Police in China have arrested a prominent advocate who had been a fugitive for weeks and criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) handling of the COVID-19 outbreak while in hiding, a rights group said yesterday.
Anti-corruption advocate Xu Zhiyong (許志永) was arrested on Saturday after being on the run since December last year, Amnesty International said.
The Chinese Communist Party has severely curtailed civil liberties since Xi took power in 2012, rounding up rights lawyers, labor advocates and even Marxist students.
The death this month of a whistle-blowing doctor who was reprimanded by police for raising the alarm about the coronavirus before dying of it himself triggered rare calls for political reform and freedom of speech.
The “Chinese government’s battle against the coronavirus has in no way diverted it from its ongoing general campaign to crush all dissenting voices,” Amnesty International China researcher Patrick Poon said in an e-mailed statement.
Another source, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, said that Xu had been arrested in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Xu went into hiding after authorities broke up a December gathering of intellectuals discussing political reform in Xiamen prior to the outbreak.
More than a dozen lawyers and advocates were detained or disappeared after the Xiamen gathering, rights groups have said — and Xu’s detention appears linked to his presence at the meeting, Poon said.
While on the run, Xu continued to post information on Twitter about rights issues.
On Feb. 4, Xu released an article calling on Xi to step down and criticized his leadership across a range of issues, including the US-China trade dispute, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests and the outbreak.
“Medical supplies are tight, hospitals are filled with patients, and a large number of infected people have no way to be diagnosed,” he wrote. “It’s a mess.”
“The coronavirus outbreak shows just how important values like freedom of expression and transparency are — the exact values that Xu has long advocated,” Human Rights Watch China researcher Wang Yaqiu (王亞秋) told reporters.
However, the disappearance of Xu illustrates how the Chinese state “persists in its old ways” by “silencing its critics,” she said.
Xu — who founded a movement calling for greater transparency among high-ranking officials — previously served a four-year prison sentence from 2013 to 2017 for organizing an “illegal gathering.”
“That he was a fugitive for so many days while continuing to speak out, that in itself was ... a kind of challenge to [Chinese authorities],” said Hua Ze, a friend of Xu who told reporters she lost contact with him on Saturday morning.
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