Late last month, on the leafy streets of China’s prestigious Peking University, a handful of students held up banners to protest against a takeover of the campus Marxist society by the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated student association.
Within an hour, police rushed at the group and dragged them into a nearby building, where, barricaded in classrooms, they were shown videos of recent graduates, including one from their own university, “confessing” to working with an “illegal organization” to arrange protests in southern China, students involved said.
On Monday, a solidarity group that has been calling for the activists to be released posted online statements decrying the videos as “slander.”
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
Friends of the activists said that the videos distorted facts and were an attempt to threaten those who have been calling for the release of dozens who have been detained since August last year.
The private screening was part of efforts by Chinese authorities to stem a groundswell of activism on China’s university campuses, with students taking up causes from #MeToo to the rights of migrant and factory workers.
Chinese authorities have in recent years made increasing use of video “confessions” to seize the public narrative in politically charged cases and to make an example of those detained as a warning to others, rights groups say. A Peking University spokeswoman declined to comment due to the university being on winter break.
The Chinese Ministry of Public Security did not reply to a faxed request for comment.
The videos shown to the students last month focus on events in July, when Chinese police quashed protests by workers from a welding equipment manufacturer in the southern city of Shenzhen who wanted to form a labor union with leaders of their choice.
About 50 students and activists from across China had flocked to support the workers, sparking waves of further detentions that spread to China’s top university campuses, including Peking University, informally known as Beida.
The videos featured four activists in their 20s, all recent graduates, saying that they had spread “false information,” founded organizations that intended to “overthrow” the government and worked in concert with foreign media.
Shen Mengyu (沈?雨), Zheng Yongming (鄭永明) and Gu Jiayue (顧佳悅) — all of whom had supported workers at Jasic International, the welding equipment firm — said they had been assigned by an unnamed “organization” to organize the worker protests.
Yue Xin (岳昕), a Beida graduate who first made headlines in April for her vocal #MeToo activism, said that the Shenzhen protests had been “politically motivated” and created a “negative impact on society.”
Yue also renounced her earlier efforts, inspired by the global #MeToo movement, to force Beida to divulge information about a decades-old rape case.
“At the time people placed too much importance on public disclosure” and “foreign forces fixated with China’s bad side” had exploited this desire to “provoke troubles,” she said in the video, according to students who have seen the clip.
It was not possible to contact Yue, Gu, Zheng or Shen for comment.
The versions of events given by the activists in the video are radically different from how close friends recall the incidents described, four of them said, declining to be named for fear of reprisals from the authorities.
“There has been no news of these classmates since they went missing in August. No one, whether family or lawyers, has been allowed to see them. Where they are being held, what they have suffered, we do not have a clue,” one of the friends said.
The reference in the videos to an “illegal organization” that orchestrated the protests was an attempt to “invert black and white,” given it was the workers’ protests that drew activist support, not the other way around, the same source said.
“The left-wing students and the support group’s actions are guided by Marxism, are answering Chairman Xi Jinping’s (習近平) call and are in line with socialist ideas,” another said, referring to Xi’s calls for China to stick with Marxist theories.
Since 2012, when Chinese President Xi Jinping took office, law enforcement authorities in China have made increasing use of “confessions,” often delivered via state media, during politically charged cases, sometimes involving foreign citizens.
Gu and Zheng are being held in a form of detention known as “residential surveillance at a designated location,” or RSDL, according to notices sent to their families and seen by students.
The controversial measure allows police to interrogate suspects for six months without legal representation and is meant to be reserved for severe crimes such as “endangering national security,” “terrorism” or serious bribery crimes.
Rights groups say that the lack of oversight gives police carte blanche in their interrogations, allowing torture and forced confessions, including those that can then be publicly released.
China aired nearly 50 such confessions between 2013 and last year, said RSDL Monitor, a group run by Madrid-based rights activist Peter Dahlin, who featured in one such video himself, aired by China’s state broadcaster in 2016.
People who are asked to make confession videos tend to have been detained for some time, and have often been physically or mentally tortured, Dahlin said.
Under RSDL, he was held in solitary confinement, denied sleep and interrogated for about six hours per day, Dahlin said in a book he wrote about China’s use of “confessions.”
After three weeks, he provided a scripted “interview” to state broadcaster journalists to try and speed up his release and that of his Chinese girlfriend, he wrote.
“These ‘confession’ videos not only serve a more generic propaganda purpose, they tend to be aimed as tools of political terror, using one or a few people to create fear in their larger communities,” Dahlin said in an interview.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in 2016 that Dahlin had pleaded guilty to crimes of endangering national security and was expelled from China in accordance with Chinese law.
Chinese state media has defended RSDL as being necessary to ensure that legal procedures “proceed smoothly” in complicated or sensitive cases.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs