Photo: Wang Zang and his family (Photo: Wang Liqin’s Twitter profile picture)
(Yunnan province—November 14, 2022) – Authorities charged and convicted Chinese poet and painter Wang Zang and his wife Wang Liqin with inciting subversion of state power for their artistic expression and public support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. After hearing the verdict, the couple expressed their disagreement with the verdict.
Wang Zang (real name Wang Yuwen) and Wang Liqin were sentenced to four years and two and a half years, respectively. In court, both refused to accept the verdict and filed an appeal.
Wang Zang himself affirmed his innocence in court with a poem.
Lawyer Lu Siwei’s license was revoked during his time as the representative lawyer for Wang Zang; therefore, he was unable to appear in court to defend Wang. Instead, lawyer Zhang Lei and lawyer Zhang Tingyuan appeared in court to plead not guilty for the two defendants.
The facts surrounding Wang Zang relate to his expression of free speech. Publicly available information indicates that Wang Zang is a well-known Chinese poet, film and television script writer and painter, human rights defender, and member of the Free Culture Movement in China.
In 2012, when Wang Zang moved into the Songzhuang Art Colony in Beijing, where there is a dense population of dissidents, the Chinese Communist Party’s state security police began to exert frequent pressure, forcing him to move several times and affecting his livelihood.
Wang Zang criticized the “Cultural Revolution” initiated by Mao Zedong, which brought great disaster to the Chinese people. He publicly expressed his solidarity with the well-known human rights activist Mr. Guo Feixiong, gave moral support to many human rights lawyers who were tortured and abused by the Chinese authorities, cared about the self-immolation of Tibetans, and supported the imprisoned Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti from Xinjiang.
In October 2014, Wang Zang was criminally detained by Beijing police for picking quarrels and provoking trouble after posting photos of him holding a yellow umbrella and organizing a poetry recitation event on the Internet in solidarity with Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central with Love and Peace,” a civil disobedience movement. After nine months of detention, he was released in July 2015 without charge. During his interrogation, Wang Zang was tortured, and his wife was harassed by Chinese state security agents.
On May 30, 2020, before the 31st anniversary of the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square, the police of Chuxiong, Yunnan Province, arrested Wang Zang in front of his children and subjected his wife and children to surveillance and harassment. His wife, who appealed online to the authorities to release Wang Zang, was summoned to the police station on June 17, and was subsequently detained as a suspect with the same charge.
The couple, respectively, has been detained at the Chuxiong City Detention Center and the Chuxiong Prefecture Detention Center in southern China’s Yunnan Province for more than two years now. Wang Zang is being held as a “political prisoner” in the same prison as those who are “criminal prisoners.” It is a fact that Chinese prisons condone the harming of political prisoners by criminal prisoners.
Wang Zang and Wang Liqin’s four young children are under the care of Wang Zang’s mother. The daily lives of the elderly and children are being monitored and restricted. The authorities seized Wang Zang’s bank accounts and identification documents and did not allow any relatives or friends to send financial assistance, leaving Wang Zang’s family’s financial situation in a dire state.
~Gao Zhensai, Special Correspondent of ChinaAid
