The nonprofit PEN America released its 2020 Global Freedom to Write report on Friday (April 23), and word jails remain one of the main tools used by authoritarian states to silence dissenting voices. China imprisons the most writers and poets in the world, with a whopping 81 people imprisoned for their words, more than half of them in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Hong Kong.
According to this report, at least 273 writers, scholars and publicists have been convicted for their words worldwide, compared to 238 in 2019. The three countries with the highest number of imprisoned writers are China (81), Saudi Arabia (32) and Turkey (25), accounting for half of the global number of imprisoned people.
The report notes that freedom of expression continued to decline globally in 2020, with many governments citing the new crown epidemic as a reason for unprecedented restrictions on freedom of expression. Some governments in authoritarian and more fragile democracies have passed laws to restrict information.
This is particularly true in China, Karin Deutsch Karlekar, director of PEN America’s Free Speech Project, said Friday at the report’s launch.
“China has imprisoned 81 writers, which is a far higher number than in other countries. This is largely because authorities arrested writers and commentators who were critical of the government’s response to the New Crown outbreak, other policies and information about imprisonment in Xinjiang,” she said.
Examples in China include the detention by police of New Crown whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang for alerting people to the new virus, and the arrest of several Chinese citizen journalists, including Zhang Zhan, Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua, who were all arrested by the government for their reporting documenting the New Crown outbreak.
Hebei, China-based netizen Zhang Wenfang was sentenced to six months in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” for publishing a series of articles about Wuhan’s Fang Cabin Hospital on Weibo under the pseudonym “Marilyn Mengliu.
In addition, Xu Zhangrun, a former professor at Tsinghua University’s Law School, was placed under house arrest for criticizing the government’s response to the new government, was “prostituted” by the Chinese Communist Party, and was dismissed from his teaching position at Tsinghua University for “moral turpitude.
The number of writers imprisoned in China in 2020 rose to 81 from 73 in 2019, with as many as 42 imprisoned in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Hong Kong.
In 2017, after prominent Uyghur writer and editor-in-chief of Xinjiang Culture magazine Kurban Mamuti disappeared several months after traveling to the United States to visit his son, his family tumbled to learn of his arrest and detention in a Xinjiang re-education camp. Mamuti’s son, Bahram Sintaş, said at the report’s launch that Beijing authorities are doing what they can to make it impossible for his father, and other publicists, to continue documenting Uyghur culture.
He said, “The atmosphere in the Uighur community now is such that there are no publicists of their own, no books of their own, and no environment whatsoever for Uighurs to learn their own culture and language. Most of the time the government and propaganda agencies brainwash them to assimilate with the Han Chinese, and 24 hours a day through media and books Uyghurs learn the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. Like my father and other publicists of this generation, they can no longer document Uyghur culture and most are put in concentration camps or prisons.”
Kaleka, director of PEN America’s Freedom of Expression Project, said such repression against minorities is on the rise, not just in China, but globally.
“We see writers, academic researchers being targeted by authorities on a regular basis if they try to speak out for the preservation of language rights, for different cultures being attacked. Their work itself is preserving their own culture. So in countries that are trying to suppress minority and religious groups, these people are targeted by the authorities, perhaps simply because they are writing in the language that the government is trying to eliminate or trying to promote their culture.” She said, “In China, we see this problem particularly with minority groups in Xinjiang and Tibet. We’re also seeing it in some countries in the Middle East, particularly with Kurdish minorities in Iran and Turkey. Worldwide, there has been a trend to target minority groups for this issue.” Kalka said.
The report notes that government crackdowns on writers and publicists have been particularly severe in the Asia-Pacific region. Nearly half, or 121, of the writers currently imprisoned are in Asia-Pacific countries. In addition to China, which has the largest number of imprisoned writers, there are Vietnam (11), India (9) and Myanmar (8).
Meanwhile, the problem is relatively serious in the Middle East and North African countries, which account for one-third of the total number of imprisoned writers. In addition to Saudi Arabia, which ranks second, Iran (19) and Egypt (14) are particularly problematic.
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