Chinese human rights lawyer Wang Yu has been out of touch since receiving the U.S. State Department’s “International Women’s Courage Award” on March 8, International Women’s Day. The State Department has said it is closely monitoring Wang’s situation, and some Chinese rights lawyers believe Wang’s charges are related to the sensitive case she is representing, the Vulgar Wiki case.
U.S. First Lady Jill Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken attended the International Women’s Courage Awards online ceremony on Monday (March 8), where Chinese rights lawyer Wang Yu was honored along with 20 other women. Wang Yu’s phone number remained unavailable until the day of the broadcast, and she last tweeted on Twitter on March 6, when she was detained at the Guangzhou airport on her way back to Beijing.
Wang Yu, the first lawyer to be arrested in the 709 case in 2015, is recognized as a brave lawyer in her field, and some lawyers in Beijing believe her silencing is linked to the sensitive case she is working on, the Vulgar Wiki case.
In May 2019, the police in Maoming, Guangdong Province, one of the units handling the case, arrested a number of members of the mainland’s “Vulgar Wiki” website who were relaying information from the site, after overseas websites such as “Chinawiki” exposed the personal information of Xi Jinping‘s daughter Xi Mingze and brother-in-law Deng Jiagui. The arrests were made by the police in Maoming, Guangdong Province.
On December 30, 2020, Beijing authorities sentenced Niu Tengyu, a person associated with the vulgar Wiki site, to 14 years in prison and a fine of 130,000 RMB as the “main culprit,” and 23 other persons or members of the vulgar Wiki site were also sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, nine of whom were minors, while Wang Yu and her husband, lawyer Bao Longjun, were sentenced to two years in prison. Wang Yu and her husband Bao Longjun represented Niu Tengyu and Chen Lok Luòan, a minor who was sentenced to two and a half years. He is the most heavily sentenced of the minors and the only one who appealed. Niu Tengyu was tortured during his detention and was arrested only for violating the right to personal information of citizens, but the prosecution later added two more charges of provocation and illegal business operation.
In an interview with U.S. media, attorney Wang Yu pointed out that the 24 people convicted were not the ones who actually violated citizens’ personal information, as much of the most original information was actually obtained from Chinese public security authorities.
Xiao Yanrui, the founder of “Vicious Wiki” who lives in Japan, told Radio Free Asia on February 23 that the personal information of Xi Mingze that was leaked was not obtained by hacking, but by paying for it from the Chinese Communist Party authorities, including public security, traffic police, border control and other citizen information control systems.
Lawyer Wang Yu pointed out that the public security department was unable to find the real person responsible, so it created a fake case, and these young people were used as scapegoats.
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