A single tweet costs Chinese activist a year in jail

BEIJING—The power of Twitter was on full display in China this week: a single tweet has landed an activist in jail.

Cheng Jianping, a 46-year-old activist, was sentenced to one year of detention in a Chinese labour camp after “re-tweeting” a satirical message that mocked Chinese youths who were staging violent protests against Japan.

The protests arose during a dispute between China and Japan over the ownership of a set of islands in the East China Sea.

“Sentencing someone to a year in a labour camp, without trial, simply for repeating another person’s clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China’s repression of online expression,” Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s director for the Asia-Pacific said.

Amnesty said Cheng might be “the first Chinese citizen to become a prisoner of conscience on the basis of a single tweet.”

The message was posted on Twitter in mid-October, after nationalist youths had gone on the rampage in some Chinese cities, smashing Japanese products including cars.

But news of Cheng’s punishment emerged only this week when she was sentenced by police to a year in Shibali River women’s labour camp in the central city of Zhengzhou.

China still operates a vast system of labour camps across the country and still empowers police and local administrators to jail people without trial for up to four years.

Cheng’s saga began when her fiancé, Hua Chunhui, posted a message on Twitter on Oct. 17 that said, “Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan (an activist). It’s no new trick. If you really want to kick it up a notch, fly immediately to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.”

Cheng, writing under the name wangyi09, re-tweeted Hua’s message and added her own biting satire: “Angry youth, charge!” she wrote.

Ten days later, police detained Cheng for “disrupting social order.”

But her defenders say she and her finance’s satirical intent was obvious — they did not support the demonstrations against Japan.

“It is possible that Cheng Jianping may have been jailed for her online activism in the last few years and her expressions of support for other Chinese dissidents,” Zarifi said.

Cheng’s fiancé Hua, however, told the BBC that documentation received from the labour camp made it clear that Cheng had in fact been sentenced to re-education because of her “tweet.”

But he also noted that Cheng had signed a petition calling for the release of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an 11-year sentence for calling for a multi-party democracy in China.

Cheng has now begun a hunger strike, he said.

Twitter — like Facebook and YouTube — is formally blocked by authorities in China.

But among China’s 400 million Internet users, many find ways around China’s so-called Great Firewall.