Chinese Woman Sentenced to Concentration Camp for Tweet

A Chinese woman was sentenced to a year of "re-education through labor" after posting an anti-Japanese message on her Twitter account. Cheng Jianping, an online Chinese activist, claims the post was satirical, but the totalitarian regime sentenced her to a year of hard labor in a concentration camp designed to curtail dissidence. Authorities kidnapped her en route to her own wedding and held her without notifying friends or family members. Ironically, the tweet was actually critical of anti-Chinese demonstrators, and was not even written by the victim. The original tweet was written by the victim's fiance and retweeted by her.

While the names of the victims are easy to discover, I am uncertain as to whether or not it would better serve the victims to reprint them here; I want to draw attention to the case, not further endanger the victims.

© C Harris Lynn, 2011