(The following is excerpted with permission from a longer report prepared by the Laogai Research Foundation)
On May 20, 2000, five graduates in Beijing, Xu Wei, Jin Haike, Zhang Honghai, Zhang Yanhua and Fan Erjun started a study group — “New Youth Study Group” — to debate the need for political reform in China. Three months later on August 19, Yang Zili, Huang Haixia and Li Yuzhou joined the group. Li Yuzhou was in fact recruited by the State Security Ministry as a spy to collect information about the group.
On March 13, 2001, the State Security Bureau of Beijing secretly seized all former members of the group except Li Yuzhou. After some interrogation, Fan Erjun, Zhang Yanhua and Huang Haixia were set free, but Xu Wei, Jin Haike, Yang Zili and Zhang Honghai were kept in custody till the final verdict was issued in 2003, giving them eight to ten years’ imprisonment.
The four young men of the group are distinguished in many ways from other dissident individuals or organizations. First, they have a clear and rational understanding of China’s problems and the nature of China’s communist system. Mostly born in the 70’s, they were free from the torture of famine and Mao-style political campaign, and even not so much involved in the 1989 pro-democracy movement. Their motive to reform China principally came from their clear realization that China is in need of freedom, democracy and human rights, which is the essential source of many incurable social problems.
Second, they have great sympathy to the underprivileged groups, especially poor peasants in rural China. With nearly a billion poor peasants, China cannot be called modernized without first solving the problems in the vast countryside.
Third, the four young men did not simply take the issue of China’s political reform as of pure academic interests that can be conducted in library or laboratory; they saw the importance of the first-hand investigations. Yang Zili, for instance, visited different areas of the countryside to make on-the-spot investigations when he wrote papers appealing for reform. Fourth, the four young men have great passion of self-sacrifice. Being graduates of China’s leading universities, they can easily find decent jobs with considerable income and can possibly become rich as so
many of their classmates had done. But they gave up that comfortable way of life, and devoted their time and effort and consequently their freedom to the improvement of China’s political and economic conditions. In one word, they did what they had done entirely out of their social conscience, out of the responsibility a real intellectual should have.
Prisoners of injustice
The four young men are the victims of injustice. Though China is said to be building a country ruled by law, cases of injustice occurred daily because of the unchecked political power and unsupervised judicial system. There are a couple of points to highlight how legal procedures, such as detention, trial, and judgment, were distorted by the political intervention. First, the judgment is essentially made upon faked testimonies. Since the State Security Bureau (SSB) of Beijing failed to find any material evidence, they “made” testimonies of witnesses. By threatening Huang Haixia that if she did not admit that the organization is anti-CCP and anti-socialism she would be sentenced to seven or more years’ of imprisonment and therefore lost her chance of graduation, they got testimony they wanted from Huang.
Another undergraduate Fan Erjun met the same situation so he had to confess that the group was aimed to overthrow China’s socialist system. But after Zhan Yanhua, Fan Erjun and Huang Haixia were set free, they immediately made a statement, saying their “testimonies were faked under the threat of the SSB”. Even Li Yuzhou, the former SSB spy now living in Thailand, confessed that the reports he delivered to the SSB were “cooked up” according to the intention of his superior.
However, the trail by the First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing on September 28, 2001, and again in April and May, 2003, and the examination of the defendants’ appeal by the Higher People’s Court of Beijin in November 2003, are made exactly on the basis of these testimonies that the three witnesses had already renounced and the SSB agent Li Yuzhou had already voiced his indignation over the misuse of his reports.
Second, the study group cannot literally be called an organization. The eight members of the “New Youth Study Group” never agreed on a political platform and had no real source of funds. They never set up branches in other cities or recruited any other members. They never even managed to hold another meeting with full attendance; someone was always too busy. What is more, when the arrest took place in March 2001, the group has been dismissed for three months.
Though China’s Constitution grants the people the freedom of association, the Chinese never really enjoy this right. However, to punish the offenders so severely simply because of such an informal and temporary group for study is still a rare and ridiculous case in history.
Third, illegal measures such as cheating, torture and threats are widely used in the case. Opinions differ on whether Li Yuzhou was originally a spy or turned into a spy under the SSB’s pressure. In either case, there were deceptions – the SSB deceived Li or Li deceived his friends or both. Legally, the evidences collected by deception are not valid.
On September 28, 2001, April 21, 2003 and May 28, 2003, when the defendants appeared at court, they complained their torture in the detention center. They were beaten or threatened to be beaten by the prison police or by other prisoners instigated by the police, forced to undergo “education through labor” and deprived of many aspects of personable freedom which even a prisoner is supposed to have. Threats were given not only to the four young men but also to others for collecting testimonies and to the defendants’ families to keep them in silence. Yang Zili’s wife, Lu Kun, for example, was detained shortly after Yang was arrested. The police forced her into a small car, took her to one of the ministry’s detention houses with her head
covered by a cloth bag and interrogated her for three days, demanding information about her husband’s friends and their activities by threatening her to give a harsher punishment of her husband if she refused to do as she was told.
In one word, the case of the “New Youth Study Group” is entirely against common
sense and legal procedure and convention and is therefore a miscarriage of justice that
should be reexamined and overturned.
