Do not question the heroes in China.
At least seven people have been threatened, detained or arrested in the past week after questioning the government’s report on the deaths of Chinese soldiers during a clash with Indian troops last year. Three of them are detained for between seven and 15 days. The other four are facing charges, including one man living outside China.
“The internet is not a lawless place,” police said in their cases. “Blasphemies of heroes and martyrs will not be tolerated.”
Their punishment might have gone unnoticed if it were not an online database of speech crimes in China. A simple Google Spreadsheet that everyone can see and contains nearly 2,000 times people who have been punished by the government for what they said online and offline.
The list – which is directly related to statements, police notices and official news reports over the past eight years – is far from complete. Most punishment takes place behind closed doors.
Yet the list paints a bleak picture of a government punishing its citizens for the slightest touch of criticism. It shows how arbitrary and ruthless China’s legal system can be if it punishes its citizens for what they say, even though freedom of speech is enshrined in the Chinese Constitution.
The list describes dissidents who were sentenced to long prison terms for attacking the government. It tells of petitioners, those who directly appeal to the government to rectify the injustice against them, locked up because they shouted too loudly. It covers nearly 600 people who are being punished for what they said about Covid-19, and too many others who cursed the police, often after receiving parking tickets.
The person behind the list is a bit of a mystery. In an interview, he described himself as a young man named Wang. Of course, if the government finds out more about him, he could end up in jail.
Mr. Wang said he decided to compile the list after reading about people who were punished for allegedly insulting the country during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, in October 2019 Although he is still young, he told me to remember more freedom of expression before Xi Jinping became the leader of the Communist Party at the end of 2012.
“I knew there were speech crimes in China, but I’ve never thought so badly,” he said. Wang posted in August on his Twitter account, where he writes in both English and Chinese. He wrote that he became depressed after reading more than 1,000 statements.
“Big Brother is watching you,” he said wrote. “I tried to look into Big Brother’s eyes and finally found him everywhere.”
The list, entitled “An Inventory of Speech Crimes in China in Recent Years”, outlined what happened to those who questioned Beijing’s official report on the June clash between Chinese and Indian forces at their disputed border in the Himalayas . The Indian government then said that 20 of its soldiers had died. Last week, the Chinese government finally said four of its troops were dead.
State-run media in China called them heroes, but some people had questions. One, a former journalist, asked if more had died, a question of intense interest inside and outside the country. According to the notice to which the spreadsheet was linked, the former journalist is charged with quarreling and provoking problems – a general accusation by the authorities against those who speak – and is sentenced to five years in prison.
By reading the list, it becomes clear how Mr. Xi and his government tamed the Chinese internet. People once thought the internet was uncontrollable, even in China. But Mr. Xi has long seen the Internet as a threat to restrict and as a tool to guide public opinion.
“The internet is the biggest variant we are dealing with,” he said in a 2018 speech. “Whether we can win the war over the internet has a direct impact on national political security.”
Liberal voices and media were among the first to be silenced. Then internet platforms themselves – including the Chinese versions of Twitter and YouTube – were punished for what they allowed.
Now Chinese internet companies are bragging about their ability to control content. Nationalist online users report speech that they consider offensive. Of the seven people accused of insulting the heroes and martyrs, six were reported by other users, according to police notices. In some ways, the Chinese internet is policing itself.
China’s police, many of whom are not because of their broad powers to lock people up indefinitely, are big beneficiaries. According to the spreadsheet, people were detained because they called the police ‘dogs’, ‘bandits’ and ‘bastards’. Most were locked up for only a few days, but one man in Liaoning Province has been sentenced to ten months in prison for writing five offensive posts on its WeChat timeline.
Indians count among those who suffer the most. In one case on the spreadsheet, a woman in Sichuan province whose son died suddenly at school and whose husband committed suicide was sentenced to three years in prison for charges that included spreading false information. The verdict contains the headlines of ten articles she posted and the pages they found. Most viewed 1,615 pages, while least only 18.
Perhaps the most depressing things are people being punished for what they said about the Covid-19 pandemic. At the top of the list is dr. Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded on January 1, 2020 along with seven others for trying to warn the country about the coronavirus. He died of the virus in early February last year and is now remembered as the bell ringer who tried to warn the world about the outbreak of the coronavirus. But the spreadsheet contains 587 other cases.
Even cheesy sketches by prospective online influencers can be considered offensive. Two men in the northwestern province of Shaanxi streamed live the funeral they held for a sheep. In the video, one man cried over a photo of the sheep while the other dug the grave. They were detained for ten days for violating social customs.
But the spreadsheet also highlights inspiring cases in which people have expressed themselves to challenge authority.
In 2018, a 19-year-old man in the northwestern city of Yinchuan decided to test the newly adopted law banning the trial and criticism of heroes and martyrs. He reported on Weibo that two famous martyrs had died meaningless deaths and that he wanted to see if he would be arrested, showing a lack of freedom of speech in China. He was detained for ten days and fined $ 70.
A man, Feng Zhouguan, Mr. Xi is criticized and charged with quarreling by local police in the city of Xiamen. He was detained for five days, but after his release he appealed, arguing that the police had improperly interfered in a possible defamation case between two individuals. According to him, the local police are “not the military bodyguards or family militia of the national leader.” The court upheld the sentence.
Yet many people pay a stronger price.
Huang Genbao, 45, was a senior engineer at a state-owned enterprise in the eastern city of Xuzhou. Two years ago, he was arrested and sentenced to 16 months in prison for insulting the national leader and tarnishing the national image on platforms such as Twitter. He shared a cell with as many as 20 people and had to follow a strict routine, including toilet breaks. He and his wife lost their jobs, and he now delivers meals to support his family.
“My life in the detention center reminded me of the book ‘1984’, he said in an interview. “Many of the experiences are probably worse than the plot in the book.”