With winter approaching, Xu Yan (許艷) brought some warm clothes and money to a detention center in eastern China for her husband, although she is not even sure the arrested human rights lawyer is still being held there.
Xu, 37, has traveled about 20 times from Beijing to Jiangsu Province’s Xuzhou in a vain struggle to get any information about Yu Wensheng (余文生) after he was taken into custody last year.
Her plight highlights the frustrations, fears and obstacles faced by the families of lawyers and activists who fall foul of the communist authorities and vanish into China’s selectively opaque legal system.
Photo: AFP
Xu returned again this week, joining the line at the Xuzhou City Detention Center with other people bringing plastic bags bulging with thick duvets and sweaters for inmates.
Along with Yu’s lawyers, she then made another failed attempt to get information from court officials.
“I still cannot check where my husband is or the status of his case,” said Xu, crying as she held a photograph of Yu and a sign demanding to see the judge responsible for his case outside the Xuzhou Intermediate People’s Court on Thursday.
“My husband just helps the disadvantaged and marginalized — and you locked him up for two years,” she said, as security guards tried to stop her from protesting.
Yu was detained in Beijing in January last year after he wrote an open letter calling for constitutional reforms.
Xu has received very little information since then.
She was able to have a five-minute video call with him in April last year. That day, she got a notice saying Yu was held in Xuzhou.
Xu only heard from her brother-in-law — and then later from her husband’s government lawyer — that Yu was put on trial in May, but nobody has told her if he was sentenced. Neither Yu nor his lawyers have been able to visit him.
“I feel helpless and also useless,” Xu said. “But in my heart, I’ve never considered giving up.”
It has come at an emotional — and financial — cost.
With no income, Xu is digging into her savings, spending about 150,000 Chinese yuan (US$21,310) over the past year in seeking justice.
Her husband’s detention has also disturbed their middle-school son, who witnessed his father’s arrest and several house searches by the police.
The boy has become more introverted and does not like leaving the house, she said.
“It’s as if he’s not as confident when seeing other people anymore,” she said. “That makes me very sad.”
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