Wu Yuren (吳玉仁), an artist who helped lead an unusually bold public protest last winter over a land dispute, has been languishing in a Beijing jail for almost six weeks after being beaten by police officers, his wife said on Thursday.
Wu’s wife, Karen Patterson, a Canadian citizen, said in a telephone interview that the police accussed her husband of assaulting an officer when he visited the police station on May 31. Patterson said she learned this only through their lawyer because the police had not formally told her that Wu had been arrested. She decided to publicly discuss the arrest, she said, because of what she called her frustration with China’s opaque legal system.
“You don’t realize how arcane this system is until you have to deal with it,” Patterson said. “It’s a nightmare.”
Patterson said she and friends of Wu, 39, believe that he had was arrested because of his recent activism, including his leadership of a group of artists in opposing a real estate developer. In February, those artists joined forces with artists from another Beijing neighborhood to march down Chang’an Street, which runs past the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Chinese leaders are especially sensitive to protests in that area and police officers stopped the protesters after they had walked about 500m.
The police detained Wu briefly in March. After he was released, he and the other artists successfully negotiated for compensation for the seizure of their studio space by the developer. Wu and some other artists then moved their studios to 798, Beijing’s largest arts district.
The land dispute attracted lots of media attention, in part because Ai Weiwei, a well-connected artist who is a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party, joined the protest and sent out Twitter feeds about it. Some of the artists in the protest, including Wu and Ai, had taken part in other kinds of activism, including signing Charter 08, a liberal manifesto calling for democratic change signed by thousands of Chinese. Liu Xiaobo, one of the authors of the manifesto, was sentenced in December to 11 years in prison.
Wu’s latest problem with the police began on May 31, when he went with a friend, to the Jiuxianqiao police station to discuss a dispute with a landlord at 798, Patterson said.
The two men were interrogated separately, and Wu was beaten, she said. He has been held since then and was not allowed to see his lawyer until this week, she added. For reasons that remain unclear, Yang was released after 10 days.
A person answering the phone at the police station declined to comment and said senior officers were not available to comment.
Patterson and the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Hannah, have not been allowed to see Wu. Patterson said she expected that Wu would be formally charged within a few months.
Patterson said Ai, the prominent artist, has been lobbying on Wu’s behalf, but she had little hope that his case would be dropped.
“The police haven’t explained anything to me,” she said. “Trying to ask for accountability is very difficult.”
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