He spent years in jail for running one of China’s few Web sites dedicated to reporting human rights abuses.
Now, authorities appreciate his coverage, Huang Qi (黃琦) said as his smartphone buzzed with fresh news of injustice.
His Web site, 64 Tianwang, named in part after the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters, runs headlines — “Village officials stab campaigner,” “Gangsters detain protester” — rarely seen in ordinary Chinese media outlets.
The stories that the dissident has collected over nearly two decades chronicle injustices during the largest urbanization in human history, which has transformed China from a largely rural nation to the world’s second-largest economy.
The process has made fortunes for some, but seen tens of millions of farmers deprived of land that their families worked for generations.
Huang has faced Chinese government reprisals for recording farmers’ efforts to resist, but now believes he is protected by the authorities — partly because of a much-publicized anticorruption drive under President Xi Jinping (習近平).
His apartment in a quiet quarter of Chengdu in the southwest bursts with beeps from his smartphone and laptop, heralding the arrival of information from a network of contacts in villages and cities nationwide.
“How many people protested? Have you got pictures?” he barked down the telephone at one correspondent, simultaneously chatting online with a woman detained by police officers who was sending him pictures of a dumpling lunch they provided.
At the current meeting of the National People’s Congress, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) said that authorities need to ensure “the interests of people in rural areas are protected” under land reform.
However, as he fired off another text message, Huang said the number of farmers who had lost their land was “constantly increasing.”
When he set up his Web site in 1997, the sale of rural land for property development — often after farmers were violently evicted — was emerging as a lucrative source of local government revenue, with individual officials making fortunes through kickbacks from developers.
However, the process left one-fifth of farmers uncompensated, while others were on average paid “a fraction of the mean price authorities themselves received,” according to a 2012 survey by US advocacy group Landesa.
The result was an explosive rise in rural protests — from marchers blocking roads to attacks on government offices — which are now thought to number tens of thousands each year, many providing fodder for Huang’s Web site.
In gleaming white shoes, Huang strode across a muddy construction site carved out of what was once farmland to meet Yuan Yi, whose home was bulldozed in December last year.
Yuan chose to stay put, living in a blue tarpaulin tent.
“I think the compensation is not fair, so I will remain here,” she said.
An hour’s drive away, Huang paused where a red banner fluttered outside a luxury graveyard in a foggy mountain valley. The banner read: “Fight corruption, investigate corrupt officials.”
A dozen women surrounded an open fire for warmth, protesting that the local government had not compensated them for the land now lined with hundreds of expensive marble headstones.
Chinese media outlets remain subject to close censorship, and the women said that newspapers in the area had been ordered not to report on their plight.
The Chinese Communist Party has responded to increasing protests by spending billions on a huge “stability maintenance” apparatus — including expanded surveillance of dissidents and extralegal detention centers known as “black jails.”
In 2000, Huang was jailed for five years, the first ever Chinese “cyberdissident” to be imprisoned for online activism. He was imprisoned again for a further three years in 2009 for reporting on low-quality school buildings that collapsed in a massive earthquake the previous year in Sichuan Province that claimed at least 87,000 lives.
Huang said he was physically abused in jail, and regularly gulps down handfuls of medicine for his ailments.
However, under Xi, he said, the use of “black jails” is becoming less common, while protesters are now detained on public order charges, rather than being sent to forced-labor camps.
“There is still repression, but at least it’s a legal process,” he said.
His Web site — whose name ‘64 Tianwang’ refers to the date of the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989 — is blocked in China, but Huang says he finally feels safe.
He mostly avoids criticism of senior officials or the kind of calls for radical political change that have seen scores of activists jailed, and he praised Xi’s anticorruption campaign, despite it lacking systemic reforms to prevent graft.
Even so, the effort is undoubtedly popular among a Chinese public infuriated by official corruption, while the party’s internal watchdog is inviting ordinary citizens to send it allegations.
“The top levels of government no longer think of me as a threat,” Huang said. “They even see me as useful, because I expose a lot of cases that they do not know about.”
“About a third of people tell me they do not care about money, as long as their local officials were jailed. Now Xi is doing the job for them,” Huang added.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion