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Chinese woman ‘detained’ after tossing ink on Xi poster: activists
SHANGHAI, July 17, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – A woman who live-streamed herself
throwing ink onto a picture of Chinese President Xi Jinping has been
detained, according to activists who accuse authorities of suppressing speech
to protect a “cult of personality” around the country’s leader.
The US-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) activist network said
authorities have also taken the woman’s father and a Chinese artist into
custody after they sought to publicise her plight on social media.
The woman, who has been identified by activists as 28-year-old Dong
Yaoqiong, went live on Twitter on July 4 in a video in which she accused the
ruling Communist Party of employing “oppressive brain control”.
In the video, retweeted tens of thousands of times, Dong splashes ink on a
poster bearing Xi’s image at a location in Shanghai’s financial district,
saying defiantly: “Xi Jinping, I’m right here waiting for you to arrest me.”
CHRD said Dong is believed to have been arrested later that day and that
her Twitter account was deleted hours after the incident.
Her final tweet included a photo of several uniformed men outside her
apartment.
CHRD said authorities were “suppressing freedom of speech to protect Xi
Jinping’s cult of personality”.
Twitter is blocked by China, along with some other major foreign social
media sites like Facebook, but can be accessed via easily available censor-
evading software.
Chinese authorities swiftly punish those who deface leaders’ images and
other Communist symbols.
Dong’s act comes at a particularly sensitive time as the government
aggressively nurtures a cult of personality around Xi, especially since he
dramatically strengthened his hold on power during a Communist Party congress
late last year.
AFP has been unable to verify the woman’s identity, but a man claiming to
be her father Dong Jianbiao at one point confirmed it by posting her
government-issued ID.
A statement attributed to the father that circulated on Twitter called his
daughter’s detention an “act of kidnapping like bandits, an act of the law
enforcement breaking the law”.
He and the artist Hua Yong both have since disappeared in the last few
days after calling on social media for the woman’s release, activists said.
Hua was previously detained in 2017 after documenting the mass eviction of
migrants in Beijing.
Shanghai police denied knowledge of the case when contacted by AFP.
BSS/AFP/MR/ 1220 hrs