There is no longer space in China to document protests

Chinese citizen journalist Lu Yuyu was imprisoned in 2016 under the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after running a popular Wickeddonna blog that documents protests happening across China for three years. He was released from prison in June, 2020 and now lives in his hometown Guizhou. In an interview, he said as the overall environment for conducting human rights related work continues to deteriorate in China, there is no more space in the country to keep defending human rights. The momentum will need to be continued by people or groups outside of China.

Question: Can you highlight some situations in detention centers?

Lu Yuyu: I remember there was one evening when I was trying to fall asleep, but the guards wouldn’t turn off the lights in my room. The light was right above my head so I tried to use a shirt to cover my head, hoping to fall asleep.

Then a female prison guard came and asked me to take off the shirt on my head, but I refused. She called two other male guards over but I still didn’t take the shirt off. The next morning while they were doing morning calls, one of them asked me to stand straight and I told them I couldn’t stand straight.

The male guard began to kick me and I tried to resist. I couldn’t overpower them so I began to yell” the CCP is beating someone.” They seemed alarmed by my sudden yell, so they let me go. From that day on, I began a three-day hunger strike. On the third day, the guard came into my room and I began to yell at them. They were probably afraid of killing me, so they didn’t say anything back. This incident ended like that.

Another incident happened in a different detention center. It was around the time of Chinese New Year, and for an entire month, they would summon me to a separate interrogation room and put me on a tiger chair. Then, they would begin to brainwash me by telling me all kinds of stories and forcing me to watch other people’s forced confession videos.

After going through the same pattern for a month, I began to hallucinate and develop a bad mood. I wasn’t feeling well. Then one day, the prison guards came to inspect my cell, and when they walked in, I stared at them rather than looking down on the ground. One of the guards told me to look down, but since I wasn’t in a good mood, I threw a bottle at him and it injured his face.

Other guards then rushed into the room and pressed me to the ground. They were twisting my legs and arms, and seven or eight of them forced me to sit on a tiger chair for three hours. They put handcuffs on my ankles and asked me to walk around with handcuffs on my legs. I refused and then they carried me back to the interrogation room and threw me onto a bed.

I had handcuffs on both my wrists and ankles and four of them pressed me against the bed and started to beat me. Since I couldn’t move, I spit on their faces. One of them who was probably over 100 kilograms, kept stepping on my legs, hurting me really badly. I kept spitting at him and he kept stepping on my leg really heavily.

I was in great pain and told them to kill me on the spot. One of the prison guards said one day when he was no longer a prison guard, he would kill me. I told him if he didn’t kill me, I would look down on him. Other guards began to be afraid and told them to let me go. I began another hunger strike for three days afterwards, and the commander of the prison guards came to visit me, asking me if I had any requests. I said I wanted the prison guard who was stepping on my leg to apologize to me. After a while, the guard came and apologized to me. That’s how this episode ended.

Question: How did you manage not to give in to the prison guards’ repeated threats to force you to confess your “crimes?”

Lu Yuyu: I knew that documenting protests in China through my blog wasn’t an impulsive move. Rather, it was a process that took me almost four years. The process was very demanding and tough. I needed to spend 8 hours a day in average to do that and I need to do it every day. What I did was I went online to collect evidence as well as relevant information and preserved them on my blog. If I didn’t do so, these traces could be deleted the next day.

The reason why I could do this for almost four years was because I was really interested in documenting protests in China. And after doing it for so many years, it would be like disapproving my own efforts if I confess that these were criminal activities. If I confess my “crimes,” maybe it could reduce two to three years from my prison sentence, but I would definitely regret it once I was released.

I have thought about these scenarios so my bottom line has always been not to confess that I’ve committed some criminal activities. They tried to charge me with “inciting subversion of state,” which carried a seven-year prison sentence, but I still didn’t give in. The prosecutors then changed it back to “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.” After I was imprisoned, the prosecutor would come visit me every two weeks and asked me if I would admit that I’d committed criminal activities. They always warned that if I don’t confess, they would hand me very long prison sentences.

Question: Some media reports suggest that your co-founder and girlfriend, Li Tingyu, was still missing. Was the information correct?

Lu Yuyu: I got in touch with her mom couple days ago and she told me that Li is already married and has a new life now. It’s obvious that she wanted me to stop bothering her. However, I told her mom that I wish to hear these information from Li. After all, we were together for almost four years and the relationship was going really well.

I didn’t know what happened to her while I was imprisoned, so I wanted to hear her telling me that she’s doing really well. Li called me on the same day, telling me that she’s already married and she has a new life now. She kept crying and telling me how sorry she was. I didn’t want to increase her grief, so I simply told her that I respect her choices. After all, when a girl needed to deal with a state apparatus by herself, what kind of choices would she have?

Question: What role do you think your blog was playing in China before you were imprisoned?

Lu Yuyu: My blog was primarily documenting protests in China. After running the blog for so many years, I realized that I couldn’t really help those people who were protesting through my blog. All I could do is to record the facts and try not to let it disappear. After all, many protests in China usually disappear without ever being noticed. My thought was to keep records of these protests and preserve the history.

I think these information can become resources for research related to protests in China. It would be too naive to say that I wanted to help those who were protesting through the blog. I probably recorded more than 70,000 protests throughout the four-year time, but all I did was to prevent them from disappearing. Under the current system in China, no one can survive by documenting protests in China. The situation now is much worse than before.

Question: Will you keep documenting protests in China now that you have been released? Do you think there are still spaces to do similar things in China?

Lu Yuyu: I couldn’t stop thinking about starting to document protests again, because it is something that I really enjoy doing. However, anyone who wants to do similar things now need to draw up a long-term plan. I can no longer do it simply because I like to do it. Under the current climate in China, I would be arrested again after documenting protests in China for 20 days or less. That would be the consequences that I need to bear, and I think it would be meaningless for me to challenge the reality. I wouldn’t be able to do it for more than half a month.

I don’t think there is any space in China for anyone to document protests. The police would visit you simply for something sensitive that you post online or on Twitter. I think if someone else living outside of China would be willing to keep documenting protests in China, that would be possible. However, such option no longer exists in China.

Question: Have you been able to freely travel to different parts of China since being released? Are there any kind of limitation to your freedom of movement?

Lu Yuyu: I can’t go to Beijing, Shanghai and Xinjiang, and since they already have my cellphone number, I will need to inform them if I’m going to leave my hometown. The police have been visiting me over the last few days, but overall, my condition seems to be a little bit better than other dissidents who have also been released. I think it might have something to do with my aggressive personality as well as the fact that I went on a few hunger strikes in prison.

I think they know my personality so they have been very polite to me since I was released. They haven’t made any outrageous demands so far, but there are certain kinds of restrictions on me.

Question: Do you have any immediate plans for the future?

Lu Yuyu: I hope to find a way to deal with my depression. I have been taking medication regularly and working on. I also spend some time to study English and read books. These are things that I’ve been doing since being released from prison.

But I have been diagnosed with serious depression, so I’m still not feeling really well everyday. I can only sleep one to two hours a day, and after taking the medication, I can probably sleep four to five hours a night. The most important thing now is to find a way to alleviate the symptoms of my depression. I haven’t found a very effective way yet.

This interview was first published in Mandarin on DW’s website.