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A Chinese woman has been sentenced to one year of “re-education” in a Chinese labor camp for sending a single tweet.
The tweet was actually a retweet, sent by her fiance Hua Chunhui in the midst of anti-Japanese demonstrations in China last month. The original tweet urged the protesters to smash Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo; Cheng Jianping merely retweeted it, adding the words, “Charge, angry youth.”
According to Hua, the tweet was just a joke, but it was enough for the Chinese authorities to accuse her of disrupting social order, and sentence her to one year of labor in the Shibali River women’s labour camp in Zhengzhou City in Henan Province. Hua was also arrested by the police but was released after five days.
The 46-year-old Cheng, whose Twitter nickname is wangyi09, is a social activist, and was already detained for five days in August this year after she voiced support for Liu Xianbin, the organizer of the China Democracy Party.
Cheng has started a hunger strike protesting the sentence, said Hua. Her lawyer Lan Zhixue and Hua have appealed the case, trying to get Cheng released from the camp.
Along with many other online services, Twitter is banned in China, but it’s still possible to evade the blockade by using a virtual private network or various online tools.
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