One of China’s best-known imprisoned dissidents, Yang Maodong (楊茂東), is putting his already fragile health at risk after weeks on a hunger strike, according to his wife and sister, with his sister saying she had unsuccessfully asked prison authorities to be allowed to see him and beg him to stop fasting.
Yang, better known by his pen name, Guo Feixiong (郭飛雄), has been among China’s most persistent and combative campaigners for expanding democratic rights and he has continued his resistance while confined in Guangdong Province, China.
For more than a month, he has refrained from eating to protest his conditions, especially what he said was a humiliating rectal examination, and to demand sweeping political change, his family said.
During a routine monthly visit from his brother last week, Yang, 49, appeared to have lost a great deal of weight, which might have exacerbated his chronic illnesses, his sister, Yang Maoping (楊茂平), said by telephone on Wednesday, as she waited at the prison in the hope of seeing him.
“I want to tell him to stop the hunger striking,” Yang Maoping said. “But they have said they have laws and regulations to follow, and this breaks the rule of a visit once a month. I want to beg him to stop before he really puts himself in danger.”
Yang’s wife, Zhang Qing (張青), who lives in Midland, Texas, with their two children, said by telephone that her husband had declared on May 9 that he would refuse to eat.
Although the family could not be sure if he had eaten occasionally or was being force-fed, his severe weight loss was alarming and she had written to him urging him to begin eating again, she said.
“Yesterday, the prison management said they would pass him my letter begging him to stop hunger striking,” Zhang said.
“He was not well when he saw his big brother last week, rambling and difficult to follow, and we are worried about what will happen,” she said. “He can be very determined.”
Yang Maodong, formerly a stocky man of about 68kg, had shed about a third of that weight, Zhang said, citing estimates from her brother-in-law who had visited him.
Officers who took calls at the Yangchun Prison in Guangdong refused to answer questions or referred calls to another number.
Yang Maodong’s latest protest has prompted international concern, as well as fasting protests to support him in China and abroad.
US embassy in Beijing spokesman Benjamin Weber on Wednesday said: “We urge China to release him immediately on humanitarian grounds.”
The Chinese government appears extremely unlikely to do that. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), authorities have pursued an intense drive of detentions, trials and convictions to stifle political dissent.
Yang Maodong was detained by police in August 2013. In November last year, he was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of disturbing public order and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
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