Guo Feixiong’s sister, Yang Maoping, said that her brother’s defense lawyer met with her brother via video chat. Guo started his hunger strike after being arrested on December 5, 2021; his weight loss is getting worse at a rate of four pounds per month. If he continues to lose weight, his life will be in danger in the next three months.
Chinese authorities arrested Guo Feixiong on January 12 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power” and detained him in the Guangzhou Municipal No. 1 Detention Center. At the time, he was seeking to travel to the United States to take care of his critically ill wife, Zhang Qing. After making his appeal to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to lift his travel ban, he was held in solitary confinement at a secret location and formally arrested.
There is reason to believe that in order to extract Guo’s confession, the state security police did not hesitate to trick him; in exchange for going abroad to take care of his wife, who was then in critical condition. However, when he provided this so-called “confession,” Chinese authorities turned around and used it as incriminating evidence to punish him for the crime of “inciting subversion of state power” instead.
Yang Maoping even proposed to the CCP security police that she was willing to be a hostage in exchange for her younger brother Yang Maodong to leave the country to take care of his wife.
Under the obstruction of the Chinese government, Zhang Qing did not have a chance to see her husband before she passed away in a hospital in Maryland. Till her last breath, she had hoped to reunite with her husband. At the same time, it was a display of the inhumane behavior of the CCP. Authorities would not even allow Guo to attend her funeral.
In a statement on Zhang Qing’s death on January 10, the U.S. State Department said that Guo Feixiong was subjected to “years of mistreatment, imprisonment, routine harassment, and surveillance.” The statement called on “the PRC to immediately grant Guo humanitarian relief and allow his travel to the United States to be reunited with his children and grieve the passing of his wife.”
Yang Maodong has two children, one of whom is underage.
Yang Maodong’s family tragedy is enough to illustrate the cruel side of the communist regime.
~ Gao Zhensai, ChinaAid Special Reporter