[Friends of Du Bin said that his
detention might have been related to book projects critical of the history of
Communism and China’s Communist Party.]
By Amy Qin
The journalist, Du Bin, 48, was
detained on Wednesday by police officers in Beijing, said his sister, Du
Jirong. Police officers told Ms. Du on Thursday that her brother had been
placed under administrative detention for “picking quarrels and provoking
trouble.” The vaguely worded offense is one that the government often uses to
quell activism and discussion of social and political issues.
Friends of Mr. Du, who has worked
as a freelance photographer for The New York Times, say they believe his
detention may have been connected to several of his recent book projects.
One book, published in Taiwan in
2017, was a historical account of what is known as the “siege
of Changchun,” when Communist troops blockaded the northeastern Chinese
city in 1948 to starve out their rival Nationalist soldiers, leading to the
deaths of at least 160,000 civilians. Another book by Mr. Du, about the more
nefarious aspects of Lenin’s experiments with Communism, was scheduled to be
published in Taiwan on Jan. 1, 2021.
Liu Hua, a friend of Mr. Du’s, said
that writing books had been a small but important source of income for the
journalist. She also said that Mr. Du had recently been summoned several times
by police officers and told to stop posting about sensitive subjects online.
“It seems as though the words
coming out of Du Bin’s pen hurt their feelings,” Ms. Liu said.
Reached by telephone on Friday
morning, an employee at the Daxing County police station in Beijing where Mr.
Du is believed to be held said he did not know anything about the case and had
never heard of Mr. Du.
It is not the first time that Mr.
Du’s work has provoked the ire of the authorities in China. In 2013, he
was detained
for just over a month after releasing a documentary about a Chinese
forced labor camp and after publishing a book, “Tiananmen Massacre,” about the
government crackdown in 1989 on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. During his
detention, he said at the time, he nearly developed an eye infection because he
kept one of his contact lenses on longer than he should have so that he could
see and document every detail of his experience in custody.
China was the world’s leading
jailer of journalists this year for a second year in a row, the Committee to
Protect Journalists, a press advocacy group, reported in its annual survey released this week.
Several citizen-journalists who
were detained
in China for their coverage of the pandemic remain under detention.
This year, the authorities also expelled
a dozen or so foreign journalists, detained
a foreign employee of a Chinese state media organization and detained
a Chinese staff member for Bloomberg on potential national security
violations.
Activists say the dragnet cast by
the authorities under Xi Jinping, the country’s hard-line leader, had become so
indiscriminate that it was difficult to know where the so-called red line was
anymore.
“Xi Jinping has really been
scanning the country and sweeping up just about any dissident who is active one
way or the other,” said Yaxue Cao, a Chinese activist in the United States.
“Given how little these dissidents
are able to do these days and how fragmented and powerless they are,” Ms. Cao
said, “it’s amazing how insecure Xi feels while projecting the image of an
invincible party.”
Amy Chang Chien contributed
reporting.
