A Chinese woman has been imprisoned for a message she retweeted on the social networking site Twitter. She was sentenced to one year in a Chinese labor camp after she forwarded a message her fiancé had written that urged recipients to attack the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, according to human rights groups.
The 46-year-old woman, Cheng Jianping, added the words “Charge, angry youth” to the original message written by her fiancé, Hua Chunhui, in which he “goaded protesters to go beyond the smashing of Japanese products and express their fury at the heavily policed expo site,” said the New York Times.
The woman was accused of “disturbing social order.”
Cheng and her fiancé were both seized by officials last month in the city of Wuxi. Hua was released after five days – yet Cheng will remain in police custody for an entire year. Hua told reporters they had planned to marry on the day they were detained.
People don’t seem to grasp that what they put out there on social networking sites such as Twitter can get them into some serious trouble. However – is it fair that Cheng is being punished more severely than her fiancé? After all – he was the one who wrote the initial message.
China, especially, is intolerant of the internet’s social networking sites. Known by the online name Wang Yi, Ms. Cheng is avidly followed by a small coterie of Chinese intellectuals who subscribe to Twitter. Twitter is blocked in China, however, the social networking site can be reached “by those willing to burrow beneath the government’s firewall.”
Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s director for the Asia-Pacific region, said “Sentencing someone to a year in a labor camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person’s clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China’s repression of online expression,” in a statement on Thursday.
Unlike our legal system in the United States, in China police can send people to labor camps for up to four years without a trial. People have little chance of appeal once they are sentenced.
International director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Renee Xia, said Ms. Cheng was part of a group of freelance advocates known as weiguan. They travel across the country to show up at courthouses where dissidents are on trial.
“There is a growing group of people like her, netizens who are moving from cyberspace to the real world,” Ms. Xia said. “Putting her into a labor camp shows that the government is prepared to come down hard on these people.”
What do you think? Does Cheng’s punishment suit her crime?
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