Law Report

As Beijing gears up for its Olympics party it wants to project a positive image to the world.

There are lots of stories it doesn't want to dwell on...like why so many schools in the Sichuan earthquake zone crumbled. Or why a prominent activist who'd been helping the parents of the children who died obtain answers has just been arrested. His crime: possessing state secrets.

Or why 30,000 people in the town of Weng'an rioted after officials tried to hush up the suspicious death of a teenage girl.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Damien Carrick: The Beijing Olympics kick off next week. For China it's a wonderful opportunity to tell the world about its astonishing economic transformation.

In recent decades, literally hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and most Chinese citizens enjoy many more freedoms than in the past. But China does remain a one-party state. And in the lead-up to the Olympics, it's particularly sensitive to stories that don't show the country in a positive light.

One such story is the recent events in the town of Weng'an, a town in South Eastern China. Late last month, 30,000 people went on a rampage, because they felt authorities had tried to hush up the suspicious death of a teenage girl.

Newsreader: ...the investigation of the alleged rape and murder of a local schoolgirl. Investigators say the girl had committed suicide, but the girl's family says it's a cover-up. Two of the suspects last seen with the girl are relatives of the local security official.

The police say the suspect is innocent, that the suspected is protected by powerful people, but not the victim. So they say the suspect is innocent.

Damien Carrick: Melbourne University Chinese law expert Sarah Biddulph explains what happened on the night of the 21st June.

Sarah Biddulph: The story centres around a young woman called Li Shufen who was a high school student. We think she was 16 years old, but some reports say she was 15, some 17. Anyway, she was renting a room in town because her family lived in a village some distance from the town, and on that night a friend called up and asked her to go out with some friends. Sometime later in the night, the friend called her brother and said that she had jumped into the river and drowned. The brother rushed to the scene and found a police patrol on the way and so they tried to recover the body from the river. At the time there were three of the friends standing on the bridge. They said that she had said 'As my family are far away, I'm going to leave early,' and then jumped in the river.

Damien Carrick: Their story was that she had ended her own life?

Sarah Biddulph: Yes, they also said that they had been drinking and eating snacks and having a nice time.

Damien Carrick: And these friends, they were young men, and several of them were children of the local elite? I think one was the son of the deputy mayor

Sarah Biddulph: Yes, certainly at the time most reports said that some of the children anyway were the sons of local officials. Early the next morning they recover the body from the river and call the police. The police say that the matter has been transferred to the Criminal Investigation Bureau and according to one story the coroner didn't come until 8 o'clock that night and the family said that he did a rough examination of the body, using a torch, and concluded that she had committed suicide by drowning. And the family of course weren't very happy with that, because they said there was no reason for her to commit suicide and they said that she had been raped and murdered. And they really wanted an investigation, a better investigation, a more thorough investigation.

Damien Carrick: So the family are highly suspicious and they demand a more in-depth investigation, and their advocacy leads to a second tragedy in the Li family. What happens at this point?

Sarah Biddulph: Yes, the second tragedy was that her uncle, who was a teacher in the local high school, was enraged by the treatment he considered to be unjust, so he went to the police station to complain, and the story goes that after he left the police station he was set upon from behind and beaten. He was seriously injured and hospitalised. Some reports say that he died.

Newsreader: Adding fuel to the fire, the girl's uncle died after being beaten during a scuffle with the police. Hours before his death he spoke to the press.

[Translation]: I was in front, and it seems there were a few men behind me. They started running after me. They hit me and I cried out 'Someone is going to attack me!'. But no-one was helping, so I just kept running as they beat me.

Sarah Biddulph: The problem of course was because he was the local high school teacher. The high school students were very upset at this and went to the police station. According to some reports, they weren't treated very well, they were roughed up.

Damien Carrick: They were beaten up?

Sarah Biddulph: Well there were some reports to say that they were. Unfortunately with this story, there are many reports and they're not all identical. So there's different stories about what exactly happened. But one report clearly says that they were beaten up.

Damien Carrick: When word spreads of what's happened to these demonstrating high school students, all hell breaks lose; what happens at this point?

Sarah Biddulph: Very shortly thereafter, about 30,000 people rioted in the street. The local police station was burned, a number of other local buildings were burned, and 40 police cars. The provincial government sent police reinforcements and they also sent the armed police down to restore order. By the next day, the crowd had basically dispersed and there was a very strong police presence in the town. The provincial government also sent a team of investigators, it said 10 criminal investigators, because they had decided to reopen the case and reinvestigate. And it appears that they did, and there were further autopsies.

In the end, the parents were prevailed upon or convinced to accept the verdict of suicide by drowning. And to accept compensation and to let the matter go.

Damien Carrick: But we've also seen earlier this month, on July 3, the government taking steps to sack four officials, including two senior police officers for quite severe malfeasance. So there seems to be some acknowledgment that something bad took place in this town.

Sarah Biddulph: Yes. This incident, with 30,000 people, is very significant, but the timing of it is also extremely significant. In the run-up to the Olympics, Beijing has been very careful to exhort local governments and the police to make sure that they deal with dissatisfaction at the local level, that they deal with complaints properly in order to prevent these sorts of large-scale protests, and to have a major incident like this shortly before the Olympics must certainly have been very embarrassing for Beijing, and they clearly would have asked the local authorities to deal with it.

Damien Carrick: What was the press coverage of the mass riot in Weng'an and the death of Li Shufen?

Sarah Biddulph: The press coverage is quite interesting. At the outset, Xinhua, which is the national newsagency, issued quite an extensive report on the incident, and also made some comments which appeared to be mildly critical of the local government in their handling of the matter. This is unusual because these sorts of incidents don't often get national press coverage in China. The provincial government at some time later, issued its official version of events, which wasn't quite the same as the Xinhua version, and they really pushed the fact that it was a small group of gangsters who had instigated the riot. But the other thing that was very interesting about this was that when the provincial government put their version of events on the media, the internet went mad. Chinese, they're called 'netizens', people who use the internet and bloggers, were outraged that a group of students would be characterised as gangsters, and they seemed very strongly to take the side of the family and to reject the official line by the provincial government.

Damien Carrick: So you've got thousands of postings on blogs and websites on this issue. So okay, it may well have died in the official press, but its information and discussion is spreading like wildfire across the internet?

Sarah Biddulph: Yes. Of course, though, those posts which were critical of the government were taken down very quickly, and I think this outraged people even more.

Damien Carrick: Sarah Biddulph, senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne Law School.

Of course, not surprisingly, the authorities haven't been successful in removing the many thousands of internet postings on the Weng'an riots.

There are a number of issues the Chinese government is sensitive about. They include Tibet, the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang, the Three Gorges Dam, and also the aftermath of the recent Sichuan earthquake.

John Kamm runs a US-based organisation called Dui Hua, which advocates on behalf of dissidents imprisoned by Chinese authorities.

John Kamm says that on 10th June, authorities arrested a very prominent critic, and charged him with possessing state secrets.

John Kamm: Huang Qi is known as China's first cyber dissident. In fact he was put in prison in 2000 for essays that he had posted on his own website, and he served a five-year sentence. After he was released he took up his activism again. His website was moved to the United States so it's now based in the United States, and he became very active again in posting essays, information, that was often critical of the Chinese government. Interestingly, he was coming around to the view that things were really improving in China. Ironically, he gave an interview to a major American radio program, NPR, in which he said that he was not concerned about his own fate, he felt that things were much better now in China than they were 10 years ago, and within days of his making those statements he was detained, and now he's been formally arrested for possession of state secrets.

Damien Carrick: He had been involved with parents of children who'd died in some of the schools which were crushed in the Sichuan earthquake. Who had approached him, and what kind of advocacy had he been involved with?

John Kamm: Well bear in mind that we don't have a very good knowledge of the reasons why he was arrested. People who were detained with him and subsequently released, are really our only source of information, reliable information. And they say that their interrogators were very much focused on Mr Huang's activities in collecting accounts of and petitions from grieving parents, parents whose children had died in one of the—incredible, but 7,000 or more school buildings are said to have collapsed in the earthquake. He was collecting their petitions and he was investigating the collapse of these schools, and possibly he was actually looking at what the government was doing insofar as their own investigations. The Chinese government has said they too are investigating these collapses.

Now conceivably, if he were to come into possession of the ongoing government investigations, information arising from that, conceivably that could be considered a state secret. It's hard for us on the outside to imagine how an account by a parent of the death of a child would be considered a state secret, but then again, as I'm sure your listener know, the definition of state secret in China is highly arbitrary.

Damien Carrick: Huang Qi has been charged with 'possessing state secrets', that's a charge which is often levelled against dissidents in China.

John Kamm: Well actually, trafficking in state secrets is more often used against dissidents and journalists who step out of line. In trafficking in state secrets, you actually provide the state secrets to a hostile overseas organisation or media outlet. Possessing state secrets, as the name clearly implies, is the step before you actually traffic in them. So I guess what happened was he was detained and was considered to have in his possession state secrets that he had not yet sent abroad. Why this is important is that trafficking in state secrets is considered a crime of endangering state security and brings with it, if convicted, very severe sentences, up to and including life in prison. Possessing state secrets is a far less serious charge, with a sentence of, I believe, three years.

Damien Carrick: In China, what types of information have been held to constitute state secrets?

John Kamm: It's an amazingly broad range of things. You know really, it runs the entire gamut from something like a test that's going to be given to middle schoolers, all the way up to detailed plans for the nuclear arsenal, and everything in between. There was a case a couple of years ago of some underground Protestant, so-called 'house church pastors' who had photographed the destruction of unauthorised churches, and sent these photographs abroad. They were convicted of trafficking in state secrets. So a photograph of a demolished church has been, can be, considered a state secret. It's amazingly broad.

Damien Carrick: But there have even been cases involving newspaper clippings which have been sent overseas, where some of the text has been underlined or highlighted, that sending off that material underlined and highlighted published articles, has been held to be trafficking secrets?

John Kamm: Absolutely. One of the most famous cases in recent years is that of the Uighur woman activist, Rebiya Kadeer, and she was sentenced to eight years in prison for among other things, sending to her husband clippings of local newspapers.

Damien Carrick: One of China's most prominent dissidents, Mr Hu Jia, was sentenced to jail in April, and some of his blogs and his writings referred or dealt with the question of the Olympics, and obviously that's an extremely touchy subject right now.

John Kamm: Very sensitive. I've been going to China for more than 30 years, so I must say that I have never seen the Chinese government more sensitive and more touchy as it is today. So Mr Hu Jia has not just posted critical essays about the Olympics, but he's been very active in various causes; environmental, AIDS, and more recently he had evolved into a kind of an information hub on the activities of dissidents in China. Like so many Chinese who have adopted fairly high profiles, the government denied him a passport, and kept him under house arrest.

Hu Jia's response to that was to videotape the officers who had surrounded his house, and it was really both a sad and hilarious video, watching the police playing cards, and sending out for fast food and falling asleep at their post etc. This doubtless embarrassed quite a few of these cops. So it's very hard to know for sure exactly why he was convicted and given a three and a half year sentence. There were plenty of reasons I'm sure that the political police wanted him behind bars. As you probably know, he has a wife and a young child and they are under house arrest as we speak.

Damien Carrick: John Kamm from Dui Hua organisation, a human rights group based in San Francisco.

That's The Law Report for this week.

Guests

Sarah Biddulph
Senior Lecturer Melbourne Law School, specialist in Chinese Law

John Kamm,
Executive Director of Dui Hua, Human Rights group based in San Francisco

Presenter

Damien Carrick

Producer

Anita Barraud

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