[On Friday evening, police
officers in Beijing detained Li Tingting, who works under the pseudonym Li
Maizi. Ms. Li has been known in advocacy circles since 2012, when, as a
22-year-old student, she started a campaign to push officials to
build more public toilets for women. Also on Friday, an activist in Guangzhou,
Zheng Churan, was detained by the police. The homes of the activists were both
searched.]
By Edward Wong
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Zheng
Churan, an activist, was also detained by the police.
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BEIJING — China detained
at least 10 women’s rights activists over the weekend to forestall a nationwide
campaign against sexual harassment on public transportation that was to overlap
with International Women’s Day, according to human rights advocates and
associates of those detained.
At least five of the
detained were still being held on Sunday evening, while the others had been
released after being interrogated. All were women.
The women still in
detention on Sunday evening live in the eastern metropolises of Beijing,
Guangzhou and Hangzhou, and had timed the start of the antiharassment campaign
to coincide with International Women’s Day on Sunday, according to Chinese
Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group based outside China that
had posted on Twitter about the detentions.
“Ask Beijing &
Guangzhou police: Is it a crime to speak out about sexual harassment in China?”
the group said in a Twitter post early Sunday. Hours later, the group said it
had learned of another activist, Wu Rongrong, who had been detained by the
police in Hangzhou and was still being held.
Ms. Wu, 30, who founded a
women’s center in Hangzhou last year, has been in police custody since
Saturday. She and the others detained have all supported or worked with
Yirenping, a nonprofit group with offices throughout China that advocates equal
rights for people with hepatitis, H.I.V./AIDS and disabilities, said a friend
of the women who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of official
reprisal.
On Friday evening, police
officers in Beijing detained Li Tingting, who works under the pseudonym Li
Maizi. Ms. Li has been known in advocacy circles since 2012, when, as a
22-year-old student, she started a campaign to push officials to
build more public toilets for women. Also on Friday, an activist in Guangzhou,
Zheng Churan, was detained by the police. The homes of the activists were both
searched.
The two other women being
detained were Wei Tingting and Wang Man, both in Beijing.
“We’ve always thought the
country supports equal rights for women,” said Wang Qiushi, a lawyer
representing Ms. Wei. “Speaking as a lawyer, this act is beyond our imagination
and has shocked us.”
Mr. Wang said that he and
other lawyers had tried to obtain details from the police at Haidian Police
Station in western Beijing, where Ms. Wei and two others were being held, but
that the police had refused to say anything.
A woman answering the
telephone at the police station denied that any of the activists were being
held there.
Most or all of the women
were working to mobilize a nationwide campaign against sexual harassment on
subways and other public transportation, their friends said. People partaking
in the campaign were supposed to put antiharassment stickers on transit
vehicles.
“The attack this time is
a big deal for us because the people who have been taken away formed the
growing core of our movement these last few years,” said a young woman in
Beijing who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also out of fear of official
retribution. “They are the core strength of the women’s activist movement.”
The detentions began on the second day of the
annual meeting in Beijing of the National People’s Congress, a nominal
legislature that is supposed to represent, under the authoritarian system of
the Chinese Communist Party, civic participation in political decisions.
Since taking power in
late 2012, Xi Jinping, the president and party leader, has clamped down on grass-roots activism and
civic discourse in China, making it harder for many nonprofit groups to do
their work.
Officials on Friday
ordered Chinese websites to delete a hugely popular online documentary about
China’s deadly air pollution, “Under the Dome,” that had been produced and
financed by one of the country’s most famous journalists, Chai Jing. Another
veteran female journalist, Fan Ming, had directed the film and had worked with
Ms. Chai for many years at the main state television network, China Central
Television. Both had left the network recently.
Their documentary was
released online at the end of February and got hundreds of millions of views on
Chinese websites within days. The new environment minister, Chen Jining, was among its most vocal
supporters, but he made no mention of the documentary at a news conference on
Saturday after officials ordered the ban.
The New York Times reported last month that an examination
of corporate records in China revealed that women make up fewer than one in 10
board members at the country’s top 300 companies. Women hold only two of 25
seats on the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo.
Vanessa Piao contributed
research.