In our newsletter 21, we told the story of Mengzhu, the activist who organized strikes of food delivery workers in Beijing and was disappeared at the end of 2020. In his newly released video, he wore a jacket with SUBVERT on the back, and he promised to see us at the Jianghu (the part of society beyond the reach of government, see newsletter 21) in the future.
Two days later (on Jan 8th), New York Times published Trial Looms After Seaside Gathering of Chinese Activists on the case of Xu Zhiyong.
Xu is a flagship figure in China, representing the movement to change the Chinese legal and political system from the outside. He has a doctor of law degree, started citizen organizations, actively participated in cases that changed Chinese society.
He made his name with a case in 2003 when a college graduate working in Shenzhen was mistaken as illegal migrant worker and died over night in police custody. This case sparked national outrage, and ended the practice of rounding up migrant workers in cities, with the push from the legal experts including Xu.
In 2008 he led a movement for lawyers to join Beijing local election and won a post for himself. The next year, the government declared his organization illegal and charged Xu with crime of tax evasion (do you remember this from our newsletter 7 on the Viya case?).
He never stopped, in 2012 when our dear supreme leader got his power, he wrote an open letter to him. In 2013 he distributed pamphlets asking Beijing government to open up its education resources to children of migrant workers. He was arrested and charged with “disrupting public orders”. His case got court trial in Jan 2014, which was closely observed by foreign media as a glimpse of what political ideology our dear supreme leader actually had. Many speculated that if our dear supreme leader was a political reformer like his father, releasing Xu is the only option. But Xu was sentences to 4 years of jail, and any hope that dear supreme leader wanted a freer China was dashed.
After his release in 2017, Xu continued effort to change China. In Dec 2019, he had lunch with a few human rights lawyers in Xiamen, a southern city on the border of the Taiwan strait. To their surprise, they were swiftly arrested, in Feb 2020 and they are waiting for trial. This time, Xu and his fellow lawyers were charged of “Subversion” and if convicted, they are facing up to 10 years of prison.
This unusual harsh crackdown is surprising even to these rights lawyers. According to NYT, Xu’s former lawyer said: If they had thought that the consequences would be this serious, I don’t think they would have held that meeting.
In our newsletter 25, we reported the decreasing birth rate in China. It was considered as a crisis and some economist tried to give a solution and it was not appreciated by the government.
More and more social media posts indicated that the government is planning a policy to force women to have three kids. Well, since they only have hammers, everything is a nail, right?
Still, with women less and less eager to get married, we have to wait to see if this hammer approach works in the future.
Right now, a woman with mental illness chained in a dark room in the countryside is being discussed all over Chinese social media. She is the mother of eight children: seven of the children are boys. She looks young but already in this marriage for 24 years. If you want to read the details of how her situation came into the light, you can read in English - Mother of Eight Found Chained Up in Shed Next to Family Home in Xuzhou, then find out latest update, also in English, via twitter.
The official response to the case is: the father has a marriage certificate with the woman, the marriage is legal, the man is a good father, we, the government, should help him by giving him 3000 yuan subsidy per month. There are even social media interviewing him, asking him for the secret of having 7 boys.
But netizens kept asking: who is this woman, when she married the man she was just a teenager, how can you be sure she agreed to this? How can a woman believed to be mentally ill and had to be chained have given birth to so many children?
Many women found this story traumatic. They compared it to the Handmaid’s Tale, and concluded that this is much much worse. In the official announcement, even the woman’s name was given by her husband, people are not sure it is actually her real name. Her teeth were all gone, many speculate that they were pulled out because she bit, perhaps her only way to fight back.
Many people mentioned a movie from 2007, Blind Mountain, which is about the exact same issue. The chained woman, according to the official announcement, was married in 1998, about the same period of the story described in the movie.
Surprisingly, Huang Lu, the leading actress of Blind Mountain denied on social media that the movie was about the stark reality in China. She became famous because of this movie, but she resents that her face is forever related to women being abducted and sold into slavery in China.
Many people were telling horrid stories that they personally know of teenager girls being forced one way or another into marriages in remote villages and could not get out, trapped in a nightmarish lifetime.
On Youtube, someone uploaded a video of a scholar of Chinese law explaining the punishment of buying and selling a woman in the criminal laws: _“If you buy a woman, how many years do you get? Up to 3 years. If you buy a parrot, how many years do you get? Up to 5 years. Two parrot, at least 5 years. Buying 20 toads, up to 3 years. So buying a woman is punished less than buying a parrot, about the same as buying 20 toads.”_ Still, he ended up with a hopeful note: “this is better than the past when it was legal to buy women.”
Despite the public outrage, this time, unlike in 2003 (when Xu and his colleagues could push for a nation wide policy change), nothing will change.
According to Twitter, Weibo has already silenced any discussion around the topic.
In our newsletter 8, we told the story of a computer genius whose father disowned her because she is a transgender. She took to social media to ensure that her father will not kill her without the world knowing it. She is still updating her Weibo account to reassure her 110,000 followers that she is alive.
We told his story in newsletter 4 and 14. His father died and he went to Weibo to ask for justice. After people paid attention to him, official new media reported his story, he and his aunt went into hiding because local thugs showed up at their home to harass them. Netizens trying to reach him to make sure he is fine was forced to delete their Weibo accounts. Since Jan 2nd, there is no updates at all. Fewer and fewer people remember.
In Hangzhou, people are showing off the hotel rooms they stayed when they were quarantined after returning to China from abroad: a presidential suit facing the lake. The person who posted the hotel photo called the quarantine a “14-day holiday”. Some are boasting the food delivery they received, lamb ribs from Costco.
Hu never responded to Zeng directly, but on Jan 25th, he took to Facebook to imply that Zeng prevented his daughter talking to him. He asked “Is our baby free?”.
Zeng responded: “you have her phone number. If she stopped responding to you, should you not ask yourself why?” According to Zeng Hu called the daughter all the time, during her class, during her sleep. The daughter does not want to be involved.
Without any evidence, people who supported Hu started alleging that Zeng had taken Hu’s right to contact his daughter away.
In the past few days, they switched their direction, started attacking Zeng for sleeping around with men during their marriage. Zeng accuses Hu to be the source of the rumours.
For some, it seems to have worked. Ah, what a woman!
For others, it backfired.
A Chinese twitter account that is mostly famous for criticising CCP and encouraging people to get out of China and migrate to other countries, saw the attack on Twitter in a few screenshots. The account with 59,000 followers commented: “How low you guys are!”
I do not understand the issue between Hu and Zeng, so I kept my mouth shut.
But some of them are using sex to humiliate Zeng with such exaggerations, and they are even looking for evidence of crimes in the plot of a novel she wrote.
This kind of using chastity branding and literary inquisition as means to fight is all too degrading and nasty, isn’t it?
What to expect of the Lunar New Year?
Food, of course.
The New Year Eve dinner is a tradition. There are regional difference on the exact dishes to be served. Before COVID, many families have abandoned cooking by themselves, instead they booked restaurants in advance, saving the trouble of cooking and washing dishes, normally done by women.
The CCTV New Year Eve gala. It is a tradition that started in the 80s when TV sets started appearing in people’s home. It is 4 hours of performances, synchronized over multiple TV channels. And normally it is the national topic on the New Year day.
Already dirty minded people are making this image viral:
The man in red is a very famous comedian, for the past 30 years, he appeared in almost every CCTV New Year Eve gala. He always open his performance with:
My audience friends, I miss you so much.
The Chinese phrase: “I miss you so much” is literally “I miss death you”, meaning I am dying to miss you.
As you know, “death” is a bad word and should not appear on the screen, so , a square appears, and a square means “oral-sex” to dirty minded people.
This is what people are expecting this year.
We will update you with what people eat and what they talk about in our next newsletter.
Happy New Year, it is the year of Tiger.
Tiger, not Tigger.