Chinese rights lawyer Xie Yang, who has been behind bars without trial for three years on “subversion” charges, has issued a defiant statement to the authorities after they repeatedly extended his detention, saying he ‘won’t bow’ to them.
Xie marked three years this week in the Changsha No. 1 Detention Center after his pretrial detention period was extended for the 10th time, his U.S.-based wife Chen Guiqiu told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview.
Hunan-based Xie was arrested in December 2021 after he supported a primary teacher forced into psychiatric “treatment” for her outspoken comments on social media and posted a video containing a satirical reference to China’s President Xi Jinping.
The teacher, Li Tiantian, was held for several days in a psychiatric hospital after she spoke out over the expulsion of a Shanghai journalism lecturer who encouraged her students to verify official accounts of the Nanjing massacre.
Since Xie’s arrest, which came after an earlier, two-year detention for subversion, he has been illegally kidnapped, subjected to enforced disappearance and tortured, while the authorities have failed to follow due process throughout his case, according to his defense lawyers.
He remains defiant, however, penning a New Year’s message on Jan. 1, 2025 that read: “I will never bow my head; I would rather it were cut off.”
Chen said that Xie’s pretrial detention has been extended this time until Feb. 28, 2025, according to notification she received.
“I think it shows how determined he is to defend a citizen’s right to freedom of speech,” Chen said. “He wants to show the authorities that they can’t force him to plead guilty -- that he won’t ‘confess’.”
Police detainees in China have reported being offered more lenient sentences in return for “pleading guilty” and showing a “cooperative attitude,” while the country’s state-run media has been widely criticized and sanctioned for its use of heavily scripted, televised “confessions” on state media.
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“I can tell from his note that his willpower is very strong,” Chen said. “I am very relieved that he hasn’t been broken by being in prison for so long, for three years.”
Chen said there is no evidence to back up the charge of “incitement to subvert state power” against her husband.
“There’s no evidence ... so they retaliate by repeatedly extending his detention,” she said. “This is arbitrary detention of a citizen; of a human rights lawyer.”
Chen said similar treatment has been meted out by the ruling Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping since a crackdown on human rights lawyers and legal staff that saw 300 arrested in 2015. For example, she said, among those arrested in 2015 were rights lawyers Wang Quanzhang and Li Heping, who were subject to harassment and repeated evictions along with their families, who still have children in school.
“They see us as the enemy, because we expose their shameless behavior, so they think we stand in opposition to them,” Chen said.
U.S.-based rights lawyer Yu Pinjian said Xie’s work involved defending some of the most disadvantaged people in China.
“He would rather die than bow down to them, which shows his determination to hold to his beliefs in the face of huge political persecution,” Yu said. “He speaks for the rest of us human rights lawyers.”
“His fearless stance inspires us and encourages us to move forward in strength,” he said.
U.S.-based right lawyer Wu Shaoping described the targeting of Xie as “an abuse of power” by the authorities, and his continued detention as illegal.
“They can’t use high-sounding reasoning to explain this away,” Wu said. “Extended detention is illegal, even under the Chinese Communist Party’s own laws.”
After the 2015 crackdown, Xie was held under “residential surveillance at a designated location” in a government guesthouse belonging to the National University of Defense Technology in Hunan’s provincial capital, Changsha.
Subjected to abuse including deprivation of food and water, Xie was tortured again after being moved to the police-run Changsha No. 2 Detention Center following his formal arrest on Jan. 9, 2016, his lawyers reported.
He was subjected to confinement in a “hanging chair” made of plastic chairs stacked high above the ground for hours at a time, so that his legs swelled up and he was in excruciating pain, he told his lawyers.
He was also deprived of sleep and repeatedly beaten, humiliated, and taunted with death threats against his family, according to copious and detailed notes made public from meetings with his lawyers.
He eventually pleaded “guilty” to subversion charges in 2017, but had earlier warned in a public letter that any guilty plea would be the result of “prolonged torture and cruel treatment.”
According to a state media report on March 1, 2017, an official investigation concluded that “no torture had taken place.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.