Lawyer charged for inciting subversion
Ding Jiaxi, Dai Zhenya and Zhang Zhongshun were among the dozens of lawyers and activists who attended an informal gathering held in Xiamen, a city on China’s southeast coast, in December 2019. Many who were present at this private gathering had been active in the New Citizens Movement, a loose network of activists who aimed to promote government transparency and expose corruption in the early 2010s. At the meeting, they discussed the situation of civil society and current affairs in China. Since 26 December 2019, police across the country have been summoning or detaining participants of the Xiamen gathering.
Dai Zhenya and Zhang Zhongshun were released on bail on 18 June 2020. On 19 June, Ding Jiaxi’s family received an arrest notice from police in Linyi, Shandong, confirming that Ding was formally arrested for “inciting subversion of state power”. Ding is currently held in Linyi County Detention Centre. According to his wife, Ding Jiaxi is not allowed to meet his lawyer after months of incommunicado detention as he is now in quarantine. It is unclear if Ding can meet his lawyer after the quarantine ends.
Ding Jiaxi is a Beijing-based former human-rights rights lawyer and a core member of the New Citizens Movement. His activism included advocating for rights of migrant workers’ children and demanding transparent governance. In 2014 Ding was sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for “gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place”. In 2018, he was barred from boarding a flight to the United States, where his wife and daughter live. In 2019, authorities stopped him from travelling to Hong Kong as he “may endanger national security and interest”.
In March 2020, apart from expressing concerns about the disappearance of Ding, Dai and Zhang, the United Nations human rights expert bodies also expressed their alarm at the ongoing use of RSDL in China, a detention system that enables criminal investigators to hold individuals for up to six months outside the formal detention system in what can amount to a form of secret incommunicado detention. This form of detention has been used to curb the activities of human rights defenders, including lawyers, activists and religious practitioners.
Since the massive crackdown on lawyers and activists in 2015, the Chinese authorities have been systematically using national security charges with extremely vague provisions, such as “subverting state power” and “inciting subversion of state power”, to prosecute lawyers, scholars, journalists, activists and NGO workers.