying that Fan Wencheng is known to have been doing business in Guangzhou for a long Time and has not made dissident comments online or been restricted from leaving the country by the authorities, and that Fan has also visited Japan and Taiwan in the past two or three years. The sources speculate that Fan’s arrest may also be a problem because of his frequent departures.
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