Chapter 10 Tyranny and Crisis (5)

Another typical example of the CCP’s persecution of pro-democracy activists is the long-term persecution of Qin Yongmin, a pro-democracy activist of worker origin. Qin Yongmin was a Wuhan worker who insisted in the late 1970s that people should have the basic human rights of expression, publication, association, etc. He had been summoned, monitored, and detained by the CCP regime for years. From the 1970s to 2012, he was arrested and detained 39 times in 43 years and spent 23 years in prison, making him the longest-standing political prisoner in China since the Deng Xiaoping era.

Since Xi Jinping took power in 2013, the persecution of Qin Yongmin was intensified and in January 2015 he was placed in administrative detention at Wuhan Detention Center No. 2 for “giving too many interviews to foreign media and writing too many articles,” and his wife Zhao Suli was subsequently detained and was made to disappear.

In June 2016, Qin Yongmin was indicted by the Wuhan Procuratorate for “allegedly inciting subversion of state power”. According to the indictment, “Qin Yongmin has organized and planned a series of subversive activities to achieve his political goals of pluralistic democracy, writing articles and publishing books and proposing reconciliation, human rights supremacy, benign interaction and peaceful transformation for all people”.

On July 11, 2018, the 3.5-year prosecution of Qin Yongmin was extended by the Wuhan Intermediate Court to 13 years in prison for subversion of state power, without giving a detailed account of the case and the reasons for the verdict. Qin Yongmin was born in 1953 and sentenced to another 13 years which meant he would stay in prison until he was 78 years old. Thus he had no chance of coming out alive.

After his release from prison in 2010, Qin Yongmin was invited to visit abroad several times but he said he wanted to stick to the front line of human rights activities and would never go abroad until China was democratized. While in prison before 2010, the deputy director of the Hubei Provincial Prison also approached him about going abroad but he refused to agree to the authorities’ conditions and refused to go abroad.

In response to Qin Yongmin’s resentencing to another 13 years, the EU and Amnesty International both issued condemnations. The EU’s July 11, 2018 statement stated: “the situation of civil rights in China has deteriorated and a number of Chinese human rights defenders are being convicted and imprisoned.”

Xi Jinping’s comprehensive and thorough crackdown on speech that does not heed Xi’s words has led to the suspension of the publication of “Yanhuang Chunqiu,” which was supported by a group of the CCP patriarchs, including military generals, in July 2016. Founded by 92-year-old veteran Du Guozheng, “Yanhuang Chunqiu” has a history of 25 years and has published a large number of reflections on the historical mistakes of the CCP, which are very popular among all walks of life. But Xi Jinping only allows the publication of “positive energy” that he approves of, not the articles reflecting on historical mistakes. The article is not allowed to be published. The “Yanhuang Spring and Autumn” could not survive even with Xi Zhongxun’s “well done” inscription in the past.

On the one hand, Xi Jinping has intensified his tyranny, forcibly demolished and relocated millions of people and a large number of peasants have been unable to survive and have petitioned and repeatedly been mercilessly persecuted, while on the other hand, he has hypocritically implemented his “poverty alleviation and poverty eradication” plan and implemented “fake poverty eradication” throughout the country. In March 2021, he also held a celebratory conference in Beijing to announce that “China has successfully eradicated poverty”, “China has won the battle against poverty”, “created a miracle on earth ” and “created a Chinese sample for global poverty eradication”.

Xi Jinping has announced 98.99 million rural poor people are all out of poverty; 832 poor counties are all off the cap of poverty; 12.8 poor villages are all off the poverty line.

Ironically, in May 2020, Premier Li Keqiang has said that China has 600 million low- and middle-income people, whose average income is less than 1,000 yuan per month, and that the 90 million people Xi Jinping has said are poor, are actually not out of line with the UN’s absolute poverty line of $1.90 per day.