Citizen Journalists Beware: Chinese Teacher Sent To Labor Camp

 

NEW YORK, NY (July 31, 2008) – A Sichuan school teacher who took pictures of collapsed school buildings in earthquake hit areas of China and posted them to a Web site has been ordered to serve one year in a labor camp, the group Human Rights in China (HRIC) reports from their New York headquarters.

The sentence to the labor camp is what the Chinese have termed as "reeducation through labor."

Liu Shaokun has reportedly been detained since June 25. His family were told they could first visit him on July 29, but then were denied visitation and have not seen him yet.

A teacher at Guanghan Middle School in Deyang City, Sichuan Province, Liu traveled to areas heavily damaged by the May 12 earthquake, took photos of collapsed school buildings and published them online. HRIC says that Liu expressed anger in a media interview over "the shoddy 'tofu' buildings" that were so weakly constructed they immediately collapsed in the quake while other buildings around them remained standing.

On June 25 Liu was detained at his school, HRIC says, and the school's principal was told that the teacher was being held for "disseminating rumors and destroying social order." Later the teacher's family were told that he was being investigated for "suspicion of the crime of inciting subversion."

HRC says that under Chinese rules, anyone can be sentenced to up to four years of reeducation through labor without any trial or formal charges. The process allowing this kind of punishment has been in place since 1957 and has been widely criticized by human rights organizations including the United Nations.

Many people have blamed the deaths of hundreds of Chinese school children on shoddy construction and corruption in the building trades that led to schools without proper internal support and steel infrastructure that could withstand an earthquake.

"Instead of investigating and pursuing accountability for shoddy and dangerous school buildings, the authorities are resorting to [reeducation through labor] to silence and lock up concerned citizens like teacher Liu Shaokun and others," HRIC executive director Sharon Hom said.

Journalists showing up in Beijing this week to cover the upcoming Olympics have discovered that they have been denied access to certain Web sites despite the Chinese government's earlier promises of no restrictions.

The Olympic Organizing Committee admitted this week that they had reached an agreement with China over blocking Web sites, including sites like Amnesty International which this week released a report critical of China's history of human rights violations and abuse.

The August issue of News Photographer magazine contains a cover story about how the Chinese photojournalists covered the aftermath of May's deadly earthquake, as well as a feature about Los Angeles Times photojournalist Barbara Davidson who covered the disaster at Fuxin Number 2 school where an entire generation of Chinese elementary school students were killed when their building collapsed, burying them in the rubble.

 

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