第39案 | 黄琦与六四天网Case 39 | Huang Qi & 64 Tianwang
创办中国最早的人权网站之一「六四天网」的黄琦三度入狱：五年、三年、十二年。2019年，绵阳中院以泄露、为境外提供国家秘密两罪判他12年；重病缠身的他在巴中监狱服刑，年迈的母亲为他奔走多年。Huang Qi, founder of 64 Tianwang, one of China's earliest human-rights websites, has been imprisoned three times — five years, three years, twelve years. In 2019 a Mianyang court gave him 12 years for leaking and providing state secrets abroad; gravely ill, he is serving the term in Bazhong Prison while his elderly mother campaigned for him for years.
The Man: Why a Website That Helped People Find the Missing Became a Major Case
Huang Qi was born on 7 April 1963 in Chengdu, Sichuan. According to the profiles maintained by Human Rights in China, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, he worked in business in his early years and came to the internet in the 1990s, becoming one of the first people in China to use it as a rights-defense tool. In 1998 he and his wife Zeng Li founded a small website in Chengdu that began with tracing missing persons. In 1999 the site was refounded and became known as 64 Tianwang, publishing appeals from ordinary people: missing relatives, homes demolished by force, petitions left unresolved for years, and abuses by local officials. In an era before microblogs and messaging apps, a petitioner who wanted the outside world to hear his voice had very few channels. What Tianwang did can be stated in one sentence: it posted the appeals of people seeking help online, in full, so that others could see them.
That single activity put the website under pressure from the start. Much of what Tianwang published concerned misconduct by local governments and police: petitioners' complaints, records of mass incidents and reports of official corruption. Its servers were repeatedly attacked and shut down, its domains blocked again and again, and Huang himself was summoned and warned by Sichuan police on many occasions. The site nevertheless survived for close to twenty years, becoming one of the longest-lived platforms for citizen human rights reporting in China and a window onto conflicts at the grassroots of Chinese society. For a long period, overseas researchers and journalists treated Tianwang as a primary source on China's petitioner population. Rights organizations describing the site converge on one judgment: it documented not grand narratives but specific people, specific grievances and specific doors slammed shut. Precisely because it was concrete, it was especially hard for local power to tolerate.
Huang Qi's fate and his website's fate were bound together. He was detained three times and imprisoned three times, on charges that grew heavier with each round: five years for inciting subversion of state power, three years for illegal possession of top-secret state documents, and twelve years for providing state secrets to foreign entities and related offenses. The three sentences add up to twenty years, and with pre-trial detention counted in, he has spent a very large share of his adult life in detention centers and prisons. According to multiple rights organizations and media reports, the trigger for the third and heaviest case was remarkably slight: Tianwang had posted a document of a local political-legal committee concerning the handling of one petitioner's case. How an internal paper of a grassroots political-legal office became a state secret worth twelve years is the key to this case, and its most absurd feature. This page separates the three cases and records them in order.
First Imprisonment: Detained in 2000, Five Years for Inciting Subversion
On 3 June 2000 Huang Qi was taken away by police in Chengdu. The detention came not long after Tianwang's founding. According to Human Rights in China and International PEN, the accusations were tied to articles posted on the site, including texts touching on the 1989 crackdown, petitioner issues and Xinjiang. The authorities charged that through the website he had incited subversion of state power. From 2000 to 2003 he remained in custody while proceedings dragged on for years, and his family and lawyers received very little information.
On 9 May 2003 the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court delivered its verdict: Huang Qi was guilty of inciting subversion of state power and was sentenced to five years in prison. PEN's American center and other institutions record the verdict date as 9 May 2003, and this page follows that date. The judgment drew international attention because what the defendant had done, in essence, was run a website posting citizens' appeals. In the years that followed, the free-expression world treated Huang as one of the earliest emblematic Chinese cases of imprisonment for online speech. At the turn of the century, only a handful of people in China had been convicted of subversion for internet expression, and Huang Qi was among the first names on that short list.
In 2004, while he was still in prison, Reporters Without Borders awarded him its Cyber-Freedom Prize, honoring his persistence in publishing human rights information under censorship. The prize was announced on his behalf because he could not receive it in person. In June 2005 he was released at the end of the five-year term. After his release he did not close Tianwang. Instead he expanded its reporting and built working ties with petitioners, rights defenders and volunteers across the country. This was the period when Tianwang's reporting network took shape: when a demolition, an interception of petitioners or a mass incident occurred somewhere, the people involved or local volunteers would send materials to Tianwang, and Huang would check them and post them. That method made the site a thorn in the authorities' side and kept Huang himself at constant risk of being taken away again. After his release he stated publicly more than once that the website would continue. The statement proved to be more than a gesture: three years later, a different affair put him back in prison.
After the Sichuan Earthquake: Speaking for Bereaved Parents, and Three More Years
On 12 May 2008 a massive earthquake struck Wenchuan in Sichuan. School buildings collapsed in large numbers and thousands of students were buried during class hours. The question of shoddily built schools immediately became a focus of public anger: why, in the same disaster zone, did government office buildings stand while schools fell in rows? Parents of dead students demanded investigations into construction quality and accountability, and were suppressed as they sought redress. Huang Qi involved himself in this cause. He traveled to the disaster area, met parents who had lost children, published their demands and experiences through Tianwang, and helped them look for legal and media support. According to Human Rights in China and Amnesty International, he also assisted parents with the practical work of their campaign, including accompanying them to present their case and helping organize materials.
In June 2008, barely a month after the quake, at the very moment when bereaved parents' emotions were rawest and official stability-maintenance pressure was at its peak, Huang was taken away in Chengdu. The reason became clear only gradually: police had found documents at his home or workplace that were classified as top state secrets. The case then sat in a detention center for more than a year. On 23 November 2009 the Wuhou District People's Court in Chengdu sentenced him to three years in prison for illegal possession of top-secret state documents. No details of the proceedings were made public, and the specific contents of the documents and the basis for their classification remain a matter of no public record to this day. Rights organizations broadly regard the charge as retaliation for his earthquake advocacy and his continued operation of Tianwang: what genuinely unsettled the authorities was not any document, but the fact that after the disaster he stood with the parents and carried their voices to the outside world.
This episode has to be read in its context. After the Wenchuan earthquake, spontaneous citizen relief work and citizen demands for accountability surged at the same time. Officials initially welcomed the first and quickly clamped down on the second. Artists, writers and rights defenders who investigated school collapses and student death tolls were warned, detained or imprisoned one after another, and Huang received one of the heavier punishments among them. A man who spoke for parents was jailed for three years over possession of secret documents, while why the schools collapsed and exactly how many students died have never received a complete official accounting that can withstand scrutiny. Set side by side, those two facts make the nature of this case easy to judge. On 10 June 2011 Huang Qi was released at the end of the three-year term. He was forty-eight years old and had been imprisoned twice.
Tianwang After Release: The Recording Never Stopped, and Neither Did the Pressure
After his 2011 release, Huang continued to run 64 Tianwang. Its coverage widened in this period: land seizures and demolitions, petitioners intercepted on their way to Beijing, local mass incidents, labor disputes, and religious and ethnic issues all appeared on the site. Its influence lay less in traffic than in function. It had become the last outlet for many grassroots appeals: when formal channels failed and the media would not report a case, Tianwang could at least preserve the materials and pass them on. The site also became a lead source for overseas media and research institutions tracking social incidents in China; a number of events appeared first on Tianwang and were followed up and verified later by larger outlets.
The reporting was accompanied by unbroken pressure. According to rights organizations' records over the years, Huang was repeatedly summoned, had his home searched and was briefly taken away in this period, and the website was inaccessible inside China for long stretches, surviving through overseas servers and mirrors. Sichuan state security kept him under routine surveillance. He did not stop. People who knew him told the media that he treated Tianwang as a record-keeping duty that somebody had to perform: even if he were the only one left, petitioners' materials had to be published. That almost stubborn persistence explains both why Tianwang survived nearly twenty years and why everyone around him understood that a third arrest was only a matter of time. In 2016, the time came.
The Third Detention: Police From Three Cities, a Political-Legal Committee Document, and Mianyang Detention Center
On 28 November 2016 Huang Qi was taken away in Chengdu. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders and multiple media reports, the police who seized him came from three cities within Sichuan province, which is unusual in an ordinary case and indicates coordination at provincial level. After the seizure he was held outside his home jurisdiction. On 16 December 2016 he was formally arrested on the charge of illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities. He was then held at the Mianyang Detention Center, and the case was handled and tried in Mianyang. A Chengdu man and a Chengdu matter were thus sent to Mianyang, and that transfer of jurisdiction itself made it harder for his family and lawyers to follow the case.
The origin of the case, according to the convergent record of rights organizations and media, was that Tianwang had earlier posted a document issued by a local political-legal committee concerning the handling of a petitioner's case. The authorities classified the document as a state secret, and treated its posting and dissemination by Tianwang as leaking state secrets and providing them abroad. One point must be stated plainly: the material in question was not military, scientific or high-level decision-making intelligence. It was a working document of a grassroots political-legal office about how one ordinary citizen's appeal was being handled. To classify such a paper as a state secret and imprison the person who posted it for more than a decade is to declare that how local power treats petitioners is itself something that may not be seen or spoken of. Huang's lawyers and supporters maintained from the beginning that the case was, in substance, a settling of accounts for Tianwang's years of reporting, with the document affair as a pretext.
During his detention in Mianyang, Huang's health deteriorated sharply and his lawyers' access was repeatedly obstructed. According to Amnesty International and statements by his lawyers, he was beaten in the detention center and developed multiple illnesses, while repeated applications by his defense lawyers for release on bail and for medical treatment were all refused. The case dragged from late 2016 to early 2019, with pre-trial detention exceeding two years, far beyond the rhythm of an ordinary criminal case. During that period his mother Pu Wenqing traveled repeatedly to Mianyang to demand visits and his release, and was refused each time. A man of fifty-five in grave ill health waited more than two years in a detention center, and what he finally received was a secret trial that diplomats were not allowed to enter.
Secret Trial and a Twelve-Year Sentence: Mianyang, 2019
On 14 January 2019 the Mianyang Intermediate People's Court heard Huang Qi's case. According to the BBC and other media and rights organizations, the hearing was closed; Western diplomats who attempted to observe were refused entry, and family members were unable to attend normally. The official explanation for the closed proceedings was that state secrets were involved. But the fact that diplomats were turned away at the door is recorded consistently across outlets, and this page notes it both in the text and in the verification note. The words state secrets perform double service in this case: they can turn a petitioner's file into classified material, and they can turn a trial into a black box the outside world cannot see into. That is the most procedurally significant feature of the case.
On 29 July 2019 the Mianyang court delivered its judgment: Huang Qi was guilty of intentionally leaking state secrets and of illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities; the combined punishment was twelve years in prison, four years' deprivation of political rights and confiscation of 20,000 yuan in personal property. Twelve years was among the heaviest sentences imposed on a Chinese human rights defender for expression-related conduct at that time, and it was several times the length of his own earlier terms of five and three years. News of the verdict brought statements the same day or within days from Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, International PEN and other organizations, condemning the sentence, demanding his immediate and unconditional release, and stressing that his health could not withstand twelve years of imprisonment. Reporters Without Borders noted in particular that Huang was a recipient of its Cyber-Freedom Prize: a laureate imprisoned again by the same regime fifteen years later, on a far heavier sentence, showed that China's space for online expression had not widened in those fifteen years but had steadily narrowed.
On 24 December 2019 Huang was transferred to Bazhong Prison in Sichuan to serve the sentence. Public records on whether he appealed and what any appeal produced are limited; rights organizations' later bulletins simply treat the twelve-year term and Bazhong Prison as his status, and this site found no publicly released second-instance court document upholding or altering the judgment, a gap flagged in the verification note. The full text of the judgment has never been made public, so the classification grade of the alleged secrets, the composition of the evidence and the reasoning behind the sentence cannot be examined by anyone outside the court. What can be confirmed is only the result: a man who ran a human rights website for twenty years is to spend from age fifty-six to age sixty-eight in prison, if his body lasts that long.
Health: Kidney Failure, Hydrocephalus and Allegedly Falsified Medical Records
Huang Qi's health problems did not begin with the verdict. According to the long record kept by Amnesty International and his lawyers, he suffers from crescentic glomerulonephritis, a rapidly progressing kidney disease that has advanced to the stage of kidney failure and requires sustained, proper treatment if his life is not to be endangered. He has also been diagnosed with hydrocephalus, rheumatic heart disease and emphysema. Any one of these conditions would be dangerous on its own. Their combination in a man held for years without adequate treatment speaks for itself, without any need for medical training to understand.
Still more disturbing are the allegations about his treatment in custody. According to Amnesty International's urgent actions and bulletins based on information from his lawyers and family, Huang was beaten in the Mianyang Detention Center, his medical records were alleged to have been falsified, and his family and lawyers strongly doubted the medical conclusions issued by the authorities, while the lawyers' repeated applications for medical parole and changes to his custodial measures were refused. These details rest on lawyer and family accounts as recorded by rights organizations, and this site cannot enter detention centers or prisons to verify them independently; they are attributed wherever they appear in this text. It must also be said that records made by different organizations at different times over many years align with one another on the types of illness and the trajectory of decline, and do not rest on a single source. When UN and international bodies have called for his release, the health argument has always come first: not a request for better food, but an explicit warning that continued imprisonment could kill him and a demand for release on humanitarian grounds.
After his transfer to Bazhong Prison, the outside world's knowledge of his health grew thinner rather than thicker. Prison visiting rules, pandemic-era controls and his family's advanced age combined to reduce the family's ability to obtain information year by year. As of the writing of this page, this site found no authoritative public record after the first video visit in 2020 of improvement in his condition, of hospital treatment or of medical parole, and no public statement by the prison about arrangements for his care. A kidney-failure patient sentenced to twelve years, held in a prison far from his home city, with information about his condition cut off: that is itself a state of affairs worth recording, and it is recorded here as no public record.
His Mother Pu Wenqing: A Retired Doctor's Last Years of Campaigning
One other person must be recorded in this case: his mother, Pu Wenqing. Born around 1931, she was a retired doctor. When her son was first imprisoned she was already close to seventy. When he was seized the third time she was eighty-five. In the years that followed, this elderly woman became the most persistent advocate in Huang Qi's case. She wrote to government bodies at every level, traveled to Mianyang, Chengdu and Beijing to present his case, and demanded visits, medical treatment and release. A woman who had practiced medicine all her life understood better than anyone what kidney failure meant, and what her son's situation inside meant. Her campaigning was driven by more than a mother's love; it was also a doctor's judgment that if the detention continued, her son would die.
On 7 December 2018, while petitioning in Beijing, Pu Wenqing was beaten. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders and media reports, the woman, then about eighty-seven years old, was assaulted by unidentified persons while appealing for her son in the capital, an incident that drew strong protests from rights organizations. An octogenarian mother, a son in detention, and a beating for the mother who petitioned: the crushing of this family by the case is nowhere more concrete than in that scene. She did not stop. She continued to speak through every channel available to her, telling interviewers the same thing again and again: she hoped that while she was still alive she could see her son once more, and see him come out alive.
On 17 September 2020, almost four years after Huang was taken, Pu Wenqing was finally granted a video visit, lasting thirty minutes. According to rights organizations, it was the first time mother and son had seen each other since November 2016, even if only through a screen. Thirty minutes had to hold four years of illness, four years of longing and what remained of an old woman's time. The family relayed afterward that Huang's physical condition remained worrying. Since then, this site has found no continuing authoritative public record of Pu Wenqing's health or of any further visit. Born around 1931, she would now be about ninety-five if living. Huang's twelve-year sentence runs until around 2028. Whether mother and son will meet again, no one can answer. This section is written separately because in cases of this kind the family are never background. They are among those on whom the punishment falls. To sentence a man to twelve years is also to sentence a mother of ninety to spend the rest of her life waiting for an outcome she will in all likelihood never see.
The Rest of the Family, and the Fate of Tianwang
Huang's wife Zeng Li was the co-founder of Tianwang. The site's original missing-persons work was something the couple built together. During the more than twenty years of Huang's three imprisonments, public information about Zeng Li has been scarce, and this site found no systematic record of her speaking publicly and continuously about the case. Only confirmable facts are recorded here: that she co-founded the website with Huang in 1998–1999, and that the family thereafter lived under long-term surveillance and case pressure. When the families of the persecuted inside China keep a low profile, that is itself a result of pressure and should not be misread as irrelevance. This site follows a strict principle of protecting ordinary people inside China and does not expand without evidence on the private life of family members.
Tianwang did not vanish the moment Huang was seized. Volunteers and overseas collaborators kept the site updated for a time, but without its editor and its core verifier, its reporting capacity shrank drastically, and updates later stalled. The large volume of petitioner materials Tianwang accumulated over nearly twenty years remains an important archive for the study of grassroots rights defense in China. The survival of a citizen website rested entirely on one person; once he was arrested, the site was crippled. That fragility explains why the authorities always fixed on Huang himself: arresting him severed an entire chain of documentation at a single stroke.
International Response: From the Cyber-Freedom Prize to Joint Appeals
Huang Qi was one of the first Chinese internet dissidents known to the international free-expression world. The 2004 Reporters Without Borders Cyber-Freedom Prize entered his name into the international human rights record. Every subsequent detention and sentencing triggered a round of international response. After his 2008 detention, multiple rights organizations and foreign governments expressed concern. After the third detention in 2016, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Amnesty International, International PEN, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders spoke out in succession, focusing on his lawyers' access and his health. After the secret trial and the twelve-year sentence in 2019, condemnation was at its densest, and media recorded serious concern expressed by several governments and by the European Union.
The demands in these responses were highly consistent: immediate and unconditional release; adequate medical care until release; family visits; and an end to the use of state-secrets charges to punish the publication of human rights information. This page summarizes wording rather than inventing quotations from any organization's statement. The outcome must also be recorded honestly: close to twenty-five years of prizes, statements and appeals have changed none of the judgments. The international response has served a documentary function more than a rescue function, and this page does not disguise that. But documentation itself has value. It is because these organizations left records at the nodes of 2000, 2004, 2009, 2016, 2019 and 2020 that Huang Qi's timeline can be fully reconstructed today, instead of disappearing along with Tianwang's shutdown. The Chinese authorities' public response to the case has remained limited throughout. The court system has not published the judgment, and diplomatic responses have largely restated that the case was handled according to law and rejected outside interference. On why the document in question constituted a state secret, on Huang's illness and the medical parole applications, and on the basis for handling his mother's visit requests, the authorities have made no public explanation. This page records that blank, faithfully, as no public record.
Latest Status: Bazhong Prison, a Twelve-Year Term, and a Line Gone Silent
As of the last verification for this page, Huang Qi remains in Bazhong Prison, Sichuan, serving the twelve-year sentence imposed on 29 July 2019, together with four years' deprivation of political rights and confiscation of 20,000 yuan in property. His earlier periods of detention and imprisonment do not count toward this term. Calculated by the usual methods of commencement and crediting, his release would fall around 2028, but the precise calculation depends on the unpublished judgment, so this is offered as an explanation, not a finding. At that point Huang would be sixty-five and his mother Pu Wenqing, if living, ninety-seven.
On health, the last relatively specific public information dates from 2019 to 2020: kidney failure and multiple serious diseases confirmed, prison medical care unclear, and the family's appeals for medical parole unanswered. After the September 2020 video visit, this site found no new authoritative reporting on his condition, hospitalization or visits. The blank that follows is recorded as no public record and is not filled with speculation. That a man whose profession was recording the grievances of others should end with his own condition a matter of no public record is the most direct commentary on the information blockade that this case affords.
Verification Note
This page was compiled by cross-checking the public archives and reporting of Human Rights in China, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, International PEN and the BBC, together with lawyer and family information relayed by rights organizations. The evidence is graded as follows: his birth date, the dates of the three detentions and judgments, the trial courts, charges, sentences, the prize, the transfer to Bazhong Prison and the first video visit are each recorded by at least two independent institutions and are treated as cross-verified. The accounts of beatings in custody and of allegedly falsified medical records rest on lawyer and family accounts recorded by rights organizations; they are attributed in the text and are not presented as independently proven. The specific contents and classification basis of the top-secret documents in the second case, the full judgment text in the third case, any public second-instance document on appeal, and his health and visits after September 2020 are all matters of no public record.
Conflicting details are collected here. The founding of Tianwang is dated 1998 in some sources and 1999 in others; this page writes of founding and refounding across 1998–1999 and does not adopt a single year as final. The first verdict date follows the 9 May 2003 date recorded by International PEN and other institutions. Pu Wenqing's birth year is given in most sources as around 1931, and her age at the time of the Beijing beating is calculated from that year and marked as approximate. The issuing office and specific content of the political-legal committee document are described in broadly consistent terms by rights organizations and media, but the original document has not been published, and this page summarizes rather than reproduces it. Quotations 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. What did Huang Qi do? He ran a website. He posted petitioners' appeals. He carried the words of parents whose children died under collapsed schools to the outside world. He published a document showing how a local political-legal apparatus handled a petitioner. For these acts he received five years, three years and twelve years, twenty years in total. The labels the authorities attached to him escalated step by step: subversion first, then top secrets, then providing secrets abroad. Yet he never had an army, never had weapons, never had an organization to overthrow anything. He had a computer and a pile of materials from people with nowhere else to turn. When a regime defines the recording of grievances as subversion and a petitioner's file as a top secret, what it is protecting is no longer national security. It is protecting its own way of treating its people from being seen, because once those methods are seen, recorded and spread, the so-called secret cannot be kept. Huang Qi's real offense has never been written in any judgment: he let people see.
Consider two concrete details of this case. First, a working document of a grassroots political-legal committee was exchanged for twelve years. By that standard, any journalist, lawyer or petitioner who touches or circulates a document about how local power operates can face the same charge, and that is exactly the exemplary purpose of a heavy sentence: it judges not only Huang Qi but everyone who still wants to keep records. Second, a patient with kidney failure, hydrocephalus and heart disease was sent to a prison far from Chengdu; his mother, over eighty-five, campaigned for four years to win a thirty-minute video call and was beaten in Beijing while petitioning along the way. When the reach of punishment extends from the defendant to his ninety-year-old mother, the case is no longer a question of sentencing. This site pins the full timeline here: 3 June 2000, 23 November 2009, 28 November 2016, 29 July 2019, 17 September 2020, the whole process by which a man who amplified other people's voices was himself silenced. Every one of those dates deserves to be remembered by somebody.
Sources
- Human Rights in China (HRIC): case files on Huang Qi and 64 Tianwang, the three cases and his involvement in bereaved parents' advocacy after the Sichuan earthquake.
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD): profile of Huang Qi as an imprisoned human rights defender; records of the 2016 detention and formal arrest, the beating of his mother Pu Wenqing in Beijing, and the video visit.
- Amnesty International: urgent actions and health bulletins on Huang Qi (kidney failure, hydrocephalus, alleged beatings in custody and falsified medical records, calls for humanitarian release).
- Reporters Without Borders (RSF): record of the 2004 Cyber-Freedom Prize and statement on the twelve-year sentence of 2019.
- International PEN: case record on free expression and the 9 May 2003 verdict date in the first case.
- BBC: reporting on the closed Mianyang trial of 2019, Western diplomats refused entry as observers, and the twelve-year sentence.
- Human Rights Watch: statements and records on imprisoned Chinese human rights defenders, including the Huang Qi case.