第三十八案 | 郭飞雄Case 38 | Guo Feixiong
维权人士郭飞雄三度入狱：五年、六年、八年。2021年他赴美照顾病危妻子时在浦东机场被拦下，妻子次年在美国病逝，他身在看守所。Rights defender Guo Feixiong has been imprisoned three times — five years, six years, eight years. In 2021 he was stopped at Pudong Airport on his way to care for his dying wife; she died in the United States the next year while he sat in a detention centre.
The Man: From Philosophy Teacher to Rights Defender
Guo Feixiong is a pen name. His legal name is Yang Maodong. According to the Chinese and English Wikipedia entries and multiple rights-group profiles, he was born on 2 August 1966 in Gucheng County, Hubei, spent part of his childhood sent down to the countryside with his parents, and knew rural poverty at first hand. In July 1988 he graduated from the philosophy department of East China Normal University in Shanghai, was assigned to teach philosophy at a workers' medical college in Wuhan, and took an active part in the 1989 student movement. In 1991 he moved south to Guangdong, worked a variety of jobs, ran a private publishing business from 1993 to 2001, and thereafter lived by writing. That publishing past would later be dug up as the basis of his first conviction.
What pushed him into rights defense was the Taishi village affair of 2005. Working as a legal adviser to the Beijing-based Shengzhi Law Office, he went south to help villagers in Taishi, in Guangzhou's Panyu district, recall a village chief accused of corruption, gave them legal advice, and posted real-time updates online. According to Human Rights in China and Amnesty International, police criminally detained him on the night of 13 September 2005; he staged a hunger strike in custody, and on 27 December 2005 prosecutors decided not to indict him and he was released. After his release he described his detention publicly, saying interrogators had used sleep deprivation and other methods to coerce a confession. Those details come from his own post-release account, recorded by rights organizations; this page presents them as his account, not as independently verified fact.
After Taishi he did not stop. In early February 2006, after a clash while trying to photograph the men tailing him, he was taken to a police station and then, in the station lobby and in front of officers, dragged out and beaten by his pursuers. Rights-group records describe that beating as one trigger for the rolling relay hunger strike launched by lawyer Gao Zhisheng and others in support of rights defenders. Guo and Gao became close associates. When Gao was arrested in August 2006, Guo campaigned for his release. The campaign failed, and very soon Guo was behind bars himself. A rights defender sets out to rescue another rights defender, and both end up in prison in turn: that sequence is the starting point for understanding everything that happened to him over the next two decades. His case was never only his own; it was one link in the authorities' dismantling of an entire rights-defense network, person by person.
One thread runs through all his writing and action: constitutional democracy. He publicly advocated official asset disclosure, press freedom and ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and took part in the New Citizens' Movement. In 2015, while in prison, he received the Front Line Defenders Award for human rights defenders at risk. The award and the sentences point at the same conduct. Everything he did was peaceful: writing essays, helping people litigate, holding placards in the street, collecting signatures. The state's response escalated each time: five years on an economic charge, then six years on public-order charges, then eight years for subversion. The three sentences add up to nineteen years, and with pre-trial detention and repeated criminal detentions on top, he has spent well over thirteen years in custody since 2005. The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders put it in 2023: he has spent over thirteen years in prison since 2005 on baseless charges.
First Imprisonment: Rescuing Gao Zhisheng, Taishi Village and an Old Book (2006–2011)
On 30 September 2006 Guo was arrested in Guangzhou on suspicion of illegal business operations, over a book he had edited years earlier, an exposé of a political scandal in Shenyang, Liaoning. According to his lawyers and rights organizations, interrogators questioned him extensively about Gao Zhisheng and the Taishi recall campaign rather than about the book's business details, and for a period he was transferred to a detention center in Liaoning. The case was twice sent back for supplementary investigation. Prosecutors in Guangzhou indicted him in May 2007 and his trial opened on 9 July 2007.
The torture allegations must be stated separately, with their attribution made explicit. According to Guo's own accounts to his lawyers and family, recorded by Amnesty International, Human Rights in China and other organizations, during secret detention he was hung up and beaten, shocked with an electric baton on the face and genitals, and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation; he said he was tortured into confessing and at one point attempted suicide by throwing himself against glass. All of this is his own account as relayed and recorded by organizations; this site cannot independently verify detention conditions from that period. But the accounts recorded by different institutions in different years are consistent, and UN experts, including the Special Rapporteur on torture, repeatedly wrote to the Chinese government about his treatment, which is a matter of public OHCHR record.
On 14 November 2007 the Tianhe District People's Court in Guangzhou sentenced him to five years in prison and a 40,000-yuan fine for illegal business operations. The Chinese Wikipedia entry gives the verdict date as 12 November, two days earlier than the English-language record; see the verification note. Multiple rights organizations condemned the proceedings as seriously flawed and the case as political persecution dressed in an economic charge. He was sent to Meizhou Prison in Guangdong. In December 2007, after a prison visit, Zhang Qing told Radio Free Asia that shortly after entering Meizhou he had been beaten at length by a fellow prisoner in front of hundreds of onlookers, falling from a stairway, while already on hunger strike. That episode is recorded as the family's account after the visit. In 2009 Zhang Qing left Guangzhou with their son and daughter, traveled via Thailand to the United States, and was granted political asylum that November. From then on an ocean divided the family, and they never lived together again. Guo was released on 13 September 2011, one source gives 12 September, and said on release that he remained committed to rights work. Release was not the start of freedom: according to Human Rights in China, he lived thereafter under intensive surveillance, repeatedly taken away, summoned and questioned.
Second Imprisonment: Southern Weekend, Asset Disclosure and a Six-Year Term (2013–2019)
In January 2013, staff at the Guangzhou newspaper Southern Weekend protested after propaganda officials rewrote the paper's New Year editorial, and Guo went to support them in the street. In March 2013 he helped organize a signature campaign urging the National People's Congress to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1998 but has never ratified. That spring he also joined street actions in eight cities, including Wuhan, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, calling for officials to disclose their assets. He must have known the price: the last round of support and advocacy had cost five years. He went anyway.
On 8 August 2013 he was criminally detained in Guangzhou on suspicion of gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place, and held at the Tianhe District Detention Center. According to Human Rights in China, the Tianhe police refused his lawyers Sui Muqing and Lin Qilei access on the ground that his case touched another subversion case, and the legal support group protested that this was unlawful; more than a hundred lawyers eventually joined the support group for his case. On 29 October 2013 a subcommittee of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on his detention, at which Zhang Qing and their daughter Yang Tianjiao testified. On 10 December 2013 the Tianhe police recommended indicting him, along with fellow activist Sun Desheng, for gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.
The case dragged on for more than two years. On 27 November 2015 the Tianhe District People's Court convicted him of gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place and of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, and sentenced him to six years. Rights organizations recorded that the picking-quarrels charge had not been in the original indictment and was added by the court at judgment, which his lawyers and family strongly protested. In his statement at sentencing he declared that political persecution would not wipe out China's democratization wave. Family and lawyers relayed that his memory and ability to express himself had by then markedly declined. He was sent to Yangchun Prison in Guangdong to serve the term.
In Prison: The 2016 Hunger Strike at Yangchun
The most dangerous stretch of his second term came in 2016. According to Amnesty International's urgent actions of May 2016, word emerged from April that he was bleeding heavily from the mouth, walking unsteadily and deteriorating fast, while the prison failed to provide timely treatment. On 9 May 2016 he began a hunger strike against degrading treatment. According to Zhang Qing's open letter of 19 May 2016 to China's president and premier, and Amnesty's record, on 9 May prison authorities subjected him to an invasive intestinal examination against his will, filmed it, threatened to post the video online, and forcibly shaved his head. The UN experts' statement of August 2016 likewise referred to a humiliating medical procedure filmed by officials with threats of public release, sleep deprivation, and harassment by inmates and guards. These details come from the family's open letter and his own account, on the basis of which the UN and Amnesty spoke out; this page records them on that basis.
His demand was concrete: transfer to a prison free of such treatment. According to the record relayed by UN experts, from 14 May 2016 he was force-fed twice a day through a nasal tube and given intravenous supplements without consent; by a family meeting in June 2016 his weight had fallen from about 75 kilograms to about 52, with continuing bleeding from the nose and mouth and internal bleeding. On 21 July 2016 his sister Yang Maoping visited him at Yangchun and reported that he was frail and could barely walk, at about 51 kilograms; he told her guards ordered him to kneel before officers and forced him down when he refused, his books had been confiscated, inmates disturbed his sleep at night, and an official cut the phone line during the visit when he began describing his treatment. On 28 July 2016 his lawyers Zhang Lei and Li Jinxing met him for about forty minutes, hoping an arrangement could be reached for him to end the strike voluntarily. On 4 August 2016 a group of UN experts, including the Special Rapporteurs on human rights defenders and on torture and the Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, publicly urged China to stop the ill-treatment, provide specialist care based on his full and informed consent, and release him; China's foreign ministry denounced the appeal as interference in internal affairs and judicial sovereignty. According to Radio Free Asia, after more than a hundred days on hunger strike he was transferred from Yangchun to Yingde Prison. Note carefully: Yingde was a transfer destination within this second sentence, not where he is serving the current one. When exactly that hunger strike ended and how far his health recovered is a matter of no public record. On 7 August 2019 he was released at the end of the six-year term.
A note on counting his hunger strikes: one overseas social-media account claims seven hunger strikes in prison and nineteen years of sentences in total. The nineteen years can be verified by simply adding the three judgments, five plus six plus eight, but the seven-strike figure currently rests on a single non-institutional source and is marked unverified on this page. The strikes this page can document individually are at least five: in custody over Taishi in 2005, at Meizhou Prison in 2007, the hundred-day strike at Yangchun in 2016, at Shanghai airport in January 2021, and from December 2021 after he was taken away again. Five documented fasts are enough to show that hunger strike was the last, and the only, form of protest still within his own control.
2021: Stopped at the Airport, and a Wife He Never Saw Again
After his 2019 release he lived quietly for a time, his passport held by Guangzhou police, with no possibility of travel. The turn came in early January 2021: he learned that his wife Zhang Qing, in the United States, had colon cancer that had spread to her liver, requiring major surgery and chemotherapy, with only their two children beside her. Zhang Qing had fled with the children in 2009 and had spent more than a decade raising them in America while campaigning for her husband's freedom, including testifying before the U.S. Congress. She was in her mid-fifties when the illness turned terminal; her best years had gone to prison visits, letters and testimony.
On 10 January 2021 Guo issued an urgent open letter to Premier Li Keqiang and Public Security Minister Zhao Kezhi, asking them to order the Guangzhou authorities to return his passport and let him travel to care for his wife; Zhang Qing had undergone major surgery in Maryland on 9 January for colon cancer metastasized to the liver. Radio Free Asia reported the letter and his anguish: he said he had gone to prison twice for freedom and democracy while she raised their two children alone, and that he felt deep guilt. Later records indicate that Guangzhou authorities at one point agreed he could leave, that he obtained a new passport and a U.S. visa within days, but that at noon on 26 January Guangzhou state security officers told him face to face that the Ministry of Public Security had imposed an exit ban and border guards would stop him at the airport. This sequence comes from his own account to Radio Free Asia and from rights-group records.
On 27 January 2021 he appealed again to China's top leadership. On 28 January, transiting through Shanghai on his way to the United States, he was stopped at Shanghai Pudong International Airport on the stated ground that he was suspected of endangering national security. That night he began an indefinite hunger strike at the airport and sent out a message explaining the ban and his protest; according to Amnesty International's urgent action of 1 February 2021, he had been unreachable since the morning of 29 January. The executive director of Human Rights in China said publicly that depriving a citizen of the right to leave his own country violated international human rights and humanitarian norms. A free citizen whose sentence had long expired, carrying a passport and a visa, stopped in his own country's airport with four words, national security, and never to see his wife again: this is the best-known scene in the case, and the hardest to defend.
The year that followed was a year of attrition. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, he kept applying to leave; in August 2021 the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau reportedly approved his application, but the Guangdong department forwarded it to the Ministry of Public Security for further review, and nothing followed. Prominent Chinese intellectuals signed an open letter urging his release on humanitarian grounds, as did thirty-five international scholars. On 29 November 2021 he wrote again to Li Keqiang asking to be allowed to go. No letter produced permission. On 5 December 2021 he lost contact with family and friends; CHRD and the UN Special Rapporteur agree he was taken into police custody that day and then held for about six months without access to a lawyer. In her final stage of illness, Zhang Qing told an interviewer she had been unable to reach her husband for months.
On 10 January 2022 Zhang Qing died in Maryland at the age of fifty-five, with only her two children at her side. Her sister-in-law Yang Maoping issued a statement that day recording the time of death and noting that Zhang died with only the children present, and that even funeral arrangements had to be decided remotely by Guo himself from custody. The children delivered eulogies at a funeral service in Maryland on 21 January 2022, later published by China Change. The couple had never truly reunited after his first detention in 2006; the family lived apart, and in the end even a farewell was denied. One day after her death, and more than a month after he was taken, Guangdong police issued the formal arrest notice on 12 January 2022, accusing him of inciting subversion of state power. U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price issued a statement of condolence the same day, calling on Beijing to grant Guo humanitarian relief immediately, allow him to travel to the United States to reunite with his children and grieve his wife, and end arbitrary detention and politically motivated exit bans. CHRD issued a statement on the day Zhang died condemning family separation as punishment and demanding his release. No release followed. What awaited him was not a plane ticket but a third prison term.
The 2023 Trial: Eight Years, and Diplomats Kept Outside the Courtroom
The third case took shape in custody. According to Front Line Defenders, on 6 July 2022 he spoke to his lawyer by video link from Guangzhou No. 1 Detention Center; he had been on hunger strike since December 2021 and his weight had fallen to about fifty kilograms, and his family feared his life would be in danger within two or three months at that rate. His sister told Radio Free Asia that guards were keeping him alive by tube-feeding, that his weight had dropped to around one hundred pounds, and that state security officers had lured him into a confession by promising he would be allowed to go to the United States to see his then-terminally ill wife; that last point is the family's account and is recorded as such. According to Front Line Defenders, on 8 July 2022 the Guangzhou procuratorate decided to indict him for inciting subversion of state power; the UN Special Rapporteur described him as charged with subversion in June 2022, about a month earlier, and this page records both, treating 8 July as the indictment milestone. According to the verdict summary relayed by his brother Yang Maoquan and his published self-defense materials, the prosecution's core case rested on years of essays attacking China's political system, a website and forum he founded to discuss constitutional government, and media interviews he gave after being barred from leaving in 2021. In his self-defense he maintained that writing essays and running a website openly exercised his freedoms of speech, thought and academic inquiry and did not amount to subversion. This page summarizes that defense rather than quoting it at length.
On 11 May 2023 the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court tried the case and sentenced him the same day: eight years in prison for inciting subversion of state power, plus three years' deprivation of political rights. According to Front Line Defenders, the hearing lasted about two and a half hours and the verdict followed a recess of about one hour. U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller issued a statement on 12 May 2023 condemning the sentence, noting that U.S. diplomats had been blocked from attending the 11 May trial, urging Beijing to give its citizens due process, respect freedom of speech and other fundamental freedoms, end arbitrary detention and exit bans, and repeating the call to release Guo immediately and let him travel to the United States to reunite with his family. Voice of America and other outlets likewise reported that diplomats from several countries were kept out. For the record: the CHRD profile page gives the sentencing date as 11 March and the Chinese Wikipedia entry as 8 May; both conflict with the 11 May date on which the State Department, VOA and Front Line Defenders agree, and this page follows 11 May, listing the other dates in the verification note. On 26 June 2023 the Guangdong Higher People's Court rejected his appeal and upheld the judgment. With that, all three sentences were complete: five years, six years, eight years, each longer than the last, and each more political in label than the last, from an economic offense to public-order offenses to a state-power offense.
The Family: Seventeen Years of Forced Separation
Written properly, this case does not belong to one man alone. When Zhang Qing fled in 2009 with the two children, both were still young, and their schooling was repeatedly disrupted by their father's cases, a point Human Rights in China recorded in relaying his open letter. She raised the children alone in the United States and campaigned for her husband for more than a decade; a list of honors in the Chinese Wikipedia entry includes a 2008 award for family members of the persecuted, which this page could not check against the original award record and therefore marks unverified. In 2013 she testified before the U.S. Congress with their daughter while her husband sat in the Tianhe detention center, denied access to his lawyers. In 2021, in late-stage cancer, after surgery and into chemotherapy, at the moment she most needed him present, what arrived was an airport interception and then his disappearance. She died without seeing him again.
The family inside China has paid its own price. His sister Yang Maoping has been the family's most persistent voice: visiting prisons, writing open letters, petitioning officials for better treatment and medical care, and asking that her brother be transferred out of Sihui Prison. According to CHRD, state security officers threatened her not to write letters or release information, and mocked her by saying Guo Feixiong was already old news. That detail comes from CHRD's record of the family's account. His brother Yang Maoquan relayed the substance of the 2023 verdict and the main points of his self-defense to the outside world. Of the two children in America, one was still a minor at the time of their mother's death, according to the sister's account to Radio Free Asia in 2022; the children handled their mother's funeral in a foreign country while their father sat in detention. The family's separation, counted from 2006, was already more than fifteen years when Zhang Qing died, by rights organizations' reckoning; counted to today it approaches twenty years. There is no record of a single reunion in all that time.
International Response: From UN Letters to State Department Statements
The international response has run for nearly twenty years, in forms from formal letters to hearings to statements, without once changing the outcome; recording that line honestly is part of the record. On the UN side, according to OHCHR, UN independent experts have written to the Chinese government about his situation repeatedly since 2006; by the joint statement of August 2016 the communications numbered eight and involved the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and several Special Rapporteurs. On 4 August 2016 UN experts, including the Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, jointly urged an end to his ill-treatment, specialist care with his consent, and his release. One point must be stated plainly: in this review this site found no standalone, numbered formal opinion of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention devoted to Guo Feixiong alone; the public record consists of joint special-procedures communications and joint statements, and the distinction is recorded here so that no one miscites it later. In October 2023 the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, stated publicly that UN experts had sent ten urgent letters about his situation since 2006, demanded his immediate release on humanitarian grounds, and warned that his health was critical and his life might be in danger. China's recorded responses to these letters and statements have consisted mainly of rejections of interference in internal affairs.
On the U.S. side, the congressional hearing of 29 October 2013 was the earliest high-level intervention; U.S. officials raised his case after Zhang Qing's surgery and the airport incident in January 2021; the State Department spokesperson issued a statement on her death on 12 January 2022; and on 12 May 2023 the spokesperson condemned the eight-year sentence and disclosed that diplomats had been blocked from the trial. Guo's case belongs to the category of rights-defender cases repeatedly covered in the State Department's annual human rights reporting on China; this page does not excerpt those reports year by year and therefore makes no claim about specific years or pages. Among rights organizations, Amnesty International issued repeated urgent actions from 2013 onward, treated him as a prisoner of conscience, and issued a further urgent action over the airport hunger strike in February 2021; Human Rights Watch issued a statement at Zhang Qing's death confirming her late-stage colon cancer and the blocked reunion; Front Line Defenders gave him its award in 2015 and published a dedicated alert on his critical health in prison in 2023; and Chinese Human Rights Defenders keeps him on its medical-watch list of prisoners of conscience, updating his weight and condition. The demands are consistent across all of them: release him, treat him, let him travel to his children in the United States. Beyond denouncing interference, Beijing has offered no public account of the substance of the case, and the full text of the judgment is a matter of no public record.
Latest Status: Sihui Prison, About Forty Kilograms, and Letters Without Replies
After his appeal was rejected he was sent to prison to serve the term. The location requires correcting a circulating error: some second-hand accounts place him in Yingde Prison in Guangdong today, but the convergent record of Front Line Defenders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders is that the family's visit in early September 2023 took place at Sihui Prison in Sihui, Zhaoqing, Guangdong. Yingde was his transfer destination during the second sentence, after the 2016 hunger strike. Two sentences, two prisons; they must not be conflated. This page follows Sihui Prison on the strength of two organizations' records, and keeps this explanation in place so it can be corrected if a genuine later transfer is documented.
His health is the most urgent element. According to the two organizations' September 2023 records, when family visited him at Sihui in early September he was severely emaciated and extremely pale, weighing about forty kilograms, with CHRD recording 41.5 kilograms, down from a normal weight of about seventy. Reports in mid-September said he could not regulate his body temperature, ran frequent fevers of 38 to 39 degrees, fainted and had difficulty standing, and suffered thyroid problems and lung inflammation. He has been on hunger strike, maintained by tube-feeding, since he was taken away in December 2021, and his health has declined steadily through the fast and the detention. His sister wrote repeatedly to officials asking for better treatment, medical care and a transfer, and received no reply. The October 2023 warning from UN Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor was the starkest: dramatic weight loss, a number of serious conditions, no acceptable medical care, and a life possibly in danger. From then until October 2026 this site found no authoritative new record of release, medical parole, improvement or further deterioration, and no report of a further successful family visit; that gap is itself recorded as no public record. On the usual method of crediting custody from December 2021 against an eight-year term, he could not complete the sentence before roughly 2029, but the judgment's start date and crediting details are not public, so this is stated as an explanation, not a finding.
Verification Note
This page was compiled by cross-checking rights-group profiles, public OHCHR statements, U.S. State Department statements, the U.S. congressional hearing record, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America reporting, family statements, and the Chinese and English Wikipedia entries. The evidence is graded as follows: the judgment dates, terms, charges, appeal outcome, and the State Department and UN interventions are recorded by at least two independent institutions and are treated as cross-verified; the details of torture, of being forced to kneel and of the cut phone line, and of state security officers luring a confession with a promise of travel, come from his own accounts and from family and lawyer relays, recorded and acted on by rights organizations, and are attributed at each occurrence in the text rather than presented as independently proven; Zhang Qing's reported 2008 award for persecuted persons' family members appears only in the honors list of the Chinese Wikipedia entry and was not checked against an original record, and is marked unverified; the claim of seven hunger strikes in total rests on a single social-media account and is unverified.
Conflicting dates are collected here. First verdict: English-language and institutional records give 14 November 2007, the Chinese Wikipedia entry gives 12 November, a two-day discrepancy, unverified, with the text following 14 November. First release: most records give 13 September 2011, while Human Rights in China, relaying his open letter, gives the term as ending 12 September, a one-day discrepancy, unverified. Third sentencing: the State Department, Voice of America and Front Line Defenders agree on 11 May 2023; the CHRD profile page gives 11 March and the Chinese Wikipedia entry 8 May; this page treats the former as a typographical error and the latter as unverified, and follows 11 May. Zhang Qing's departure with the children is dated January 2009 in one record and April 2009 in another; the text states only that she left in 2009 and received asylum in the United States that November. Her place of death is given in different records as Gaithersburg and Germantown, Maryland; the text states only Maryland. On the prison location, to repeat: the current term rests on the Sihui Prison family-visit records, Yingde was the previous term's transfer prison, and the circulating claim that he is now in Yingde is unverified and inconsistent with the institutional record. The full judgment text, the sentence start and crediting, and his health after September 2023 are all matters of no public record. Quotations from sources throughout are paraphrased and summarized; direct quotation is minimal and far below this site's citation ceiling for any single source.
Our Take
Our Take is tied to the facts of this case alone. The most damning element is not the length of the sentences but a single detail: the man standing in Pudong Airport on 28 January 2021 was not a fugitive and not a suspect in custody. He was a free citizen, two years past the end of his sentence, carrying a passport and a United States visa. The only thing he was trying to do was bring water and food to a wife dying of cancer and see her one last time. The reason given for stopping him was a suspicion of endangering national security, and no document has ever explained what he had endangered. A year later his wife was dead and he was in a detention center; two days after her death the arrest notice arrived, and the charge rested on the essays he had been writing for years. A regime that must deploy the machinery of national security to stop a husband from seeing his dying wife is not defending itself against subversion. It is defending itself against the man himself: against his living, his speaking and his being remembered.
Look, then, at the staircase of the three judgments. An old book exposing corruption: five years. Supporting a newspaper and demanding that officials disclose their assets: six years. Writing essays, running a website and giving interviews: eight years, for subversion. He did the same thing throughout, using peaceful means to ask the state to keep the promises written in its own constitution. What changed was the label the authorities attached, heavier each time, until speech itself was written up as subversion of state power. When speech equals subversion, anyone who writes anything critical can be worth eight years, and that is the part of this judgment that belongs to everyone. The family's experience shows the punishment was never his alone: a wife dead abroad without seeing her husband again, a sister threatened and mocked for writing letters begging for medical care, two children burying their mother in a foreign country while counting their father's sentence. Punishing a writer by dismantling his family is the most concrete fact in this case, and the one that should be forgotten last. This site pins the timeline here, the night at the airport, the day of her death, the two and a half hours of that trial, so that whoever turns to this history later cannot step around it.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch: statement on the death of Zhang Qing and Guo Feixiong being blocked from traveling to the United States (January 2022), cross-checked against the Agence France-Presse report carried by Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
- Amnesty International: Urgent Actions ASA 17/3599/2021 (1 February 2021, airport hunger strike), ASA 17/4072/2016 and ASA 17/4597/2016 (2016 prison hunger strike and torture risk).
- UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: joint statement of UN experts, 4 August 2016; UN News report of 4 August 2016; special procedures communications records (spcommreports.ohchr.org).
- UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders Mary Lawlor, statement of October 2023 (reported by UN News partners and wire services): ten communications since 2006, critical health, call for humanitarian release.
- U.S. Department of State: spokesperson Ned Price, statement on the passing of Zhang Qing, January 2022; spokesperson Matthew Miller, statement on the sentencing of Guo Feixiong, 12 May 2023.
- Voice of America: 13 May 2023 report on the Guangzhou court's eight-year sentence, the verdict details and self-defense relayed by his brother Yang Maoquan.
- Front Line Defenders: case alert on Guo Feixiong's critical health in prison (Sihui Prison visit, appeal rejected 26 June 2023, trial and sentencing on 11 May 2023, indictment decision of July 2022).
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders: Guo Feixiong prisoner-of-conscience profile and medical-watch list (Sihui Prison, weight of 41.5 kg, sister's medical appeals and reported threats); statement of 10 January 2022 on the death of Zhang Qing.
- Human Rights in China: Guo Feixiong profile; urgent open letter to Premier Li Keqiang and Minister Zhao Kezhi of 10 January 2021; January 2021 airport statement; commentary on the 2015 sentencing; records of lawyers being denied access in 2013.
- Radio Free Asia: December 2007 Meizhou Prison visit and beating report; January 2021 passport letter and airport interception coverage; July 2022 Guangzhou detention-center hunger strike and family interview; 2016 reporting on the transfer from Yangchun to Yingde Prison.
- U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee: hearing record of 29 October 2013, Guo Feixiong and freedom of expression in China (testimony by Zhang Qing and Yang Tianjiao).
- China Change: January 2022 memorial to Zhang Qing, the children's eulogies, and the timeline of the airport interception and the 5 December 2021 detention.
- Wikipedia, Chinese and English entries on Guo Feixiong: basic biographical facts, Taishi village, the first trial and sentence, cross-checked (conflicting dates flagged in the verification note).