China prevented human rights lawyer Ni Yulan (倪玉蘭) from traveling to the US to receive an award for her work, Ni said yesterday as she condemned the restriction on her freedom.
Authorities refused to provide Ni with a passport to attend a ceremony on Tuesday in Washington honoring “International Women of Courage,” a day before Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) arrived in the city for a nuclear summit.
The Chinese Public Security Bureau “would not let me leave,” Ni said, adding that authorities informed her she was being stopped due to her involvement with more than 200 rights lawyers and activists who were detained by the government last summer.
“It is purely to limit my personal freedom,” she said.
Ni is best known for her advocacy on behalf of Beijingers’ property rights.
She has been jailed twice and is paralyzed from the waist down, a result she says of beatings received during her detention.
In a tongue-in-cheek letter posted online on Wednesday, she thanked the “party and government” for making her award nomination possible, adding that it was the direct result of abuse in 2014 when, she said, authorities held her in her apartment without food or water.
In desperation, she reached out to “foreign diplomats” who brought supplies to her home and negotiated with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on her behalf, she wrote.
Ni is one of a widening group of campaigners put under tightened control by Beijing as it seeks to tamp down activities that go against the party line.
She was one of 14 women from around the world recognized by the US Department of State for “exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equality and women’s empowerment, often at great personal risk.”
At the event, US Secretary of State John Kerry bemoaned the fact that China had refused to allow Ni to attend “despite repeated requests,” and praised her “leadership in advocating for the rule of law and full, equal rights in China.”
The US embassy in Beijing has “raised our concerns about Ni’s passport refusal with the Chinese government,” a spokesman said.
Ni was the only award-winner not present at the ceremony.
The Global Times, a newspaper linked to the Chinese Communist Party, quoted analysts as saying that the award was an attempt by Washington to “smear China’s image and stir trouble.”
Earlier this year, Beijing stopped journalist Yang Jisheng (楊繼繩) from traveling to the US to receive an award for his work documenting tens of millions of deaths from starvation during China’s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s.
Government-affiliated academics have said his work is anti-China propaganda.
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