It has now been 52 days. Global Voices Online Northeast Asia editor, blogger, and filmmaker Hao Wu still has not been charged or given access to a lawyer. We still don't know where he is.
His sister Nina Wu continues to blog in Chinese about the ordeal. We continue to post translations of her blog at Freehaowu.org. Here are some recent excerpts. On Day 50 she thanked everybody who cares:
Today I received phone calls, emails, and greetings from friends one after another. They were all asking about Haozi, but I disappointed them. Currently the family members have no further information about Haozi. Like everyone else, we are impatiently waiting. Thank you, friends. For the many ways in which everyone has spontaneously made efforts to help Haozi be free sooner, we sincerely express our gratitude. Our family feels gratified to know that Hoazi has these kinds of friends. I believe that the love from family members, friends, and all who know or do not know Haozi will allow him to see the springtime sunlight again soon.
Nina has often been pointing out on her blog that as a privileged middle class Chinese who works in finance, and who has been generally unconcerned with politics, she hadn't been aware of the extent to which a Chinese person can suddenly lose his or her rights.
...before this happened to my brother, I felt that I had it all: family, friends, a job I liked, and a typical Shanghai “little capitalist” life. I felt that I had the ability to control everything. I could choose the lifestyle I wanted; I could choose my circle of friends…in fact this was just what it looked like. It is so easy for someone to lose his or her privileges. An ordinary person can very easily be taken from his or her daily life. It doesn’t require any warning or reason, and of course it doesn’t require the assent of that person. Legal help is also unavailable. Even though the thirty-sixth clause of the Constitution states, “The physical freedom of the citizens of the People’s Republic of China cannot be violated…it is forbidden to detain or use other methods to take away or limit the physical freedom of a citizen; it is forbidden to illegally search the body of a citizen,” my brother has already lost his freedom. The staff of the Procuratorate did not deny that laws were being broken in the current stage, but no organization or person has stopped these illegal phenomena from continuing.
Really, only when your own rights are violated do you realize their importance to you. I am now beginning to pay attention to law, beginning to look for rights I might have. I hope that it isn’t all too late.
At the same time, I know that I already have lost my right to privacy. I know that they know my every movement. Actually, when you act magnanimously, there is nothing to conceal. I haven’t done anything that I’d be ashamed to show others. I will continue to strive for my brother’s early release. It’s just that I don’t know: when all the legal channels have been exhausted, will anything be left?
Before Hao's detention, she hadn't been aware of the extent of Chinese Internet censorship, either:
After Haozi disappeared, browsing the Internet and searching for related information became a mandatory daily class. I have googled a great deal of information on “Hao Wu,” but I can’t visit many of the search results, especially addresses with .org suffixes. Eight or nine out of ten will return “Impossible to display this webpage.” I don’t know what kind of sensitive information these websites contain. Before, I did not believe in “Internet censorship.” This was because I used to visit mostly finance and investment websites, which rarely have problems. Only when I faced a serious predicament did I discover that this was a real problem.
Today someone asked me about the effect of Haozi’s incident on me and other family members. I think the most direct effect is that I began to be concerned about my own “rights” and the social problems that Haozi was concerned about.
One webpage Nina will be unable to visit without a proxy server is this Radio Free Asia interview with Hu Jia, an AIDS activist who was recently released after being detained without charge for over a month. He describes the circumstances of his detention:
They put a black hood over my head, removing my glasses first, so I couldn’t see anything. Sometimes they forced my head right down to the floor as the car was driving along…
They were making sure that I had no idea where they were taking me. I started to vomit at one point because I was extremely car-sick. I’m not normally car-sick, but because one minute the car was accelerating, the next minute they were slamming on the brakes, and me with my head pressed down against the floor...
...
When my mother and wife were going to the police station to look for me, they ran into police officers who had been watching me. But they absolutely refused to admit they were holding me.
The place was called the the No. 5 Production Brigade of Taihu township, Tongzhou county, Beijing. It used to be countryside but now it’s been turned into one of those holiday villages. I was locked up in the inner room of one of their suites. It was very cold. At any given time there’d be seven or eight police officers watching me. They did it in shifts.
I had no idea of all the reports that were circulating about me. I had no way of knowing. They had all been told not to bring any news from the outside world in with them. They were also very careful about their mobile phones. They were very careful to keep them far away from me for fear I would manage any sort of communication at all with the outside world.
After they had kidnapped me and taken me to that place, I asked them why they were doing it, but they wouldn’t tell me…That evening, three people came to visit from the Beijing municipal headquarters of the State Security Bureau. They were very young. They started asking me about the hunger strike, because when Gao Zhisheng had put out his statement about the hunger strike, he had included my name.
I answered all their questions either by saying I couldn’t answer or by suggesting they go and look it up on the Internet. They got nothing new out of me, and then they left. After that, I think they realized that they weren’t going to change my attitude or achieve any sort of cooperation or communication with me.
Yesterday lunchtime another four people came from the Beijing municipal headquarters and took all the notes I had made about who had come to see me, my diary, everything on my person. They did a very intimate search.
Then they put the black hood over my eyes again and took me out to the suburbs of Beijing and left me to walk home, after warning me that more misfortune would come upon me if I continued to take part in those activities – any activities relating to human rights – I would be detained again and my family would be left to worry about me.
Police behaving like kidnappers or hostage-takers. Is Hao being held under similar circumstances? We have no way of knowing.
Heard about this while reading 'Instapundit' and they refrence a Chinese government website. Unfortunately the list no email addresses, funny strange. No?Someone would be doing a great service if those websites were listed.
Posted by: Rusty | April 14, 2006 at 12:38 PM
Two points:
1. There's no privacy anywhere, full stop. China is not unique in this regard.
2. Does the Internet Firewall of China extend to pages cached by the various search engines? I'm thinking archive.org or the Google cache here.
Posted by: | April 14, 2006 at 01:11 PM
2. Does the Internet Firewall of China extend to pages cached by the various search engines? I'm thinking archive.org or the Google cache here.
The Google cache is blocked here in northern China. Archive.org isn't blocked but isn't well-known in China.
Posted by: Matthew J. Stinson | April 15, 2006 at 01:08 PM
wait..the customary release of dissidents prior to visits by China to US that the Western press predict will happen hasn't happened yet?
Posted by: mahathir_fan | April 15, 2006 at 03:17 PM