A Chinese woman sentenced to a year in a labour camp could be the first person in the country persecuted over a tweet, human rights groups said yesterday, as Beijing tightens its grip on social media.
Cheng Jianping, 46, was convicted on Monday of “disturbing social order” after she retweeted a Twitter posting that mocked anti-Japanese protesters and suggested they attack the Japanese pavilion at Shanghai’s World Expo.
“To my knowledge it is the first time... someone was sent to labour camp for tweeting,” Vincent Brossel, said a representative of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.
Even though Twitter is blocked in China, the government has sent a “very clear message... that they watch it and (users should) be careful,” he said. Amnesty International has urged the government to release Ms Cheng, whose sentencing comes as China faces intense criticism over its tough reaction to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident writer Liu Xiaobo.
Ms Cheng, an online activist who had supported Mr Liu and other rights defenders, could be the first Chinese citizen to become “a prisoner of conscience on the basis of a single tweet,” Amnesty said.
On October 17, Ms Cheng added the phrase “Angry youth, charge!” before retweeting a message posted by her fiance, Hua Chunhui, that mocked Chinese anti-Japanese protesters who had smashed Japanese products over a maritime dispute between the two countries, Amnesty said.
Mr Hua wrote that if protesters “really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion”.
The dispute erupted in early September when Tokyo arrested a Chinese trawler captain near a disputed East China Sea archipelago claimed by both sides.
Mr Hua, who said he had been detained by police for 10 days over the tweet, said Ms Cheng’s sentence was “completely illegal and absurd and without any reason”.
“I don’t think our punishment was right, we only tweeted one sentence and it’s satirical,” said Hua, who had planned to marry Ms Cheng on October 28.