In the online world, he is a tweeter on the influential Chinese Twitter account “China’s Word Jail Incident Inventory.
“No one around me knows that I care about politics,” he says, “and I have to keep myself safe.”
For security reasons, he only reveals that he is Wang, a post-90s activist living in “wall country” who describes himself as “an activist advocating freedom of speech.
In October 2019, as the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 70th anniversary in power, he launched “China’s Word Jail Incident Inventory,” a bilingual record of cases in which people have been convicted for their words in China in recent years. Through government websites, court verdicts, official media reports, police social media accounts and other public sources, he has built a database of nearly 2,000 cases of convictions for speech from 2013 to the present. These are the tip of the iceberg, he said.
Speaking of the opportunity to set up the Twitter account, Wang told VOA that China had caught many so-called “insulters” at the Time of a major military parade to celebrate the country’s 70th anniversary. Some people were arrested simply for saying something online that officials didn’t like. The two most absurd cases for him were a Sichuan netizen who said, “What’s so good about the parade” and a Shan Dongfang daily who said, “The motherland didn’t raise you, your mother raised you.” The two were both detained.
“That’s when I realized that this country’s crackdown on speech may have risen to a new level. Although we all know that such incidents have always existed, it was only when that series of cases was reported that I felt the fine print,” Wang said.
Among the cases he documented were well-known figures who were widely reported in the media, such as property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, who was heavily sentenced to 18 years for suggesting that Xi was a “clown who insists on being an emperor even after stripping him naked”; Xu Zhangrun, a former Tsinghua University professor who was dismissed after publishing a series of articles critical of the authorities; and Xu Zhangrun, who was prosecuted for showing solidarity with several prisoners of conscience. Geng Xiaonan, a “chivalrous woman” in the publishing industry who was charged with “illegal business operation”; Cai Xia, a former professor at the Communist Party School who was expelled from the Party for attacking the Communist Party as a “political zombie”; and Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist who was sentenced to prison for reporting on the Wuhan Epidemic. Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan ……
But many more are little-known, little-noticed figures, some of whom have not even been named. For example, Wu, who was detained for 7 days in Qingdao, Shandong Province, for “insulting village cadres” in a WeChat group; Li, who was detained for 5 days in Yinchuan, Ningxia Province, for bashing traffic police in a posting bar; and Yao, who was sentenced to 6 months in prison in Song County, Henan Province, for tweeting and forwarding “false information about the epidemic related to politics. Yao Mou. Among the nearly 2,000 contemporary victims of literal imprisonment, there are even minors.
Huang Genbao, a 45-year-old former employee of a central enterprise in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, is one of the victims of the word prison that Wang has “documented”. In the official verdict, he was sentenced to one year and four months in prison for “insulting the country’s leaders” and spreading “false information that damages the country’s image and harms its interests” on Twitter.
“On the morning of May 31 (2019), around 9 a.m., they called me to the conference room through someone from the unit, and I was not prepared, and they took my phone away,” Huang Genbao told Voice of America, “and I didn’t think he would do anything for real this time. “
Huang Genbao, who was released from prison, has opened a new Twitter account (his previous account is controlled by someone else) and continues to speak out. He maintains his innocence and has formally filed a complaint for a new trial with the Xuzhou Intermediate People’s Court.
“We are human beings, how can we allow them to be kept in captivity like pigs,” he wrote.
“I don’t think these people should be forgotten,” Xiao Wang, the tweeter of “China’s Word Jail Incident Inventory,” told Voice of America. Many of these cases would be headlines in other countries, but in China, it’s just a number, simply one in a thousand or one in ten thousand. This group is so huge, and I want to do everything I can to let the world know about them.”
At the same time Wang was tweeting, the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a host of diplomats were setting up Twitter accounts. Although Twitter was blocked by the Chinese government, officials clearly realized the importance of occupying the platform.
At that time, Wang often tweeted at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posting cases he had compiled of people who had been convicted for their words. A week later, he was blacked out.
Last year, the Chinese Foreign Ministry publicly stated: “In China, no one can be punished or penalized for merely speaking out. …… A very small number of people, for ulterior motives, create rumors that they have been ‘convicted for their words’ in China. ‘ that do not stand up to factual scrutiny.”
“So may I ask, does this stand up to scrutiny?” Wang again posted a page full of victims who were warned, detained and even sentenced for speaking out.
He told Voice of America, “It is important to let the world know that the Chinese Communist Party’s suppression of speech and persecution of human rights is systematic and not just a few simple cases.”
Many tweeters said thank you to Xiao Wang for making the forgotten people remembered and letting the world know the current state of freedom of expression in China.
One Twitter user wrote, “When these things happen one after another, you may think they are just single incidents, individual events, but after listing them together, you find a huge net around you, choking you and making you tremble. In fact, disaster is not far away, how can we continue to age?”
Wang is also aware that what he is doing may bring risks to himself, and perhaps he himself is the next object to be “inventoried”.
Last April, three 90-year-olds in Beijing were suspected of disappearing for backing up articles deleted during the New Crown epidemic on the website Tuan Duan Xing, and Chen Mei and Cai Wei were subsequently arrested for “provocation and nuisance”; in 2016, Lu Yu, a Guizhou boy who collected and published information on mass protests in China, was arrested for “provocation and nuisance”. In 2016, Lu Yuyu, the Guizhou boy who collected and published the events of the mass protests in China, and his girlfriend at the time, Li Tingyu, were arrested. In August of the following year, Lu Yuyu was sentenced to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and Li Tingyu was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of probation.
“When I gathered their cases, I was shocked myself,” Wang told the Voice of America. “At the same time, I realized I could be next.”
But when Wang really realized he could be “next,” he felt “there was no turning back. I have to keep doing it, no matter what the outcome.
“Because I know that even if I stop, even if I delete this Twitter account, the risk of future persecution is still very much there. I would rather be persecuted by them than stop,” he said.
He told Voice of America that the Chinese Communist Party’s goal in arresting dissidents everywhere is to make an example of people, trying to silence them, and that if he followed suit, it would be tantamount to allowing authoritarian rule to prevail, “If a country is persecuting even freedom of speech, freedom should already be uprooted in that country.”
Wang says he will keep this job of keeping his memory alive until the day he too is disappeared, or the day when China is completely free from being convicted for his words.
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