Amnesty International Report 2017/18

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Amnesty International Report 2017/18

In June, the National Intelligence Law was 

adopted and entered into force. These laws 

were part of a national security legal 

architecture introduced in 2014 − which also 

included the Anti-espionage Law, Criminal 

Law Amendment (9), National Security Law, 

Anti-terrorism Law and Cyber Security Law − 

and presented serious threats to the 

protection of human rights. The National 

Intelligence Law used similarly vague and 

overbroad concepts of national security, and 

granted effectively unchecked powers to 

national intelligence institutions with unclear 

roles and responsibilities. All lacked 

safeguards to protect against arbitrary 

detention and to protect the right to privacy, 

freedom of expression and other human 

rights.

1

The draft Supervision Law, which opened 

for consultation in November, would, if 

enacted as is, legalize a new form of arbitrary 

detention, named liuzhi, and create an 

extrajudicial system with far-reaching powers 

with significant potential to infringe human 

rights.

2

The authorities continued to use “residential 

surveillance in a designated location”, a form 

of secret incommunicado detention that 

allowed the police to hold individuals for up 

to six months outside the formal detention 

system, without access to legal counsel of 

their choice, their families or others, and 

placed suspects at risk of torture and other 

ill-treatment. This form of detention was used 

to curb the activities of human rights 

defenders, including lawyers, activists and 

religious practitioners.

HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS

On 13 July, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu 

Xiaobo died in custody from liver cancer. The 

authorities had refused a request from Liu 

Xiaobo and his family that he travel abroad to 

receive medical treatment.

3

 At the end of the 

year, his wife Liu Xia remained under 

surveillance and illegal “house arrest” which 

had continued since Liu Xiaobo was awarded 

the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. At least 10 

activists were detained for holding memorials 

for him.

In November, writer and government critic 

Yang Tongyan, who had spent nearly half his 

life in detention, died shortly after his release 

on medical parole.

Among the nearly 250 targeted individuals 

who were questioned or detained by state 

security agents following the unprecedented 

government crackdown on human rights 

lawyers and other activists that started in July 

2015, nine were convicted of “subverting 

state power”, “inciting subversion of state 

power” or “picking quarrels and provoking 

trouble”. Three people were given suspended 

sentences and one “exempted from criminal 

punishment” while remaining under 

surveillance and five remained imprisoned. In 

April, Beijing lawyer Li Heping, detained 

since the beginning of the crackdown, was 

given a three-year suspended prison 

sentence for “subverting state power”. He 

claimed that he was tortured during pre-trial 

detention, including being force-fed 

medicine. Yin Xu’an was sentenced in May to 

three and a half years’ imprisonment. Wang 

Fang was sentenced in July to three years’ 

imprisonment. Beijing lawyer Jiang Tianyong, 

who went missing in November 2016 and 

“confessed” at a trial in August to fabricating 

the torture account of lawyer Xie Yang by 

Chinese police and attending overseas 

workshops to discuss changing China’s 

political system, was sentenced in November 

to two years’ imprisonment for “inciting 

subversion of state power”. Hu Shigen and 

Zhou Shifeng, convicted in 2016, remained 

imprisoned. Beijing human rights lawyer 

Wang Quanzhang, held in incommunicado 

detention since the beginning of the 

crackdown, was still awaiting trial at the end 

of the year, charged with “subverting state 

power”. In January, an interview transcript 

with Xie Yang was published in which he said 

he faced torture and other ill-treatment 

during detention. Xie Yang was released on 

bail without a verdict in May after his trial. On 

26 December, the court announced his 

conviction on the charge of “inciting 

subversion of state power” but ruled that he 

was “exempt from criminal punishment”. He 

remained under surveillance.

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Amnesty International Report 2017/18

127

In July, Beijing lawyer Wang Yu, whose 

detention on 9 July 2015 marked the 

beginning of the crackdown, wrote in an 

article published online that she was ill-

treated during detention. She was released 

on bail in mid-2016 but remained under 

close surveillance. Lawyers Li Shuyun, Ren 

Quanniu and Li Chunfu, and activist Gou 

Hongguo, reported that they were drugged 

during detention.

4

In addition to the 250 targeted individuals, 

activist Wu Gan, who worked in a law firm 

later targeted by the authorities in the 

crackdown, was tried in August in a closed 

hearing for “subverting state power” after 

nearly 27 months’ pre-trial detention. On 26 

December, he was sentenced to eight years’ 

imprisonment.

In March, Guangdong activist Su Changlan 

was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment 

for “inciting subversion of state power” for 

her online criticism of the Chinese 

Communist Party and the Chinese socialist 

system. She was detained in 2014 after 

expressing support for Hong Kong’s 2014 

pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. She 

was released in October after serving the full 

sentence but with health concerns 

aggravated by poor conditions in detention.

On 19 March, Lee Ming-Cheh, manager of a 

Taiwan NGO, was detained by state security 

officers when he entered mainland China 

from Macao. In September, he was tried in 

Hunan Province for “subverting state power” 

and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in 

November.

5

At least 11 activists were detained in June 

for commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen 

crackdown; most were accused of “picking 

quarrels and provoking trouble”. Li Xiaoling 

and Shi Tingfu remained in detention, and 

Ding Yajun was sentenced to three years’ 

imprisonment in September.

In August, lawyer Gao Zhisheng went 

missing from an isolated village in Shaanxi 

province, where he had lived under tight 

surveillance since his release from prison in 

2014. The family later learned he was in 

authorities’ custody but his location and 

condition remained unknown.

Lawyer Li Yuhan was detained in October 

and claimed she was tortured and ill-treated 

during detention.

WORKERS’ RIGHTS

In May, labour activists Hua Haifeng, Li Zhao 

and Su Heng were detained in Jiangxi 

province while investigating work conditions 

at Huajian shoe factories. The activists were 

released on bail in June but remained under 

close surveillance.

In July, a Guangzhou court sentenced 

labour activist Liu Shaoming to four and a 

half years’ imprisonment for publishing his 

reflections about joining the pro-democracy 

movement and becoming a member of 

China’s first independent trade union in 

1989, and experiences during the 1989 

Tiananmen crackdown.

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION – INTERNET

Thousands of websites and social media 

services remained blocked, including 

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On 1 June, 

the Cybersecurity Law came into effect, 

making it obligatory for internet companies 

operating in China to censor users’ content. 

In August, the Cyberspace Administration of 

China and the Guangdong Provincial 

Cyberspace Administration launched an 

investigation into internet service providers 

Tencent’s WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu’s 

Tieba because their platforms contained user 

accounts which “spread information that 

endangers national security, public security 

and social order, including violence and 

terror, false information and rumours and 

pornography”. In September, China’s 

dominant messaging service WeChat 

introduced new terms of service to collect a 

wide range of personal information, and 

made data on its over 900 million users 

available to the government.

Huang Qi, co-founder of 64tianwang.com, a 

website that reports on and documents 

protests in China, was accused of “leaking 

state secrets”. He was allowed to meet his 

lawyer only eight months after he was 

detained and claimed that he was ill-treated 

in detention. At the end of 2017, 10 

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