China’s war on thought

Huang Qi, one of China’s most prominent human rights activists who has already spent nearly half of the past two decades in prison and state detention, was sentenced last week to 12 years in prison. His supposed crime was leaking state secrets, but in actuality his only offense was speaking out against government wrongdoing. The harsh punishment—which could amount to a death sentence, given his frail health—is the latest sign of the extreme lengths that President Xi Jinping’s Communist Party will go to silence political dissent.

In 1998, the veteran “cyber-dissident” set up 64 Tianwang, a website initially designed to investigate and report on Chinese citizens who had disappeared. Named for the violent June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, Huang’s website continues to use a nationwide network of volunteers to document the increasingly dire human rights situation in China, though it is blocked on the mainland. His tireless efforts landed him five

years in prison in 2000 for “state subversion” and three years in 2009 for investigating the deadly collapse of poorly constructed schools during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

The government’s harassment and abuse of Huang extend beyond him. His mother, Pu Wenqing, was detained incommunicado for several weeks in 2018 after appealing for her son’s urgent medical release. The 86-year-old has been under guarded house arrest since February.

Unfortunately, Xi’s broad campaign to silence critical thought shows no sign of slowing down.

Huang is just one of countless individuals who have been abused because of their dedication to human rights and refusal to buckle to the propaganda of the Chinese regime.

More than a dozen international human rights groups, including the United Nations, have pushed for Huang’s immediate release. Instead of arbitrarily imprisoning Huang for baseless crimes for which he has suffered enough, China should heed the calls for clemency.