.Ms. Zeng’s Wikipedia page is mostly about her being the (ex-)wife of Hu Jia, nothing about her own work and activism. But Zeng, in addition to be a strong advocate for her ex-husband when he was disappeared, she was a prominent AIDS victim activist on her own. In this 2007 article in Chinese by Human Right Watch, they were introduced as “Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan, two most well known names in China as rights activist for AIDS patients. “
This is how they met, working as activists to help the AIDS patient in Henan in 2004. Ms. Zeng was 21 and Mr. Hu was 31 back then.
In 2005, she married Hu, just when Hu was facing police harassment and forced disappearances. She used internet to blog about their situation to keep the world paying attention to them. She was named as one of the Time “100 most influential people in the world” in 2007, as Hu Jia’s wife.
In 2008, when Hu was sentenced to 3 year and a half prison time, she was a new mom with a baby just a few months old.
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The older women by her sides are her mother and mother-in-law. Zeng mentioned in her tweet that her family is of peasant background in Fujian province in south China. Hu Jia’s parents were retired university professors living in Beijing.
The photo caption from Human Rights Watch (HRW) website says: “Beijing rights activist Hu Jia is sentenced to three and a half years in prison, as his wife Zeng Jinyan walks out of the courthouse with her child in the arms, April 3, 2008.”
In 2011, Hu was released from jail. The next year, Zeng went to Hong Kong for her graduate study with her 5 years old daughter. “She specialises in gender and sexuality, culture and politics, intellectual identity and social activism, and ethnicity, with a particular emphasis on China”, according to an online profile. In the past 9 years, she conducted interviews with prominent writers, made documentaries and wrote books.
Her most recent documentary, Outcry and Whisper (2020) , is a highly personal and sometimes uncomfortably intimate documentary chronicling women’s oppression and resistance in mainland China and Hong Kong.
She is currently a Postdoc at Lund University in Sweden.
On Dec 20th, Zeng posted a letter on facebook. It starts with:
(rough translation) Hu Jia, our child is 14 years old now.
What happened to Lee Jinglei triggered my heartbreak again. I thought I could forget about it after all these years. Every time a friend says "isn't that putting Hu Jia at a disadvantage" and politely advises me not to do this or that, or something new happens from Beijing, I feel sad again, even though I ended up keeping quiet again.
I don't want to talk about it anymore, but every time something new happens, I have to go through a difficult time again. In the end, it's just a matter of never being treated as a human being of flesh and blood, of being exploited, abused and deprived in all sorts of ways, and experiencing pain at home, in the name of "family". They were no less than what I experienced in society - but most people would say that this is no more important than defending the rights of democracy and freedom. I gave up several opportunities to take legal actions.
What Ms. Zeng is trying to say is, as the wife of one of the most famous human rights activists in China, as she was going through domestic abuse from her ex-husband, she was not allowed to speak up of her suffering by her own circle of activist friends, and she had to give up legal actions to protect Hu Jia, because the Chinese government would definitely use her as a weapon to punish Hu Jia.
Her letter was emotional and often incoherent, but she had very serious and concrete allegations. So, as I summarise her allegations here I will use her own tweets to clarify these allegations.
In the open letter, Ms. Zeng said that everyone (including herself) thinks it would be a mistake to go to the court. They were afraid that the government will use this to send Hu Jia to jail. Then she will be blamed to have the blood of Hu Jia on her hands.
When she left for Hong Kong to study for her PhD, they were in effect separated. But Hu Jia did not allow her to disclose it to the public. They eventually divorced in 2016. Why did it last so long? On Jan 1st, Ms. Zeng explained:
(rough translation) Why would Hu Jia not tell people it took so long to divorce?
For one, he said (many friends have heard him saying that), because he could go to prison again, and his parents were old, he hoped that in case he went to prison, I could deal with his family matters with a legal status (of a wife).
Another one: all of our assets were in his hands.
The second point she made needs some explanation. Ms. Zeng’s work for the family business contributed to the growth of the business, which belonged to Hu Jia’s parents. She wanted her fair share of the family fortune, but Hu Jia disagreed. The only way to fight it was to go to the court, but as mentioned above, she could not. So, she was stuck.
In 2013-2014, Hu Jia had relationship with a woman, who was spreading many lies about Zeng.
On Dec 30th, she said: “Almost everyday in 2013 and 2014, my daughter and I were facing threat of sexual violence, rape, etc. People called her in the middle of the night, or sent knives and paper coffin to her door.
Ms. Zeng also explained that she was desperate to get out of the marriage because she felt very tortured in the relationship and she was threatened and bullied on the internet because of Hu Jia’s girlfriend.
So, in 2016, she agreed to get out with nothing but her daughter.
Shortly after Hu came out of jail in 2011, she was pregnant again. One day, she fell down a flight of stairs of their apartment building, with the child in her arms. Mr. Hu paid no attention to her severe injury from that fall, instead he continued talking on the phone. When she was hospitalized for treatment, she fainted but there was no one nearby to take care of her. Ms. Zeng said “I did not want to live”. Then she decided to abort the fetus.
After the abortion, she first met her mother-in-law, whose comment were “what a pity, this time it might be a boy. ” When they came back to their own home, Zeng fell very weak and hungry. Hu Jia told her to wait and continued to work, for hours.
On Jan 8th, she added that they separated after the abortion.
On Jan 3rd, Zeng added:
(rough translation) When I fell down the stairs, I had my arms around my child to protect her, I was injured and Hu Jia was still on the phone, not even picking up the child in my arms. He couldn't even answer what my injuries were like, or how to deal with them.
(Ms. Zeng continued to recount an earlier time:)
When I got off the train back in Beijing, I had one child in my stomach, and one in my arms, and dragged the luggage along, and he was still on the phone until I was frantic and shouting. It was just part of the routine and he didn't see it as abuse.
Ms. Zeng said that all their time together as a couple, Hu Jia made no more than five meals for her. And when they were out eating fast food, Hu did not allow her to add an egg to the meal. (eggs are cheap). She said that Hu did not agree to the separation until she threatened to kill herself. And he did not sign the divorce papers until she agreed to give up her share of the family assets and child support.
Ms. Zeng sighed, “I saved him by blogging about him. This made me famous, but also imprisoned me. “
Between 2005 and 2009, Ms. Zeng worked as deputy general manager of the family business that belonged to Hu Jia’s parents. She said that she was representing the company in all matters. Later she was managing the business account. She was paid only 2000 yuan a month. (In comparison, Zeng mentioned that her mother-in-law once proposed to pay her up to 2000 yuan to full time take care of them. So 2000 a month is on the level of maid/nanny).
Zeng said that when Hu Jia was in prison, the mother-in-law told the family guests that they paid her so low because they were afraid she will have affairs if she had money.
Hu Jia’s mother decided everything. They used the profit of the company to buy the apartment for Hu Jia under the names of Hu Jia’s parents. They told Zeng that she is part of the family and part of the asset of the family belongs to her and her daughter.
In 2009, Hu Jia’s sister and brother-in-law took over the company, writing off their own debt of hundreds of thousands of RMB. Meanwhile the company already had 100 million yuan of running cost in the first year they took over.
On Jan 1st, Zeng said, Hu Jia’s parents have promised her, especially when the firm was transferred to the sister, that the wealth of the family will be shared in 6 equal parts: Hu Jia’s mother, Hu Jia’s father, Hu Jia’s sister, Hu Jia, Zeng, and their daughter.
But in 2016, Zeng had to give up everything, including her own car, to get the divorce. Every time she asked Hu Jia to help her and their daughter, Hu Jia said no. Zeng consulted lawyers, who told her that it is impossible to get money out of Hu Jia.
This family arrangement of properties is very common in China. An American writer Leta Hong Fincher wrote a book “Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China” on the topic. This is from the book:
In 2011, however, China’s supreme court specified that marital real estate “belongs to the person […] whose name is on the property deed”. Since the majority of property deeds are in the name of men, if a marriage collapses the woman can be left homeless, even if she sank savings and income into financing the property.
In the case of Hu Jia, it is even harder for Ms. Zeng to get her fair share of the family wealth because the apartment is under the names of Hu Jia’s parents.
Because of Hu Jia, Ms. Zeng did not have her passport until 2011. But when she met the police to get her passport back, Hu Jia claimed that she was collaborating with the police to harm him. Ms Zeng attempted suicide to prove her innocence.
To get the visa for the daughter to go with her to Hong Kong, Ms. Zeng’s father has to borrow money from his peasant friends. Hu Jia would not help at all.
On Twitter, Ms. Zeng added:
We left Beijing for Hong Kong in 2012. My father and I borrowed money for our child's visa, our airline tickets were given to us by a friend who works in HIV and AIDS XXX. I had less than 100,000 yuan in cash. I had to pay for the deposit of the apartment (shared with others) and the tuition for the kid's school. My own tuition was paid by a professor. Since my scholarship only came at the month end, I could only eat the left over after the kid finished eating.
Hong Kong is expensive. Zeng had tried to find ways to lower the cost. But Hu would not agree. For example, she proposed that they sell their big apartment in Beijing to buy two smaller apartments, one in Beijing, one in Shenzhen. Hu Jia can live in Shenzhen to take care of the daughter while Zeng lives on campus to save money. But no, Mr. Hu does not want to help. In the end, Zeng had to hire a nanny for the kid.
Even though Hu Jia’s family owns multiple properties in China, when Zeng requested selling some of them to support her and her daughter during difficult times (including COVID time), it was always refused. Eventually, Hu Jia’s parents did sell one apartment in Beijing and Zeng was entitled to 1 million yuan. But it took Zeng years to get the money transferred to her with the help from Hu Jia’s father.
During COVID time, Zeng got a temporary position in Israel. Because of lockdown, language barrier, her teenage daughter was facing very tough challenges. Zeng asked for help to send her daughter to English language school but it was refused. In the end she had to move back to Hong Kong. This is just one example of many hardships the mother and the daughter had to face due to lack of support from the family.
When the couple divorced, Hu Jia promised that Zeng can use their Beijing apartment. So she have used it to store her books. Some of them are out of print. But at the end of year 2020, Zeng was told that Hu Jia’s new girlfriend threw them all out.
This makes Zeng worried about the future. She thinks that her daughter will have no place to stay if she visited Beijing. All the promises that Hu Jia and his parents made become meaningless. Those promises had no legal binding. And Hu’s family refused to make a will to make them legally binding.
Ms. Zeng said, now she wrote this down publicly, also to help her daughter see what kind of family relation that she would face if one day Ms. Zeng herself is gone. She does not want her daughter to see the relationship between the parents as normal.
In the open letter, Zeng mentioned that she suffered different forms of abuse.
On Dec 23rd, Zeng tweeted:
Hu Jia, you said you could never beat a woman or a child. Yes, how could a gentleman like you move your fingers? You can only torture others precisely. When I told my friends about it, both my friend and I believe this is your post-traumatic stress disorder. When I said “no”, did my eyes say “yes”? Have you ever thought why I pushed you away to lock myself in the bathroom?
Later, on Jan 11th, she said:
A sexually assaulted B, A even admitted once. But, since A said, there is some kind of reason - so, is A worthy of forgiveness? And, A said, you finally opened the bathroom door and came out, right?
If B didn’t open the bathroom door, she had to jump out of the window on the fourth floor of the bathroom.
No matter what A did, A is justifiable. The abuse, violence, deprivation that B endured, is insignificant.
It is coded because Zeng is still managing her message: she does not want Hu Jia being charged by the government based on her words.
However, I remember that I read this story in her open letter on Dec 22nd. Zeng had subsequently updated the letter multiple times, so I could not find it any more.
On Jan 2nd, one comment from Twitter said
According to the legal interpretations of the country(China) with jurisdiction over Hu Jia, “abuse” refers to the act of physically and mentally persecuting, torturing, and destroying the family members living together by various methods such as beating, scolding, freezing, starving, tying, forcing to do excessive physical labor, restricting freedom, and humiliation. The obvious difference between abuse and occasional scolding and corporal punishment is that abuse is frequent or even consistent and has relative continuity.
Zeng responded:
Please show the list to Hu Jia. Except for making me bleed, he has done almost everything.
Back in Dec 23rd, Zeng tweeted:
Let me give you a very small very ordinary example: whenever I said that I was upset, sad, you would say: “it is wrong for you to think this way”, “This is negative”, “This is harmful”, etc, followed by long lectures. I will never accept your mansplaining, correcting my feelings.
And, over and over again, you rearranged basic facts of time and cause and effect. Is it to convince others to continue to honor you, while also to rewrite my memory? Now I say publicly that I appreciate the concern of my old friends, but I don’t want to hear a single kind word, nor do I want any “dialogue”. Only Hu Jia’s own actions, apologies and remedies will make forgiveness possible.
Many people read Hu Jia’s very rational and appropriate response, decided that Hu is as great as ever. The two camps, pro-democracy camp who are mostly Hu Jia’s friend, and feminists who don’t know them personally are still fighting on twitter.
We will tell Hu Jia’s side in the next newsletter.