Shanghai law scholar Zhang Xuezhong was released 26 hours after being taken away by the authorities after he launched an online referendum on Twitter entitled “National Constitution, Peaceful Transition. The concern is that his tweets “were” disappeared.
According to a report by the French broadcaster, Zhang Xuezhong was taken away from his Shanghai residence at around 11 a.m. on February 19, and has been missing since then, and could not be reached by phone until around 1 p.m. on the 20th, when his friends revealed that Zhang Xuezhong had just been released.
Zhang Xuezhong, a former law professor at East China University of Political Science and Law, has always maintained that China’s current constitution is not a true constitution, and that it should be the product of the will of all the people, while the Chinese constitution was made by a group of “representatives” who were not freely elected by all the people, in accordance with the will of a leader or a political party. Therefore, he has publicly called several times for a national constitution-making process.
One of them was in May last year, when Zhang Xuezhong published an open letter of nearly 10,000 words to the National People’s Congress of the Communist Party of China before the “two sessions” of the Communist Party. He was taken from his Home by the Shanghai police the next day and returned home 24 hours after being summoned.
Most recently, on Feb. 16, he tweeted on the overseas social media platform, calling for “‘national constitutionalism and peaceful transition’ is a political idea that I have put forward after careful consideration. If you feel that China’s political modernization is the public issue most worthy of our Chinese concern, please show your support by retweeting.”
The aforementioned loss of contact for 26 hours occurred three days later. At the same Time, his referendum tweets disappeared and his account was opened with the words “This tweet cannot be viewed”.
The Chinese Communist Party‘s ability to influence tweets has sparked debate among tweeters: “I’m curious, how did Zhang Xuezhong’s tweets get deleted? Was it deleted by Twitter or was Zhang himself forced to delete it? Or was Zhang’s Twitter account forced to hand over his login password to be deleted by Kokubo?” “If it’s true that Twitter did special processing, it’s extremely bad in nature.”
Many Twitter users who are concerned about the direction of the situation in China said that while they do not agree with Zhang Xuezhong’s so-called peaceful transition proposal and consider it to be seeking skin with a tiger, they are still concerned about his freedom of speech and personal freedom:.
“Courageous, but not very realistic, the only language they can understand is violence.”
“I don’t agree with some of Mr. Zhang Xuezhong’s views and have taken him off because of his Heichuan remarks, but I support his right to have freedom of speech, and at the same time hope he will understand the meaning of freedom of speech more deeply in the future.”
“Yes, I also disagree with Professor Zhang Xuezhong’s idea of peaceful transition, because I think that path has been proven to be unworkable. But when Professor Zhang was arrested by the CCP, we should still stand in solidarity with him, even if it has little practical effect.”
“Why did the CCP release Zhang Xuezhong? It’s just the same old trick of catching and releasing Cao and supporting the people’s rebellion to protect the Communist Party! China has already made and enforced its constitution! As a legal scholar with no concept of the rule of law, China’s problem is not about ‘national participation in constitution-making’ at all! Rather, the problem is the complete abolition of one-party dictatorship, the abolition of the pseudo-legal system, and the restoration of democratic constitutionalism! The peaceful transformation of the Chinese Communist Party is totally impossible!”
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