Mainland China has seen frequent cases of conviction for words. Cao Jinwei, a man from Jinyun County, Zhejiang Province, was detained for five days for saying in a WeChat group, “Let Xi do the Chinese dream, let’s just do a good job” and “Jumping off a building will alarm the new provincial party secretary, and someone will be unlucky.
The influential Chinese Twitter circle “Chinese text prison event inventory” account released the above news on the 5th. The account was accompanied by a related post.
The Twitter account “China Text Jail Incident Inventory” is influential in the Chinese Twitter community, and the tweeter has built a database of nearly 2,000 convictions for speech from 2013 to the present through government websites, court judgments, official media reports, police social media accounts, and other public sources of information.
Its tweeter, who still lives inside the wall, said in an interview with Voice of America earlier that nearly 2,000 cases of conviction for speech have been collected over the past year or so. These are just the tip of the iceberg. “I want to do everything I can to let the world know about them,” he said, even though he may be the next person to be “reeled in.” He said there is no turning back for the day when China is no longer convicted for speaking out.
Earlier, on May 3, “China’s Word Jail Incident Inventory” posted a message saying that a police officer in Dalian, Liaoning Province, Ju Zhentao, was found guilty of “making inappropriate remarks and slandering the government’s credibility” for chatting in a WeChat group about the government’s concealment of the truth about the epidemic. He was sentenced to 7 days of detention. Ju Zhentao filed an administrative reconsideration and initiated two administrative lawsuits, both of which failed.
On the 4th, the account posted a message that Cai Zucheng, a lawyer in Longgang City, Zhejiang Province, was detained for 13 days and fined 1,000 yuan for saying “I have a good solution for the peaceful reunification of the motherland: dissolve the Chinese Communist Party and elect Cai Ing-wen as interim president, and then elect the official president”. Cai Zucheng filed an appeal, claiming that he was merely exercising his constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of expression, but lost the case.
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