Chinese rights activist Guo Feixiong (real name Yang Maodong) was intercepted at Shanghai Pudong Airport on Jan. 28 while on a flight to the United States to visit his seriously ill wife. Guo’s Family in the U.S. says they have made numerous inquiries but have not heard anything from him, and are hoping for diplomatic help from the U.S. and the international community. Some observers say Guo’s last-minute interdiction from leaving the country once again reveals the authorities’ disregard for basic human rights and humanitarian norms, and highlights the further deterioration of the human rights situation in mainland China.
Guo Feixiong was intercepted and lost at the airport
Guo Feixiong’s sister Yang Maoping flew from Shanghai to Maryland more than a week ago to visit and help care for her sister-in-law Zhang Qing, who had just been released from the hospital after surgery to remove colon cancer, which was in the middle to late stages.
Yang Maoping told VOA on Sunday that before she learned her brother Yang Maodong (pen name Guo Feixiong) had been intercepted, she thought he would make the trip soon to be with Zhang Qing and her children, and that her family was eagerly awaiting his arrival.
She said she accompanied Zhang Qing to the hospital for a review on Jan. 28, when she got the news that her brother had passed airport security, only to return Home later to learn that Guo Feixiong had been banned from leaving the country.
At 8:47 p.m. that night (local Time in Shanghai), the last three messages Guo Feixiong sent by WeChat to his brother-in-law, who was in Shanghai to see him off, were 1) China Customs has announced that it has officially refused to let me leave the country due to suspicion of endangering national security, and I have started an indefinite hunger strike on the spot at the customs desk; 2) You should leave other things alone in the future; and 3) I may be caught back in Guangzhou tomorrow.
Yang Maoping was a doctor at a hospital in Shanghai before coming to the United States. She said that on Tuesday Zhang Qing will go to the hospital for another examination to determine if the two lumps in his liver found earlier are cancer metastases.
According to Yang Maoping, Zhang Qing is having a very hard time these days because of the incident, feeling very bad and seriously affecting her physical recovery, and urgently needs her husband of 12 years to come and give irreplaceable care in Life and spirit.
Yang Maoping also disclosed that on the day of the interception, Guo Feixiong and his brother-in-law, who were in a hurry to get there, did not eat dinner. After Guo Feixiong went on an indefinite protest hunger strike, family and friends became very anxious. She said the Guangzhou state security guards, who are usually responsible for dealing with her brother, have not been answering the phone calls she has made, while those who used to deal directly with her personally said they did not understand the situation.
Dr. Yang said she called a colleague from her former unit who now works at the Pudong airport medical office on Sunday, and the other party said they had not heard of hunger strikers being forcibly intubated and fed at the airport.
Yang Maoping said it was impossible to determine where her brother was being controlled by the police, but none of that mattered, the priority was for him to come to his wife’s side as soon as possible.
Fear of a repeat of Gao Zhisheng’s “evaporation”
Chen Guangcheng, a friend of Guo Feixiong and a blind legal scholar, told the Voice of America that Guo Feixiong’s failure to leave the country and being lost is similar to the time his wife, Yuan Weijing, was intercepted at the Beijing airport years ago when he received the 2007 “Outstanding Leader of the Year” international award while in prison.
According to Chen Guangcheng, Guo Feixiong is in a critical situation and needs urgent attention from the outside world, otherwise he may disappear for three years, like the famous human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has not been heard from since.
Zhisheng Gao has been a practicing lawyer since 1996, and has long helped the disadvantaged to defend their rights. After his release from prison in 2014, he was placed under continued house arrest by the authorities and has been missing since August 2017.
International human rights organizations stand in solidarity
Amnesty International on Sunday called for concern for Guo Feixiong’s safety and health, and wrote a petition to Chinese Public Security Minister Zhao Kezhi urging authorities to allow him to leave China, lift any arbitrary restrictions on him, and ensure he receives adequate medical care during his hunger strike.
Prior to this, the Rev. Fu Xiqiu, president of China Aid, a U.S. non-governmental organization and Christian human rights organization, had urgently contacted the U.S. State Department to seek U.S. diplomatic concerns about the incident. He received an update from the State Department on Saturday (Jan. 30) that the State Department was stepping up its actions and negotiations with the Chinese side regarding the Guo Feixiong case.
A day earlier, the State Department had expressed its “dismay” and “close concern” about the incident to the media.
The head of the human rights organization assisted Guo Feixiong’s wife and three children to come to the U.S. from China in 2009, when he was serving a prison sentence for “illegal business operation.
Fu told VOA that Guo’s case is a “litmus test” of the Biden administration’s China Policy and whether U.S.-China relations will soon improve. In view of the fact that Guo Feixiong’s daughter Yang Tianjiao has joined the U.S. citizenship, Guo Feixiong is legally an immediate relative of a U.S. citizen, and the U.S. government is obliged to help Guo Feixiong to go to the U.S. for family reunion.
Chen Guangcheng: U.S. Intervention May Have Important Impact
Chen Guangcheng, a blind scholar who studies legal and human rights issues in the United States, criticized the Chinese Communist authorities for taking advantage of the situation by imposing certain conditions and brutally denying Guo Feixiong’s right to leave the country, fearing that Guo’s influence overseas would pose a threat to the regime.
Chen Guangcheng believes Beijing will pay a diplomatic price for this. “If the U.S. wants (to intervene), it is going to make it pay.” And that price is very big, not simply a matter of petty friction,” he said. Because in a case like Guo Feixiong, first of all, he has been out of prison for so long, and his family out of such a situation, you do not let him out, whether from the most basic humane, or from the law, reason, no matter from which point of view it does not have any reason to speak.”
Many years ago, Chen Guangcheng, who has been blind since childhood, used his self-taught legal knowledge to help victims of birth control violence and people with disabilities defend their rights, and was sent to prison for four years and three months for “destruction of property” and “gathering a crowd to disrupt traffic. In April 2012, he managed to escape and, with the help of friends, fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he finally moved his family to the United States under the scrutiny of the international media after some high-level diplomatic games between the U.S. and China.
Chen Guangcheng believes that Beijing’s move to ban Guo Feixiong from leaving the country on the grounds that he is “suspected of endangering national security” is both absurd and foolish, and that it is counterproductive.
Feng Zhenghu: Guo Feixiong’s case is reasonable and the authorities are passive
Shanghai rights activist Feng Zhenghu was secretly kidnapped and illegally detained in Beijing for 41 days in February 2009, and then advised by Shanghai public security authorities to leave the country for Japan to avoid the 20th anniversary of the June 4 incident. On June 7, 2010, he was denied entry to Japan eight times, and was forced to stay in the immigration hall at Tokyo’s Narita Airport for three months. He repeatedly expressed his desire to return to Japan to the Chinese Communist Party leaders and international media before returning to his home in Shanghai before the 2010 Lunar New Year.
Feng Zhenghu recently told VOA that until now, a group of plainclothes officers have been stationed outside his home to keep an eye on him.
The source, who has chosen to use Chinese law to defend his rights, believes that Guo Feixiong was presumably taken away from the airport long ago and is now likely to be asked to negotiate terms, and that authorities should let him leave the country. “When he leaves like this, the impact is huge, and everyone is watching. So it doesn’t matter which place he is in. Guo Feixiong is already on the moral high ground, too.”
Feng Zhenghu pointed out to Voice of America that Guo Feixiong was stopped while leaving Shanghai with a passport issued by the authorities to leave the country, indicating that local public security officials wanted him to leave the country, only that officials higher up in the hierarchy couldn’t make up their minds and the repetition occurred because within the Chinese system, such matters are not decided by one person in the Ministry of Public Security, and the bigger the official the less courageous he is, all afraid of taking responsibility, so he must make Guo Feixiong promise not to talk politics after leaving the country.
Feng Zhenghu pointed out that when he was preparing to leave the country again after returning from Japan in 2010, the Shanghai police also verbally intervened on the grounds of “national security” and he was sued in court.
In an interview with the Voice of America in August 2019, after his second prison term, Guo Feixiong, then 53, urged Xi Jinping to implement constitutional reform and called for deeper U.S.-China cooperation.
Feng Zhenghu expressed understanding for Guo Feixiong’s insistence on staying in China after both releases for his political ideals. He said that this is the same choice that other “prisoners of conscience” who advocated for the new civil movement, such as Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, made when they gave up their overseas residency. But the possibility that he will be used for some diplomatic dealings is not ruled out.
Yang Maoping: Hoping for a heavyweight rescue
Yang Maoping, Guo Feixiong’s sister, expressed her gratitude for the international community’s and public opinion’s attention to the Guo Feixiong case, and told VOA that when she learned that the Ministry of Public Security had suddenly changed its mind and required Yang Maodong to reach “certain agreements” as a condition for leaving the country, she had hoped her friends would persuade her brother to go to the United States no matter what.
Dr. Yang said she was extremely concerned about her brother’s situation and was looking forward to having a heavyweight foreign dignitary come forward to contact Beijing authorities about Yang’s obligation to care for his seriously ill wife in the United States.
“I guess someone at the presidential level would have to come forward,” she said. “I remember in the past when President Clinton was not president, years ago there was an American journalist who was detained in North Korea and Clinton personally went to North Korea to get that journalist back. I wish someone like that had come along and saved us and solved the situation in front of us. I think without someone like Biden showing up, maybe it’s not a good idea for us to solve the Yang Maodong matter.”
Scholar: China’s human rights rule of law regressing
A press release issued by China Aid Association recently quoted U.S.-based scholar Meng Yuanxin as saying, “In general, I am not optimistic about Guo Feixiong’s situation because the Chinese Communist Party, since Hu Wen, has had very few cases of even hostage diplomacy, and observing what Xi has done so far, it is a major regression in human rights and the rule of law, and its recklessness has reached a shocking and jaw-dropping level, even to the point of hostage Diplomacy also seems to be scorned and disdainful. Even so, I sincerely hope that the Communist Party’s top brass will take into account China’s most traditional and fundamental notions of human decency and treat Guo Feixiong well, so that he can come to the United States to care for his wife and children, who have been separated for more than a decade.”
Guo Feixiong’s wife, Zhang Qing, is in urgent need of family care after surgery in the United States. Guo sent an urgent open letter several days ago to three Communist Party leaders – Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang and Li Zhanshu – appealing to them to allow him to come to the United States to care for his wife unconditionally and in a humanitarian spirit. But he was barred from leaving Shanghai’s Pudong Airport on Jan. 28 on suspicion of “endangering national security” and subsequently lost contact with the authorities.
The interception of Guo Feixiong’s travel to the U.S. provoked a strong public reaction. The Chinese government has remained silent about the outcry.
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