Niu Tengyu, the 21-year-old “main culprit” of the unfair trial of 24 young Chinese men involved in the 2019 leak of information about Xi Jinping‘s daughter, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison. The Parents of the youths recently wrote an open letter criticizing the flawed verdict and the scapegoating of their children in the political case.
An open letter from ten parents of the “Vicious Wiki Case” was published on Feb. 16 by the Human Rights Watch website, which focuses on the human rights situation in China. In the letter, dated February 8, they pleaded with the judiciary to correct the sentences handed down to the 24 young people in the case, pointing out that the verdict was full of loopholes and injustice, that the 24 young people had become scapegoats in a political case, and that the case would become a great shame in Chinese legal history.
Defendants in “Vulgar Wiki” Case Change Charges Again and Again
In the first half of 2019, Xi Jinping’s daughter Xi Mingze’s pseudonym, photo, personal ID and the personal information of Xi’s brother-in-law Deng Jiagui were posted online by the overseas websites Red Bank Foundation and Chinawiki. The “Vulgar Wiki” website was locked by the authorities after it was split into friendly links.
In August 2019, Niu Tengyu, who was under 20 years old at the Time, was arrested by the authorities and later placed under residential surveillance on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power. At the end of the investigation by the Guangdong Maoming Public Security Bureau, the charges became “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” “insulting the national flag,” and “damaging computer information systems.
Finally, on December 30, 2020, the Maonan District Court of Maoming City, Guangdong Province, sentenced Niu Tengyu as the “principal offender” and changed the charges to “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” “infringing personal information,” and “illegal business operation. “The court sentenced Niu Tengyu to 14 years and a fine of 130,000 yuan, while 23 other people or members of the “Vulgar Wiki” website also received varying sentences.
According to an open letter from ten parents, nine of the 24 defendants were minors and five adults were under the age of 20 when they were arrested. The parents wrote in their letter that most became political prisoners simply by participating in “editing the words.
“First of all, the vile wiki did not publish (Xi Minze’s information), but the websites associated with them did, which in itself is not valid from the evidence. Secondly, the intention of the crackdown on these young people is simply to suppress and warn against such an unruly subculture (subculture) within the system.” Cao Yaxue, editor-in-chief of Change China, a website that follows the case, said that Vulgar Wiki is a group of young people who “expose and record the facts,” but the authorities do not allow any satirical, sarcastic, or socially pernicious voices to expose political reality.
Niu Tengyu, a defender of the vile Wiki site, was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2020 for “inciting subversion of state power” (Public Domain)
Defendant Tortured to Confess, Family, Lawyers Warned to Keep Quiet
A source familiar with the case, who wished to remain anonymous, told us that the entire arrest and trial process was opaque, and that the families were warned not to raise their profile.
We learned that Huang Hanzhong, the lawyer who met with Niu Tengyu on Feb. 1, was given a written notice by the Beijing Chaoyang District Judicial Bureau to withdraw from representing him in the case, and that he was not allowed to give any interviews to foreign media about the case.
Niu Tengyu’s mother recently told our Cantonese team that the children were “scapegoats”, and she also mentioned her son’s strength, “He (Niu Tengyu) said he never cried, and I was strong, but I never thought they would be so unreasonable. Niu Teng Yu was beaten the worst and most powerful, he never admitted guilt from the beginning to the end. Some of the children who came out said that Niu Tengyu he is a hero in our hearts.”
According to a handwritten statement brought out by Niu Tengyu through his lawyer, Niu Tengyu said he was forced to write hundreds of thousands of words of “self-reporting material” on hundreds of pages of A4 paper, the content of which was specified by the public security. The headline and outline must be written within a specified period of time, or else you can only eat white rice, forbidden to sleep, hung up and beaten, etc. In the month from December 10, 2019 to January 20, 2020, he slept less than 30 hours and his hand was beaten to the point of disability.
Local Officials Creating “Rebellion Cases” to Serve Xi Jinping?
Chen Jiangang, a U.S.-based Chinese human rights lawyer, told the station that the trial was not transparent, but judging from his past experience in handling related cases, since the case involves Xi Jinping’s relatives, it may have come from instructions from higher-ups, or local officials may have taken the opportunity to build a case to claim credit.
“This kind of verdict is a violation of Chinese people’s freedom of speech and human rights, and even because this matter involves Xi Jinping, it is a practice of local Communist Party governments to show their loyalty to the Party and central leaders, going out of their way to take the blood from other people’s necks to dye their own ties red, like Xi Jinping’s allegiance.” Chen Jianzang recalled, “It is very cruel to have encountered in some cases before that individuals who want to be promoted and get rich keep creating crimes of subversion of state power and creating cases of rebellion.”
In an interview with our Cantonese team last month, Xiao Yanrui, founder of the website “Vicious Wiki”, a website that has been under investigation since 2013 and currently resides in Japan, also said that Niu Tengyu and other convicted persons had nothing to do with the leakage of Xi Mingze’s personal information, and blamed the Guangdong Provincial Internet Police in Maoming City for concocting the unjust case in order to take credit for it. The unjust case.
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