I’ve gone ahead and created my first Wiki page, which not surprisingly is for the New Youth 4. (One problem: I didn’t capitalize the “y” in the title, and now I don’t know if I can edit it. Help?)
The link is here. Any any all help is appreciated in updating/expanding/improving what is already there. I aim to pick away at it slowly and make it as comprehensive as this site, so if I’m slagging off, please dive right in.
I will be writing more about this topic in the new week or so, but for now, here’s the relevant section from China’s criminal law code dealing with “Crimes of Endangering National Security”:
Article 105. Whoever organizes, plots, or acts to subvert the political power of the state and overthrow the socialist system, the ringleaders or those whose crimes are grave are to be sentenced to life imprisonment, or not less than 10 years of fixed-term imprisonment; active participants are to be sentenced from not less than three years to not more than 10 years of fixed-term imprisonment; other participants are to be sentenced to not more than three years of fixed-term imprisonment, criminal detention, control, or deprivation of political rights.
Whoever instigates the subversion of the political power of the state and overthrow the socialist system through spreading rumors, slandering, or other ways are to be sentenced to not more than five years of fixed-term imprisonment, criminal detention, control, or deprivation of political rights; the ringleaders and those whose crimes are grave are to be sentenced to not less than five years of fixed-term imprisonment.
Thanks (yet again) to our friends at Mideast Youth, we now have an online petition that allows individuals to take a small but important step to signal to the Chinese leadership that the imprisonment of Chinese citizens, for the simple crime of peacefully discussing reform, an action sanctioned by China’s own Constitution, is unconscionable and must end now.
Please, take 30 seconds to sign the petition and then pass it along to your friends. If you have a blog, please blog about it.
We’ve put a permanent link up in the top right hand corner of the website as well.
‘The Great Wall of Confinement’ traces the development of China’s penal system from its origins through modern times. Prisons are still in large part a tool for political control, a fact that shouldn’t come as a surprise considering their origin.
Thankfully, much of the book is available for free through Google books.
While I haven’t seen it on the streets here in China, if this book is as explosive as it looks, I expect pirated copies to be available soon. ‘A Thousand Miles of Prison Walls: an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Contemporary Chinese Labour Camp’ has just been published in Taiwan. It’s authored by Professors Philip Williams, Head of the School of Language Studies at the Palmerston North campus and Professor Yenna Wu from the University of California at Riverside.
China’s prison system is certainly one of the world’s cruelest, and not coincidentally one of the world’s most secretive. While the official incarceration rate is 118 per 100,000 people, this is based on the official numbers. Some human rights officials believe the number is ten times this. Of course, we won’t know until China does a huge amount of reforming and their official statistics can be verified.
I’m trying to track down some credible reports from former political prisoners, but from the anecdotal stories I’ve heard, existence in China’s prison system is a nightmare.
Posting has been non-existent for the past month because of the simple reason that both at work and at home, I was unable to visit the New Youth website and the administration page that allows me to post. The Great Fire Wall of China is, at times, very ineffective, but as far as I’m concerned, the folks who spend their days blocking websites showed me their mettle last month.
Some friends here have worked some magic on my computer and it now appears as though I’m back to normal. Posting should take on a regular form, and I hope to have some interviews up in the next few weeks with folks either involved with the case, or who can shed some light on China’s prison and judicial system.
This article was published in the New Yorker before this website went live, and sadly I’ve forgotten about it until now. Zha Jianying writes of the imprisonment of her older brother Zha Jianguo for the crime of “subverting the state,” the same “crime” that has ensnared the New Youth 4.
Jianguo was arrested and tried in the summer of 1999, and I remember with perfect clarity the moment I learned what had happened. I was standing in the kitchen of a friend’s country house, outside Montreal, drinking a cup of freshly made coffee, and glancing at a story on the front page of the local newspaper. It was about a missile that China had just test-launched, which was supposed to be able to hit Alaska; in the last paragraph, Jianguo’s trial was reported. I was astonished and outraged, and, as his little sister, I was fiercely proud as well: Jianguo’s act of subversion was to have helped start an opposition party, the China Democracy Party (C.D.P.). It was the first time in the history of the People’s Republic of China that anyone had dared to form and register an independent party. Jianguo and his fellow-activists had done so openly, peacefully. Now they were going to prison for it.
Friends,
Now that the ball is rolling a bit, I’d like to ask a favor of everyone who reads this site: please write a respectful letter to the Chinese Consulate or Embassy in your country. I stress that the letter, if it is to have any impact, must be respectful in tone and aim at the heart of this case, not any other issue such as Tiananmen, Taiwan, etc. Our goal is the New Youth 4, not a moral crusade agains the CCP.
Here is the list of Chinese Consulates around the world, here is a list of its Embassies.
For an example of what a good letter looks like, see Bridget Johnson’s letter to the Egyptian Ambassador to the U.S. Nabil Fahmy in regards to the campaign to free Kareem Amer
In Richard’s post on the New Youth 4, he states, “it feels like there’s not much we can do [about the New Youth 4], but simply being aware is an important antecedent to creating change and making a difference.”
I think it’s worth discussing this briefly, as his sentiment is one no doubt shared by many others. And with good reason. Think of how large and powerful the Chinese government and how insignificant most of us who follow this case are.
It’s trite to say that an individual can affect change, so I won’t bother repeating that cliché. Thankfully, campaigns such as ours and the effort to free the Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer are composed of not only those who directly oversee the websites, and extends to those who write blog posts, journalists who cover the case, and those who take the time to write letters to Embassies and Consulates. By this count, New Youth 4 has dozens of members.
And I can assure you that the Chinese government is aware of what we’re doing, which is exactly the point. For all the nefarious activities of the CCP, it is in large part composed of kind and decent people who care greatly for the people of China and the future of the country. While it’s easy for them to miss one voice, hundreds and thousands of voices is much harder. This is why we urge anyone who’s struck by this case to blog, speak, and write about it.
The folks at Freekareem.org have put so much pressure on the government there that it’s felt the need to defend its actions. (It’s defense was so weak, that it had the effect of galvanizing more support for Kareem.) We can, and hopefully will do the same here.
President Hu Jintao, June 25, 2007:
“The government should expand political participation channels for ordinary people, enrich the forms of participation and promote a scientific and democratic decision-making process.”
