BEIJING – Free. After ten years in prison. Blame? Have an unauthorized biography of the Chinese leader ready for printing. Title: The godfather of China: Xi Jinping. At 83, editor Yao Wentian finally got out of prison. And he returned to Hong Kong to his family.
In the former British colony Yao, a former engineer, in 2006 founded the Morning Bell Press, an inconvenient publishing house for the Communist Party: it published works by Chinese dissidents, liberal intellectuals, scholars in exile and officials ousted for political reasons.
They had arrested him in October ten years ago in Shenzhen and locked up in Dongguan prison, not far from the border with Hong Kong. Officially he ended up in handcuffs not for that book, but for “smuggling common goods” after bringing building materials to China to help a friend who was renovating his apartment. He had not declared the value of those goods to customs, authorities said at the time. Ten years in prison for a minor crime like that actually hid something else. The book on Xi precisely. That volume was written by dissident Yu Jie, who fled to the United States in 2010 following alleged torture and persecution for his criticism of the regime.
The human rights NGO Dui Hua gave the news of Yao’s release. All the appeals to release him on medical grounds presented in recent years had always been rejected. Although he had recently been moved to the prison medical facility and had been granted monthly visits by his wife, according to the NGO.
Born in Sichuan, Yao moved to Hong Kong in 1982. Tough family. His son, Yongzhan, had been one of the student leaders in Shanghai during the pro-democracy protests of 1989, which then resulted in the massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on the night between 3 and 4 June of that year. Today Yongzhan is a US citizen.
Hong Kong’s publishing industry is now almost entirely under Party control. The last Democratic newspaper in town, Jimmy Lai’s Apple Daily, shut down two years ago. The 75-year-old Lai is in prison today and in the trial that should open in September he risks life imprisonment. Gui Minhai is also among the “uncomfortable” Hong Kong publishers still in prison: “taken” while on vacation in Thailand in 2015 and reappeared months later in front of state television cameras to “confess” his involvement in an accident road dating back ten years earlier. Again, one charge covering another.
Gui is the co-founder of the Causeway Bay publishing house, which specializes in stories about the private lives of Chinese leaders. Released for some time but still under close surveillance, in 2018 he was seized again by the police on a train bound for Beijing while he was accompanied by two Swedish diplomats (Gui lived thirty years in Sweden and is a Swedish citizen). Two years later, in 2020, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for “illegally providing information abroad”. For him, liberation is still far away.