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Journalist Case File: Zhang Honghai
Agency: freelance
Date Imprisoned: 29 May 2003
Charge: subversion
Sentence: 8 Years
Zhang was a member of 新青年学会 (The Fresh Youth Study Group) a loose knit intellectual group that met to discuss social issues and to distributed articles about politics and social and governmental reforms through a China web forum by Zhang
The forum, which has since been closed, was known as the 长江的思想家园 (Changjiang/Yangtze Garden of Ideas), and featured a wide range of essays, poetry, and writings by a number of different authors.
Zhang and three other group members were detained in March 2001 and later charged with subversion.
Two articles that were published through Zhang’s web forum "Be a New Citizen, Reform China" and "What's to Be Done?" were sited at their trial, and were described, by the court, as proving the groups intent to "overthrow the Chinese Communist Party's leadership and the socialist system and subvert the regime of the people's democratic dictatorship.".
A legal appeal filed by Zhang in November 2003 was turned down even though three key witnesses who testified against Zhang and other group members had withdrawn their testimony.
When they were cited at the trial, were the articles read into the record
in their entirety, or were they just referenced and then quoted out of
context?
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I honestly don’t know, I’m not privy to these matters.
Given the nature of the articles, they were probably quoted in context rather than out of it as their context is changing or criticizing the government, which is actually what they were trying to do.
From what I have been able to gather the charges laid against this group were not fabricated, under Chinese law they actually did commit subversive acts, but this isn’t to say that I think that it was right that they were imprisoned.
The publication of pro reform articles in China, or indeed anything that criticizes the government or calls for democratic or social reforms is considered to be subversive because it is advocating the replacement or reform of the government. This would be tolerated, or even encouraged, in the US or the EU, but not in China.
Sadly, in many of these cases, the people actually did what it was said at the trial, only in most other countries it wouldn’t be considered to be subversion. US news papers print these kinds of articles every day.
I don’t know what the testimonies of the men who later withdrew them said, but I presume that they were about intent, and probably painted them as revolutionaries rather than reformers, or may have linked them to other reform groups.