Appellate decision against two Shanxi women confirms that under Article 300 possession of printed material of a xie jiao is enough to go to jail.
by Yang Feng
You find a nice book on the Internet. OK, you got there by cheating the Great Firewall that blocks certain websites in China, but so do millions of students and teachers who need to access foreign materials. You want to keep the book, and you download it, print the pages, and ask a friend who knows how to do it to bind them together. All this is done at home. During the years, you print other texts from the same source, and keep them in a basement, sharing them just with a few friends. One day, the police knock at your door, and you find yourself arrested. You are sentenced to a five-year jail term. Finding the decision absurd, you file an appeal but the decision is confirmed.
This is what happened to Cao Qian, a 57-year-old woman from Xiaoyi city, a county-level city under the administration of Lüliang prefecture-level city in Shanxi province. She was arrested on May 28, 2020, after having been found in possession of Falun Gong books and articles, sentenced on January 11, 2021, by the Wenshui County People’s Court, and the decision was confirmed on appeal on May 27, 2021, by the Intermediate People’s Court of Lüliang city, Shanxi. Together with Cao Qian, another woman called Jang Baolian, the one who had bound and stored the books downloaded by Cao Qian, was also arrested, and sentenced to the same five-year jail sentence in first degree and appeal.
The long memory of Public Security had not forgotten that in 2002 Jang Baolian had been arrested as a Falun Gong practitioner, and in 2009 she was arrested again in an anti-Falun-Gong operation in Shanxi that also led to the arrest of Cao Qian. They were small operators, though. They escaped with administrative penalties, and stayed out of trouble for more than ten years.
Now, the hunt for what remains of Falun Gong in China has started again, as the CCP is mightily upset by the success of Falun Gong “Nine True Words” meditation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Xiaoyi police testified that in total Cao and Jang had in their possession 594 books and articles of Falun Gong, which does not seem a large collection considering that it had been built in ten years or more. They had more files in their computers, and were accused of having supplied Falun Gong material to one Falun Gong practitioner named Zhang, and perhaps others as well.
The first degree and appeal decisions against Cao and Jang sentenced them under Article 300 of the Chinese Criminal Code, for “using a xie jiao to undermine the enforcement of the law.” Xie jiao are religious movements banned by the CCP as “heterodox teachings.” “Undermine the enforcement of the law,” however, really does not mean anything. Any connections with a xie jiao, down to downloading and keeping in one’s home books and leaflets, is enough to be sentenced under Article 300.
“This case, a Falun Gong practitioner told Bitter Winter, clearly shows that the words ‘undermine the enforcement of the law’ are in the law and in court decisions just to persuade the populace that we do something terrible. ‘Undermining the enforcement of the law’ sounds like stopping police on the street when they are pursuing a criminal. The decision in Shanxi confirms that ‘use a xie jiao to undermine the enforcement of the law’ means ‘use a xie jiao.’ The words ‘to undermine the enforcement of the law’ are not necessary, they are there just for propaganda purposes. And ‘using a xie jiao’ means practicing in a park, telling your neighbor about Falun Gong, keeping books at home, everything.”
Yang Feng uses a pseudonym for security reasons.
