第110案 | 卢昱宇Case 110 | Lu Yuyu
他做的事，是把中国每天发生的抗争记下来：征地、欠薪、污染、腐败——当事人发到网上的照片视频，他逐条核实，再发出去存档。官方的群体事件统计2007年就停了，此后近十年，唯一连续的记录出自他和伴侣李婷玉两个人：2015年他们记下28,950起，日均79起，靠读者捐赠过活。国家给这份工作的回价是：国保跟踪三年，账号开一个删一个；2016年6月，两人去取一件快递，被反扭双手、套上黑头套带走——日期连官方转述都对不上，机构说15日，他本人说16日，本站两说并列。看守所里他被指遭殴打、绝食抗议；牢里坐着，斯特拉斯堡把新闻自由奖颁给了他们。案卷的数字最说明问题：据他和国际特赦组织的口径，七万条信息里，检方最终只确认八条虚假。李婷玉被秘密审了一场，结局至今有三种说法，本站一个也不替办案方合并；他被判四年，狱中确诊抑郁。2020年6月出狱，迎接他的是跟踪、逼迁和一次八个人闯进门的驱逐：注销推特，就没人骚扰你。他把驱逐写成《再见，广州！》，存到了收不走的地方——就像他十年前做的那样。His work was writing down the protests that happen in China every day: land seizures, wage arrears, pollution, corruption — the photos and videos participants posted online, verified item by item, then published and archived. China's official count of mass incidents stopped in 2007; for almost a decade after that, the only continuous record came from Lu Yuyu and his partner Li Tingyu: 28,950 incidents logged in 2015, an average of 79 a day, the two of them living on readers' donations. The state's price for that work was three years of state-security tracking and accounts deleted the moment they opened; in June 2016 the two went to collect a delivery and were taken with their arms twisted behind them and black hoods over their heads — on a date even the relayed record cannot fix: the organisations say the 15th, Lu himself says the 16th, and this page carries both. In detention he was alleged to have been beaten and to have hunger-struck in protest; while they sat in cells, Strasbourg awarded them a press-freedom prize. The case file's arithmetic says the most: on his and Amnesty International's account, of some 70,000 messages, prosecutors in the end confirmed eight as false. Li Tingyu was tried in secret, and her outcome still stands in three versions, none of which this page will merge on the case organs' behalf; he drew four years and a diagnosis of depression. He came out in June 2020 to tracking, forced relocations and an expulsion carried out by eight men through his front door: cancel your Twitter account, and no one will harass you again. He wrote the expulsion up as 'Goodbye, Guangzhou!' and stored it where it cannot be confiscated — exactly as he had done ten years before.
The man: a Guizhou drifter between factories and warehouses
Fix the man first, and fix the grading of his particulars with him. Lu Yuyu's birth details rest on a thinner chain than most of this case, and this page says so at the outset: the Independent Chinese PEN Center's person page and Chinese Wikipedia both give 14 June 1977, born in the Fenggang area under Zunyi, Guizhou (the PEN page's English rendering of the place name is garbled, and this page takes only the core on which the sources agree — a man from Zunyi, Guizhou). CPJ, Amnesty International and Radio Free Asia describe him only as a man from Guizhou in China's southwest; none gives a date of birth. This site holds no identity document, so the date is recorded on a single source chain, and the text avoids precise age calculations — he was in his late thirties when he was taken in 2016.
His early life, in his own telling, comes from Amnesty International's long profile of February 2021, based on an interview at his home in Guizhou after his release, and it is graded throughout as his account: he describes himself as a rebellious, angry child, later expelled from university for fighting; he drifted between jobs — construction worker, internet-café manager, plumber, warehouse manager. In his words, work made him miserable, until in 2011 he found Weibo and saw people like Ai Weiwei and Chen Guangcheng, and realised what kind of life he wanted to pursue. In CPJ's interview of 30 July 2020 he filled in those years more concretely, again on his own account: in 2011 and 2012, he said, he was imprisoned, expelled and beaten by state-security agents around the country because of his online comments and because he held up signs calling for general elections; he wandered with no fixed address, then worked illegally at a plastics factory in Fuzhou and slowly settled, collecting information in his spare time. The "imprisoned" in that sentence is left vague by Lu himself, with no date or place, and this page records it at exactly his level of vagueness rather than completing it for him. Chinese Wikipedia carries a further claim — that as a student he was expelled and jailed for six years for stabbing someone. That claim appears in no CPJ, Amnesty International or Radio Free Asia material and in no organisation's case file that this site has seen; it has no second source. It is marked unverified, is not adopted as fact, and is noted here only so that later readers do not mistake an unsourced encyclopaedia entry for a settled record.
His turn from street protest to recording has a clear self-explanation. After police attention made sign-holding costly, he judged that protesting with a sign could train one's courage but had limited practical effect (on Amnesty International's relay of his words). So he changed tactics: instead of being the one person on the street, he would gather the small protests happening all over the country, verify them, and send them out. In a 2014 interview carried by Paopao.net, he stated the purpose of the work plainly — in substance, to amplify the voices of protesters, to draw social attention, and to spread people's experience of struggle so that others could learn from their successes and failures (relayed by Global Voices on 23 June 2016). This page places that sentence near the head of his biography because the whole case that followed is, in essence, the state machine's answer to it.
April 2012 brought his first loss of liberty for public protest: he joined a protest demanding that officials disclose their assets, and was detained for ten days (CPJ's case profile and its report of 28 June 2016). Hold the year and the demand in mind: a protest asking for asset disclosure, ten days in detention. Four years later, what put him in prison for four years was still not any act of violence. It was that he had recorded tens of thousands of other people's protests.
Not News: two people, one computer, and a near-scholarly discipline of verification
The project's start date is recorded in layers, because the sources measure different things. CPJ dates Lu's reporting and archiving of protests from October 2012. Global Voices dates his research into mass incidents from 2011 and his systematic distribution over social media from 2013. Lu himself, in his CPJ interview, was the most precise: strictly speaking, Not News began in July 2013, because that was when Li Tingyu began saving the material he found to Google, Twitter and other networks outside the firewall; before that, the data existed only on a hard disk — a disk that state-security agents had confiscated and that he never recovered. This page follows his layering: gathering from 2011–2012, systematic recording from October 2012, and Not News as a formed project from July 2013.
The name "Non-News" （非新闻， also rendered "Not News" and "News Worth Knowing") was Li Tingyu's coinage — it meant the news you would not see in the media (Amnesty International). The accounts ran under the name Wickedonna: the blog at wickedonna.blogspot.com and the Twitter account @wickedonnaa (Amnesty International's urgent action; CPJ). The division of labour, on Lu's own account, was that he searched for information, published it and analysed the data, while Li saved everything to networks outside China. That division revealed its full meaning after the arrests of June 2016: the person inside China did the collecting, and the archive was mirrored abroad in real time. You can seize the person and confiscate the disks. What has already been published and stored abroad cannot be taken back.
Their working method is the part of this case that most deserves detail, because it determines what the later figure of "eight" means. Each day, Lu spent about eight hours tracking protest news on social media, cross-checking through different search engines and verifying that photographs and videos really came from the protest scenes (Global Voices, relaying the 2014 interview). CPJ's summary is that he collected photos, videos and text posted by participants and witnesses on Chinese social media platforms, verified them, and republished them through Twitter, Weibo, Blogspot, YouTube and Google Drive, issuing periodic statistical reports. The coverage ran to protests over land expropriation, wage arrears, official corruption and environmental pollution (CPJ). Amnesty International singles out one rule: Lu insisted on fact-checking information before publishing it. Because of that rigour, the organisation judged, a conviction was hard to construct — a judgement recorded here as Amnesty International's, and one that interlocks with the case file's final arithmetic (eight items confirmed false out of some 70,000) in the evidence section below.
The tallies they left behind must be graded, every one of them, as their own tallies; not a single figure may masquerade as an official or third-party count. The official background is this: the Chinese government stopped publishing figures for "mass incidents" after 2007, a year for which the official figure exceeded 100,000 (Amnesty International; Bannedbook). Not News' own annual summary for 2015 recorded 28,950 marches, demonstrations, rallies and similar incidents, an average of 79 a day, up 34 percent on 2014 (their annual summary, as relayed by Lausan and by Taiwan's Independent Opinion). CPJ and Amnesty International round the same figure to "nearly 30,000" and "more than 30,000" respectively; this page takes their self-reported 28,950 as the primary figure and carries the roundings beside it. Their last monthly count, for April 2016, recorded 2,001 demonstrations, including one incident involving more than 10,000 people, 236 incidents met with police crackdowns and at least 2,782 arrests (Lausan, relaying their monthly report). For the first quarter of 2016 they recorded 9,869 incidents (Global Voices). These figures count only the events they found and verified; in Lu's own assessment, as in Lausan's, they were only a fraction of the resistance actually taking place across China every day. This page spells out that limit to forestall two opposite misreadings: 28,950 is not the total of protest in China in 2015 — and the fact that it is not the total does not drain it of weight. After a decade in which the state published nothing, this was close to the only continuous record the outside world had. The Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin drew on the Not News archive as one of the primary sources for its map of strikes in China (Lausan).
Their livelihood belongs in the archive too, because it defines the nature of the undertaking: the two lived mainly on donations from readers and fellow internet users (Amnesty International; CPJ's reporting). No institution, no salary, no office — two people, a computer, a cat, and eight hours a day of searching and checking. That was the full extent of the "gang" that Dali police would later take down in a single operation for picking quarrels and provoking trouble.
Li Tingyu: the Sun Yat-sen student who dropped out, and who named the project
Li Tingyu's public record is thinner than Lu's, and this page pins down what it can and says plainly what it cannot. CPJ's case profile, citing Radio Free Asia and the couple's friend Wen Yunchao, a New York-based blogger, records that she was originally from Foshan, Guangdong, and had been a student at Sun Yat-sen University; while a student she was repeatedly harassed by police for publishing articles criticising the Chinese government on websites blocked by China's censorship system, and she dropped out of the university in 2014 as a result. Amnesty International's 2021 profile calls her a university student from Guangzhou — Guangzhou being the city where she studied, Foshan being CPJ's given origin; the two statements measure different things and are carried side by side, unmerged. How she and Lu met is on his account to Amnesty International: she had long read his blog; they began corresponding at the end of 2012; and in June 2013, when he posted that he had resigned from his factory job to concentrate on gathering information and was in financial difficulty, she answered that she wanted to come and help him, and to help raise the work's profile. She then joined the recording, and she named the project "Non-News" (Amnesty International). CPJ's profile dates her help with research and publication from early 2013, citing the Hong Kong outlet The Initium — a difference of months against Amnesty International's June–July 2013 sequence, carried here side by side.
One relay error must be corrected before it travels further: CPJ's sentencing report of 4 August 2017 misspells her name as "Li Dingyu". Its own case profile and every other source give Li Tingyu. This page leaves the correction on record: a later reader who meets "Dingyu" in that CPJ text is meeting a typo, not another person. The same report renders lawyer Xiao Yunyang's name as "Xiao Yungyang", likewise a transcription error; this page standardises on Xiao Yunyang.
The shape of their relationship determines the emotional structure of this case: they were partners and colleagues, living together, subsisting on the same donations, harassed by the same state-security officers, moving home under the same pressure, and seized on the same errand. Amnesty International titled its profile "Love in the time of censorship". This page does not go in for sentiment, but one fact must be recorded: the day of their arrest in June 2016 was the last time the two saw each other (Amnesty International, on Lu's account). After that, one of them drew four years and the other's fate dissolves into three conflicting versions; and when Lu came out in 2020 and went looking for her, the answer was that she had begun a new life. That thread is completed in the release section below; its starting point is pinned here.
Three years of state security: harassment, expulsion from Zhuhai, and the "invisible man" of Dali
June 2016 was not the beginning of this story. It was the day the net closed. On Lu's account to Amnesty International, the police had tracked the couple for the entire three years of their relationship, and the two were constantly harassed by national-security police (Amnesty International; CPJ). Chinese Wikipedia's entry supplies one intermediate station, recorded here on its single source chain and graded accordingly: after the two joined forces at the end of 2013, police came to their temporary home in Zhuhai and warned them not to continue publishing rights-defence information; their landlord then refused to renew their lease, and they moved on to Dali in Yunnan. In its broad direction that account matches Amnesty International's, which records that in 2014, worn down by the unwanted attention, the couple moved to Dali and lived mainly on donations from other internet users. This page's treatment: the year of the move follows Amnesty International's 2014; the Zhuhai station is archived on the Wikipedia chain and marked as single-source.
Lu said he lived in Dali as an "invisible man", and still never felt safe (relayed by Amnesty International). One concrete gauge: by 2015, any new Weibo account he opened was deleted on sight (the same source). Set that detail beside the working method of the previous section — eight hours a day of gathering and verification on one side, accounts extinguished the moment they appeared on the other — and it measures the conditions under which the 2015 tally nevertheless reached 28,950. He expected prison. In his own words, he had long been prepared and forewarned about it; he simply avoided talking to Li about it, because talk only increased their fear and changed nothing (Amnesty International). In June 2016 the expectation came true.
15 June or 16 June: the first date conflict this page refuses to merge
This case's timeline has two dates from its first day, and this page pins them both down and forbids any passage of the text to choose a side silently. Version one: 15 June. CPJ's case profile records that Dali police detained the two on 15 June 2016 on suspicion of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, citing Radio Free Asia. Amnesty International's urgent action of July 2016 and its update of September 2016 both date their criminal detention from 15 June. Reporters Without Borders' award citation of 8 November 2016 likewise dates their arrest to 15 June and notes they were held incommunicado for more than three weeks before they could speak to lawyers. The Not News Twitter account's last update fell on 15 June (Lausan's archived screenshot note) — an independent, artefact-level anchor: after the 15th, the account is silent. Chinese Wikipedia also gives 15 June. This site sorts the case to 15 June (sort_date 2016-06-15), because that side of the record has the longer source chain and the support of the account's silence.
Version two: 16 June. CPJ's sentencing report of 4 August 2017 dates the police detention to 16 June. More weightily, Lu Yuyu himself, in his July 2020 account to CPJ, said: at noon on 16 June 2016 he and Li Tingyu went into Dali's old town for rice noodles; meanwhile the owner of the Gantong express-delivery station kept texting them to collect their packages; they rode their motorbike to the station and Li went in to collect them; suddenly several strangers surrounded him, one seizing the motorbike's handlebar and the others twisting his arms behind his back; he was put into a car at the roadside and a black hood was placed over his head; and he saw Li being taken away by several policewomen, shouting his name. The protagonist's own account and the institutional record differ by a day. Possible explanations include a failure of memory, differences of time zone and filing convention, and the possibility that the day a man is seized and the day on the criminal-detention instrument are simply not the same day — but no published document can decide between them, and this page records only the conflict itself. The archive's rule stands: the man says the 16th, several organisations say the 15th, both are written, and no one is permitted to smooth the day flat on the reader's behalf.
The arrest scene exists in a second version too, from the same mouth, published half a year later, with details that diverge from the CPJ version; this page carries it alongside. In Amnesty International's February 2021 profile, Lu said the two had gone to pick up a pot of catnip for their cat, Little Stinker: Li — "Jane" — went into the shop to collect it while he waited outside; several men closed in; his hands were twisted behind his back, a black hood went over his head, and he was taken into a black car; he had naively hoped the police did not know Jane was inside, but she was escorted out by several policewomen, shouting his name at the top of her voice, and put into another sedan. The cores of the two versions agree — a delivery or collection point, arms twisted, a black hood, Li taken by policewomen calling his name. They differ on the date (15th or 16th) and on what was being collected (packages, on a trip that began with rice noodles, or a catnip plant). This page's judgement is written here: divergences of this kind are the ordinary condition of oral history; they do not impeach the teller. But an archive must set both versions out, each with its source and its publication date — the CPJ version in July 2020, the Amnesty International version in February 2021. The same treatment applies throughout this page to everything sourced to Lu's own telling: his account is this case's most important first-hand source, and an account is not an instrument; where its details diverge, the divergence is marked, not hidden.
What followed, on Lu's CPJ account: the two were escorted back to their home, which police searched thoroughly, photographing it, sealing it up and taking items away; that afternoon he was taken to the city detention centre for a physical examination, and interrogation then ran until four the next morning, after which he was sent to the Dali Prefecture Detention Center. Amnesty International's urgent action, on what Li told her lawyers, records that on 15 June several unidentified men grabbed her, put her into a car without licence plates and forcibly placed a black hood over her head. The disappearance lasted about three weeks. Their friend Xu Hui visited the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture Detention Center on 25 June and the centre confirmed the two were held there; when he returned the next day he was told they had been transferred elsewhere, and their whereabouts became unknown; a police officer at the centre told CPJ by telephone that he had no information about either of them (CPJ, 28 June 2016). Global Voices' headline of 23 June was "missing": to the outside world, these two people first vanished, and only later became "criminally detained persons". On 6 July lawyers finally met both at the detention centre: Lu appeared in good spirits and maintained that the information he had compiled was objective fact and that he was innocent; Li said her interrogations had centred on the information she had compiled for the blog and Twitter, and likewise maintained that she had fabricated nothing — she had only compiled and collected it (Amnesty International's urgent action, on the lawyers' accounts). The date of their formal arrest is not precisely recorded in the public sources — Radio Free Asia, as relayed by the Independent Chinese PEN Center, speaks in a headline of the two being formally arrested, but no date is a matter of public record, and this page makes no inference.
The evidence: eight items out of some seventy thousand
The conviction evidence in this case has an arithmetic structure, and it must be written at its proper grade. Amnesty International's 2021 profile says that Lu had always insisted on fact-checking before publishing; that because of this rigour it was difficult to find evidence to convict him; and that in the end, of the roughly 70,000 messages he had posted, only eight were confirmed as evidence of "false information". This page's grading of that figure is explicit: it comes from Lu Yuyu's own telling to Amnesty International and from that organisation's summary of the case; this site has obtained no indictment, case file or judgment against which to verify it, because this case's indictment and judgment have never been published. The text therefore writes it throughout as "on the account of the case file relayed by Lu and Amnesty International", and not as a document-confirmed fact. But the other side must be written with equal precision: in the absence of any published document to the contrary, that figure interlocks with Lu's courtroom statement, with his verification method, and with the four-year sentence that followed, forming a self-consistent chain of evidence.
The last thing Lu said in court is something he told Amnesty International himself, recorded here as his account and quoted only in substance: when the judge finally asked whether he had anything to say, he answered that he had recorded almost 70,000 incidents over the years, and that at the rate of four years for eight tweets he ought to be sentenced to 35,000 years — at which, he said, the gallery erupted. The detail cannot be independently verified and is archived as his own telling. It earns its place not for its rhetoric but because it states the sentencing structure of this case in the defendant's own arithmetic: some 70,000 records, eight alleged to be false, four years in prison. Even taking the prosecuting side's own confirmed figure at face value, the "false" share is barely more than one in ten thousand. This site's commentary returns to that sum.
Beaten in detention: the night of 29 August 2016, what the lawyer said, and what the centre denied
An attribution must be corrected first, because retellings of this case — and the commissioning summary for this very page — are prone to getting it wrong: the man who reported in 2016 that Lu Yuyu had been beaten in custody was his lawyer Wang Zongyue, not Xiao Yunyang. Xiao Yunyang was his other lawyer; it was Xiao who later called the four-year sentence unreasonable. Both men acted for Lu, but the two episodes must not be fused into one. On 31 August 2016, after meeting Lu, Wang Zongyue posted a message to a group on the Telegram messaging service, later reposted to social media, saying that Lu had told him: on the night of 29 August, patrolling officers had discovered that he had covered his eyes to sleep under the cell's bright lights, and an argument followed; the next morning guards came to his cell, told him to stand, then told him he did not know how to stand and that they would teach him — and assaulted him, twisting his arms, choking him, and causing his head to hit a wall. The detention centre refused his request to see a doctor, and he went on hunger strike in protest (CPJ, 1 September 2016, under a headline that itself assigns the claim to the lawyer). Amnesty International's urgent-action update of 7 September 2016 runs in substantially the same terms, adding that Lu said he had been beaten and was suffering sleep deprivation, and that he had lost weight since the previous update.
The same day, Li Tingyu's lawyer Huang Simin met Li. Huang told CPJ that Li said she had heard Lu screaming on the morning of 30 August, and that other inmates had told her they had seen Lu injured (the same CPJ report). That is the only corroborative chain for the beating allegation: not Lu's word alone, but his partner, held in the same facility, hearing his screams through a wall and relaying other inmates' sight of his injuries through her own lawyer. This page's grading: the allegation comes from the detainee relayed by his lawyer; the corroboration comes from Li relayed by hers; the two chains are independent of each other but both stop at relay — there is no medical record and no published investigation. The centre's side must be recorded with equal fidelity: an unnamed officer of the Dali detention centre denied by telephone to CPJ that its guards had assaulted Lu (the same report). Denial and allegation are carried side by side. The archive does not adjudicate; it nails both statements to the page and notes that no investigation result was ever published. Huang Simin relayed one further detail of Li's that day: police had seized her English diary, warned her not to write anything in English, and said the diary had been sent to the public security bureau for translation and checking (Amnesty International's urgent-action update). That a detained woman's writing a diary in English was itself treated as suspect is recorded here because it gauges how wide the interrogators' definition of "dangerous" ran.
Li Tingyu's outcome: three versions, and this page merges none of them
This is the section of the case that must not be blurred. Li Tingyu was tried in secret on Thursday 20 April 2017 (Radio Free Asia's report of that day is headlined with the secret Thursday hearing; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2017 annual report likewise dates the closed trial to April 2017). She faced the same charge as Lu: picking quarrels and provoking trouble. What became of her after that hearing is recorded in the public sources in three mutually incompatible versions. This page sets them out in full, with source and grade for each.
Version one: released on probation. CPJ's case profile records that, on the account of Lu's lawyer Xiao Yunyang in an interview with NTDTV and of the website Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Li was "released on probation" after the secret trial of 20 April 2017. Lausan's essay uses similar language — she was on probation, and was released in 2017. The weakness of this version is its vagueness: in the Chinese legal context, probation (a suspended sentence) presupposes a pronounced term of imprisonment, and this version supplies no term.
Version two: two years, suspended for three. Amnesty International's profile of February 2021 states plainly that Lu was sentenced to four years and Li received a two-year sentence suspended for three years. Chinese Wikipedia's entry on Lu Yuyu gives the same version: Li sentenced to two years, suspended for three. This is formally the most complete of the three versions, with both a term and a suspension period — but this site has obtained no judgment document to confirm it.
Version three: released on bail, no verdict announced. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2017 annual report, citing Radio Free Asia and the Rights Defense Network of 3 August 2017, records that the Dali City People's Court released Li on bail sometime after holding her closed trial in April 2017. CPJ's sentencing report of 4 August 2017 runs close to it: on Chinese Human Rights Defenders' account, Li was released after her April trial, but no verdict had been announced in her case. Bail pending trial and a suspended sentence are entirely different legal states: the first means the case, technically, was never concluded; the second means a conviction was pronounced and only its execution deferred.
This page's treatment is written here for later editors to follow: the three versions stand side by side and are never merged. Without Li's judgment, a release instrument, or her own public account, any sentence that fuses them into "Li was released on a suspended sentence" would be doing the case organs' bookkeeping for them, turning a muddled record into a tidy one — when the muddle is itself part of the fact. A secret trial and a woman who vanishes from the public record, of whom the outside world cannot say to this day whether she was convicted or never sentenced at all: that uncertainty is the record. The exact date of her release is given by none of the three versions and is a matter of no public record. Of her public life after 2017 there is no public record. What Lu learned after his own release in 2020 is recorded in the release section below; beyond the ending of the relationship, this page does not pursue her life — it is her privacy, and it is what her disappearance bought her.
Lu Yuyu's trial: heard on 23 June 2017, sentenced to four years on 3 August
Lu Yuyu's case was heard on 23 June 2017 at the Dali City People's Court (CPJ's sentencing report dates the start of his trial to 23 June; the court's full name is the Dali City People's Court of the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan). Very little of the hearing is known outside. The one substantive record with a source is the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2017 annual report, relaying the hearing record published by his defence lawyers: Lu rejected the prosecution's accusation that he had fabricated information about mass incidents, emphasising that his aim was to document history and to make the record available for public access. This page grades that as "the Commission's report, relaying the lawyers' published hearing record". Whether the hearing was public, who attended, and how long it lasted are, beyond the above, matters of no public record — Lu's own account of a gallery erupting (see the evidence section) implies that observers were present, but their composition is nowhere recorded.
On 3 August 2017 the Dali City People's Court sentenced Lu Yuyu to four years' imprisonment for picking quarrels and provoking trouble (CPJ, 4 August 2017; The New York Times, 4 August 2017; Radio Free Asia, 3 August 2017; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2017 annual report — all in agreement). His lawyer Xiao Yunyang told Radio Free Asia that the sentence was "unreasonable" and that it had already been appealed (CPJ). CPJ's Asia programme coordinator Steven Butler commented at the time, in substance, that the conviction on so vague a charge starkly illustrated the fear China's leaders have of their own people (CPJ's report; this page gives his words in substance). Lu's own reading of the coming verdict, given after his release, was flat: he had foreseen the result, and he knew that under "their law" appeals were useless. He appealed anyway, he said, so that through his lawyers he could stay in touch with the outside world and protect himself as far as possible through outside solidarity — and, in his judgement, it was precisely because of sustained outside attention that "they did not abuse me too much" (CPJ's interview of 30 July 2020, his account). This page records that sentence in full because it is the defendant's own explanation of his litigation strategy: the appeal was not about changing the verdict. It was about staying alive.
The procedural aftermath, pinned item by item. On 13 September 2017 the appeal was heard and the court upheld the verdict and the sentence (CPJ's case profile, on his lawyers' account). Chinese Wikipedia records that on 25 September the Dali Prefecture Intermediate Court upheld the original judgment at second instance — the 13th and the 25th may be a hearing date and a ruling-delivery date, or one of the two may be wrong; the public record cannot decide, and this page carries both, taking CPJ's lawyer-sourced 13 September as the text's primary date. On 13 October 2017 Lu was transferred from the Dali city detention centre to Dali Prison (Minsheng Guancha, as relayed by CPJ's case profile); Minsheng Guancha further reported that a friend of Lu's, unnamed, applied to visit him in prison and was refused (the same source). In late 2019 Lu was in the process of lodging a further appeal at the Yunnan Provincial High Court (CPJ's case profile, on a person knowledgeable about the case who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal — graded here as an anonymous single source); the outcome of that appeal is a matter of no public record. CPJ's calls to the Dali City Public Security Bureau in late 2019, seeking information about his detention, went unanswered (the same source). Of any published text of a detention instrument, indictment, judgment or appeal ruling in this case there is no public record.
Four years inside: the tiger bench, the shackles and the depression, in his own post-release telling
The whole substance of this section comes from one source: Lu Yuyu's interview with CPJ on 30 July 2020, the first systematic account he gave of his four years, weeks after his release. This page's uniform treatment is that every item is written as "on Lu's account", never promoted into independently verified fact. It is also recorded that CPJ telephoned the Dali City Detention Center for comment on his allegations and no one answered, and that the centre had denied assault in 2016 (see above). An account is not an instrument; but in a case where not even the judgment is public, the defendant's complete telling is the highest-grade material an archive can obtain. Keeping it whole, and keeping its grade visible, is the only thing this site can do.
He said he was beaten by police twice inside, and that the episode his lawyer reported in August 2016 was not the most serious. The most serious came at the end of 2016, after he had been transferred to the Dali City Detention Center. The city public security bureau and the prefecture bureau jointly sent four officers, sometimes five, who took him at eight every morning to a special interrogation room, cuffed him to a tiger bench — a bench device that immobilises and strains the legs, described as a form of torture in a Human Rights Watch report — to "brainwash" him and tell him stories, sometimes showing him videos of other people's confessions. It lasted almost a month, he said, and left him disoriented, anxious and hallucinating (his account). Then, one day, armed police and guards made a joint inspection of the centre; under the rules, when police entered, everyone had to look down at the ground, but he did not lower his head. An armed policeman ordered him to put his head down; he replied that he could not; the man kicked him; Lu picked up a plastic jar of fermented bean curd and hit the officer in the face, drawing blood; two policemen seized his hands, and he began shouting "Down with the CCP" (his account records the words he shouted, and this page records them). More police rushed in, pressed him to the ground, twisted his arms and legs behind him and carried him to the tiger bench outside, where he sat for about three hours. They then put him in conjoined shackles and handcuffs and told him to walk back to the cell himself; when he refused, they carried him back, put him on the bunk and beat him — the assailants, he said, being two auxiliary policemen, one policeman and one instructor. The man who beat him hardest he named: an officer called Yang Wenjie (a name given in his account, not independently verified). Yang weighed about 240 pounds, Lu said, and stepped on his lap; Lu cursed him and told him to go ahead and break his leg. Yang took off his police uniform and said that even if he could no longer be a police officer, he would kill Lu; Lu answered in kind; and other officers then dragged Yang away — Lu guessed because they feared he really would kill him. They put a motorcycle helmet on Lu's head and transferred several prisoners from other cells to guard him day and night (his account).
He then began a hunger strike, refusing water as well. Officers first brought in a prosecutor to persuade him, without effect; they arranged a forensic medical examination and promised that if he ended the strike he could sue the officer who beat him through the procuratorate; he struck on. They then offered an apology from the armed policeman. On the third day he said he did not want the armed policeman's apology — he wanted one from Yang Wenjie, who had beaten him hardest. They thought for a long time, had Yang apologise, and he began eating — but the shackles and handcuffs stayed on until after the Chinese New Year in 2017 (his account). He explained why he had not told his lawyer about that attack at the time: he had already been on hunger strike once before, he did not want people outside to worry too much, and he felt that as long as he was not afraid of death he could settle such problems himself (his account). This page's overall grading of the passage: a single-party account, with no independent corroboration, and a named officer who has never been independently checked. Its value lies in its completeness and density of detail; its risk lies in the same place. Later users of this archive must cite the grade along with the story.
After his transfer to Dali Prison in October 2017, he said, he was not beaten again — but what replaced beating was "soft violence", which he found more terrifying and harder to endure than the detention centre, and which he did not elaborate (his account). Other fragments of prison life are scattered across the sources: the food was very poor, meat rare, and he was often hungry (his account to Amnesty International); he was set to sewing jeans, skirts and other garments for a wage of a few US dollars a month (on Chinese Wikipedia's account — a detail this site has not found in the CPJ or Amnesty International texts, and which is marked here as unverified); and he was diagnosed with depression during his imprisonment (Amnesty International; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, citing sources of November 2019, records that he was suffering from depression and that the prison authorities denied his requests for medical treatment and physical exercise). His own tracing of the illness runs: the depression began around the beatings and hunger strike of late 2016; by 2019 he felt he was losing control, had begun hearing voices, felt that everyone was staring at him and speaking in allusions, and suffered insomnia and anxiety; he had hoped to pay a professional doctor himself, but doctors came only twice, made an assessment, and otherwise left other prisoners to watch him (CPJ's interview, his account). After his release he told Amnesty International that he now took medication, exercised regularly every day, and spent some time learning English and reading books — "that's about all I can do". A man who had recorded some 70,000 acts of resistance came out to a daily schedule of medication, exercise and English lessons. This page adds no comment. It records.
The international response: a press-freedom prize received in a cell, and six years of attention from four institutions
The density of the international record in this case is, for two citizen journalists living on donations, remarkable. It is set out item by item. CPJ spoke first: on 28 June 2016, within days of the couple's detention being confirmed, it issued a statement of alarm demanding their immediate release and calling "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" an absurdly vague charge (CPJ, 28 June 2016). Amnesty International issued Urgent Action UA 147/16 in July 2016, calling for their immediate and unconditional release and warning that both were at risk of torture and other ill-treatment; its update of 7 September 2016 (ASA 17/4778/2016) recorded the beating allegations and the seizure of Li's diary, and demanded an investigation of the abuse allegations and accountability for those responsible. Global Voices reported the case at the "missing" stage, on 23 June 2016. The Independent Chinese PEN Center named Lu and Li honorary members in 2016 (its statement record).
The peak of the international record came on 8 November 2016: at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, Reporters Without Borders and TV5 Monde awarded the 2016 Press Freedom Prize in the citizen-journalist category to Lu Yuyu and Li Tingyu, both then in detention. The journalist prize went to the Syrian reporter Hadi Abdullah and the media prize to China's 64Tianwang. RSF's citation recorded two facts: that the couple had been arrested on 15 June and held incommunicado for more than three weeks before they could speak to lawyers, and that they were charged with disturbing public order for systematically documenting strikes and demonstrations across China (RSF's release of 7 November 2016, as relayed by the Independent Chinese PEN Center). Both laureates were in a detention centre. That is the sharpest single contrast in this case's whole archive: the same work that in Strasbourg was a press-freedom prize was, in Dali, picking quarrels and provoking trouble.
After the sentence, the attention did not lapse. CPJ condemned the four-year term on 4 August 2017. RSF's materials of 2017 and 2018 listed the two among China's imprisoned press-freedom laureates and described China as the world's biggest prison for journalists. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China wrote the case into the United States' official record across several years: its 2017 annual report carries a dedicated entry — Li's closed trial and release on bail, Lu's four-year sentence, and his courtroom statement that he was documenting history; its 2020 freedom-of-expression volume records the four-year term, the June 2020 release, and, citing November 2019 sources, his depression and the refusal of medical treatment and exercise; and its 2021 annual report records the post-release harassment and his forced departure from Guangdong, citing his own article "Goodbye, Guangzhou!" of 10 March 2021. CPJ's long interview of 30 July 2020 is the principal source for this case's prison sections, and on 9 March 2021 CPJ spoke again, over the Guangzhou expulsion, demanding that the authorities stop harassing him and let him live where he wished. The Lausan Collective's 2020 essay, "Archives of Resistance", characterised Not News as a form of archival resistance: official repression aims not only to suppress action but to block information and sustain a false image of stability, while the daily archive itself allows later resisters to stand on their predecessors' experience (Lausan, 2020; graded here as that essay's argument, given in substance). On the Chinese official side: in the sources checked, this site has found no bulletin, statement or report on this case from mainland official media, any court, or the foreign ministry. CPJ's 2016 telephone calls drew one denial and thereafter unanswered ringing. The judgment was never published, the trial never announced, the term confirmed only through lawyers and foreign organisations — the total of this case's official text is, again, approximately zero.
Release in June 2020: a day's variance in the date, and a line that ends
The release date is written on this page, on its best-graded source, as 14 June 2020: the Lausan Collective's essay states plainly that after four years of imprisonment Lu Yuyu walked out of prison on June 14. Carried beside it: Chinese Wikipedia gives completion of sentence and release on 15 June 2020, returning to Zunyi; Radio Free Asia reported his release on completion of his sentence on 16 June 2020 (as cited in the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2020 volume); CPJ's report of March 2021 says only that he was freed "last year", and its July 2020 interview that he was released in June after serving his full sentence. A variance of one or two days may come from the computation of the term and the timing of reports; this page takes Lausan's 14 June as its text date, carries all three versions, and sorts by it. The Wikipedia chain adds that on the eve of his release the authorities warned him not to travel to Beijing, Shanghai or Xinjiang (a single source chain, marked unverified here). What he had served was a full four years, not a day remitted — from a Dali detention centre in June 2016 to Dali Prison in June 2020.
The first thing he is recorded as doing after his release was to look for Li Tingyu. On Amnesty International's relay of his account: the first tweet he posted after his release was a plea for information about her whereabouts; several weeks later he reached her mother and was told she had "moved on"; Li herself later confirmed it in a tearful telephone conversation with him; Lu then deleted every tweet relating to "Jane", saying he was happy simply to know that she was well. Chinese Wikipedia's version concurs in substance, recording that he contacted Li and learned she had married. This page's writing stops there: their last meeting was the moment in June 2016 when she was led away by policewomen, shouting his name; four years later, over a telephone line, they confirmed that both were alive, and the relationship formally ended. Of any later news of Li there is no public record, and this site does not go looking into her life.
Release was not the restoration of freedom; on that the sources agree in concrete detail. In an interview he gave The Wall Street Journal in November 2020, relayed by CPJ on 9 March 2021, he said that since his release police had tracked him wherever he went, repeatedly forced him to relocate, and warned him to stop circumventing the country's internet firewall. The Wall Street Journal's follow-up reporting in January 2021 recorded that at least fifty people had by then been jailed for their posts on Twitter — Lu Yuyu being one named person inside that statistic. Chinese Wikipedia supplies two dates from August 2020, recorded here on that source chain and graded as a single unverified chain: on the morning of 4 August, police came to the single-occupancy flat where he was living and took him, together with his mobile phone and computer, to a police station; on 6 August police again warned him not to circumvent the firewall and not to give interviews; and later, when he travelled to Guangzhou, police discovered him there and took him to the railway station and made him leave the city. In direction those details match CPJ's "tracked and repeatedly forced to relocate", but the precise dates have not been found in a second source, so they are archived at their grade and not promoted. On 31 July 2020 Radio Free Asia and the Epoch Times carried his first post-release assessment, under a headline whose sense was that rights defence in China had become harder than it had been four years earlier — the recorder's own testimony that the conditions under which Not News might be rebuilt had, during his four years inside, only worsened.
"Goodbye, Guangzhou!": 9 March 2021, and the eight men who came through his door
The post-release harassment reached a public peak on 9 March 2021, and this time the record chain is unusually complete. On Lu's account to CPJ that day, given over a messaging app: Guangzhou national-security officers broke into his apartment and forced him to leave the city; approximately eight officers, in plain clothes and in uniform, forced their way in and refused to show any identification; they demanded that he deactivate his Twitter account, and said that if he did not shut up on Twitter they would have to keep harassing him; when he told them he had deleted most of his sensitive tweets, one officer answered in substance: it is because you have clout — cancel your Twitter account, and no one will harass you again (CPJ, 9 March 2021; given here in substance, with quotation kept short). CPJ's Asia programme coordinator Steven Butler commented that day, in substance, that Lu had committed no crime and that his continued abuse by the authorities only exposed their own lawless and arbitrary behaviour.
Lu himself left a text of the episode: on 10 March 2021 he published "Goodbye, Guangzhou!" on the Matters platform; China Digital Times published an English translation on 11 March; and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2021 annual report formally cites the piece as evidence that the authorities harassed him after his June 2020 release and forced him to leave Guangdong. A man driven out of a city writes the expulsion up as an article, and the article is archived by citation in a foreign legislature's annual report — which is precisely the continuation of the work he began in 2012: record what happened, and store the record where it cannot be confiscated. This page sets the full chain down because it is the best-evidenced link in the case's post-release chapters: his own account, CPJ's same-day report, his signed article, and citation in an official American annual report — four layers, all present.
After March 2021 the public record thins quickly. Amnesty International's long profile of February 2021, published just before the Guangzhou episode, remains the last detailed portrait of his post-release life: living at home in Guizhou, taking medication, exercising, learning English and reading, with his freedom of movement restricted by the authorities (on his account). Thereafter — in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 — this site's dedicated searches of CPJ, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Radio Free Asia and Chinese- and English-language news sources have found no public record of Lu Yuyu's whereabouts, health, interviews or any fresh detention: no public record. The cause of that silence cannot be determined — life may have quietened, or reporting may simply have moved on — and this page does not choose for the reader.
The most recent public trace falls in 2026. In September 2026, Guangzhou police detained the labour recorder Feng Rui (known as Xiao Wu) on suspicion of picking quarrels and provoking trouble; Hong Kong's Ming Pao confirmed on 4 October that he had been detained and had met a lawyer. On 28 October 2026, Lingua Sinica, a publication associated with the China Media Project, published a long article on the narrowing space for labour documentation, quoting Lu Yuyu's comments to the China Media Project (CMP): in substance, that the authorities attach such weight to a recorder with so small a platform as Feng's precisely because they fear his ability to piece fragmented, isolated labour incidents together; that the present crackdown aims to cut off information channels before workers' anger can form a broader social consensus; and that the disappearance of documentation space leaves information extremely fragmented, with workers fighting for their rights more easily stranded on isolated islands (the article's relay of his words, given here in substance). This page grades that 2026 record as follows: relayed comment in a reputable research publication, of medium-to-good credibility, but stating neither where Lu was nor how he was interviewed. That is: as of October 2026, Lu Yuyu was still speaking publicly, and still on the subject of a decade earlier — why recording matters, and why the piecing-together is what the authorities fear. His exact whereabouts and circumstances since March 2021 are a matter of no public record. Several anonymous Medium articles of 2025–2026 attack Lu in violent language, claiming that he abandoned his family and fled abroad: they carry no author's real name, no evidence and no second source, and they sit ill with the October 2026 record of his commenting to CMP. This site marks them unverified, does not credit them, and notes here only that it found and excluded them.
Timeline
14 June 1977: Lu Yuyu is born in the Zunyi area of Guizhou (the Independent Chinese PEN Center's person page and Chinese Wikipedia — a single source chain).
2011–2012: Lu begins using Weibo and gathering reports of unreported protests; on his own account to CPJ, in those two years he was imprisoned, expelled and beaten by state-security agents for his online comments and for holding signs calling for general elections, and later worked at a plastics factory in Fuzhou.
April 2012: Lu joins a protest demanding disclosure of officials' assets and is detained for ten days (CPJ).
October 2012: Lu begins systematically documenting mass incidents across China (CPJ).
Early to mid-2013: Li Tingyu (a Sun Yat-sen University student from Foshan) joins the work, names it "Non-News", and takes charge of saving its material on networks outside China; on Lu's account, Not News strictly begins in July 2013.
2014: Harassed repeatedly by state security, the couple move to Dali, Yunnan, living mainly on readers' donations (Amnesty International); Li drops out of university around this period (CPJ dates her dropping out to 2014). Chinese Wikipedia further records an earlier stop in Zhuhai, where police warned them at home and their landlord refused to renew their lease (single source).
2015: Not News records 28,950 mass incidents for the year, an average of 79 a day (its annual summary); by this year Lu's new Weibo accounts are being deleted on sight (Amnesty International).
April 2016: Not News records 2,001 demonstrations in the month, with at least 2,782 arrests (its monthly tally, relayed by Lausan); its first-quarter total is 9,869 incidents (Global Voices).
15/16 June 2016 (both dates carried): the couple are seized in Dali while collecting a delivery, black-hooded, and criminally detained on suspicion of picking quarrels and provoking trouble; the Not News Twitter account's last update is 15 June. Global Voices reports them "missing" on 23 June; on 25 June their friend Xu Hui confirms at the detention centre that they are held there, and is told the next day that they have been transferred; CPJ issues its release demand on 28 June.
6 July 2016: lawyers meet both at the Dali prefectural detention centre for the first time; both maintain that the compiled information was factual and that they are innocent (Amnesty International's urgent action, on the lawyers' accounts). Amnesty International issues Urgent Action UA 147/16 in July.
29–30 August 2016: Lu is alleged to have been beaten in detention — arms twisted, choked, his head striking a wall — refused a doctor, and begins a hunger strike (his lawyer Wang Zongyue, after a 31 August meeting; Li Tingyu says she heard his screams; a detention-centre officer denies the assault by telephone). Amnesty International issues its update on 7 September.
8 November 2016: the RSF–TV5 Monde Press Freedom Prize is awarded in Strasbourg; Lu Yuyu and Li Tingyu receive the citizen-journalist prize in custody, in absentia.
Late 2016: on Lu's post-release account, after transfer to the Dali City Detention Center he undergoes almost a month of tiger-bench "brainwashing" interrogations, then is beaten by several officers after a confrontation (naming officer Yang Wenjie — unverified), hunger-strikes for three days to force an apology, and wears shackles until after the 2017 New Year; he dates his depression from this period.
20 April 2017: Li Tingyu is tried in secret; her outcome stands in three versions — released on probation (CPJ's case profile) / two years suspended for three (Amnesty International) / released on bail with no verdict announced (the Congressional-Executive Commission on China; Radio Free Asia).
23 June 2017: Lu Yuyu's case is heard at the Dali City People's Court; he rejects the fabrication charge and says his purpose was to document history (the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, relaying the lawyers' published hearing record).
3 August 2017: the Dali City People's Court sentences Lu Yuyu to four years for picking quarrels and provoking trouble; lawyer Xiao Yunyang calls the sentence unreasonable and says it has been appealed.
13 September 2017: the appeal is heard and the verdict upheld (CPJ, on his lawyers' account); Chinese Wikipedia gives 25 September for the second-instance ruling by the Dali Prefecture Intermediate Court — both dates carried.
13 October 2017: Lu is transferred from the Dali city detention centre to Dali Prison (Minsheng Guancha, relayed by CPJ).
Around November 2019: sources report that Lu is suffering from depression and that the prison has denied his requests for medical treatment and exercise (cited in the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's volume); in late 2019 he is pursuing a further appeal at the Yunnan Provincial High Court (a knowledgeable source to CPJ; its outcome is a matter of no public record).
14 June 2020: Lu is released on completion of his sentence (Lausan's date; Chinese Wikipedia gives 15 June and Radio Free Asia reported on 16 June — a variance of one to two days, carried). After release he posts on Twitter seeking Li Tingyu, and learns through her mother, then from Li herself by telephone, that she has moved on (Amnesty International).
30 July 2020: CPJ publishes Lu's post-release interview, a systematic account of beatings, the tiger bench, hunger strikes and depression in custody. On 31 July Radio Free Asia carries his assessment that rights defence has become harder than four years earlier.
4 and 6 August 2020: Chinese Wikipedia records police taking him, his phone and his computer in, and warning him against circumventing the firewall and giving interviews (a single source chain, unverified).
November 2020: Lu tells The Wall Street Journal that since his release he has been tracked, repeatedly forced to relocate and warned against circumventing the firewall (relayed by CPJ).
February 2021: Amnesty International publishes its long profile, "Love in the time of censorship", containing the catnip version of the arrest, the case-file arithmetic of eight items out of some 70,000, and the end of the couple's relationship.
9 March 2021: about eight Guangzhou state-security officers enter Lu's home, force him to leave Guangzhou and demand that he close his Twitter account (his account to CPJ). On 10 March he publishes "Goodbye, Guangzhou!"; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2021 annual report cites the episode.
2022–2025: this site has found no public record of Lu Yuyu's whereabouts or activities.
28 October 2026: a Lingua Sinica article quotes Lu's comments to the China Media Project on the Feng Rui case — the most recent public utterance by him that this site has found; where he then was is a matter of no public record.
Our Take
This site's commentary on this case is tied to this case's facts only.
First, do the prosecuting side's own arithmetic. On the account of the case file relayed by Lu Yuyu and Amnesty International, of some 70,000 messages, the authorities ultimately confirmed eight as "false information". Take that account entirely at face value, without discount, and argue the prosecution's case for it: the conclusion is still that a man was imprisoned for four years over a falsity rate of barely more than one in ten thousand. The remaining ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent was protest record that he had verified before publishing — land seizures, wage arrears, pollution, corruption, event after event of it true. Which is to say, this case never punished fabrication. The eight items are the rounding error. What was actually sentenced was the 70,000 true items themselves — the act of recording itself. That is why Lu's courtroom remark, that at this rate he deserved 35,000 years, cuts as it does: it simply runs the state's arithmetic to its end. When an offence is priced by the item, the more you record the greater your guilt; and the more accurate your record, the less fabrication there is to charge — until nothing remains but a pocket offence like picking quarrels to put the man in.
Second, consider the name "Non-News" against the state's own silence. China's official count of mass incidents stops in 2007, and the reason for the stop is understood by everyone: the numbers had grown too ugly, so there would be no numbers. For almost a decade after that, the only continuous record of how many protests a vast country produced each day came from two young people living on donations — one searching for eight hours a day, the other mirroring the archive beyond the firewall. By the standards of any normal country, what they built was basic infrastructure of journalism and of archives: China Labour Bulletin built its strike map on it, international media used it as a primary source, scholars built datasets on it. Their payment was three years of state-security tracking, accounts deleted on sight, eviction in Zhuhai and a black hood in Dali. A regime that first strangles the official statistics and then imprisons the private statisticians does not want "no false information". It wants no information — first the numbers disappear, then the people who count.
Third, the three conflicting versions of Li Tingyu's outcome are carried unmerged on this page for a reason that belongs in the commentary. Whether she was sentenced to two years suspended for three, or released on bail with no verdict ever announced, is not word-play: the first means the state handed down a conviction against her; the second means the state held her for some ten months, tried her in secret, and did not trouble to give even a verdict. Both are persecution, but they are not the same persecution. An archive that saves itself trouble by writing "released on probation" is doing the case organs' bookkeeping for them, tidying their muddle into clarity — when the muddle is the truest part of the record. Her file is as confused as it is because the secret trial never needed a conclusion that could withstand inspection. It needed a person to disappear for a while, a relationship to break, and a project to stop. By that measure it achieved everything: the project halts on 15 June 2016, and the relationship ends on the way to collect a delivery.
Fourth, follow the chain of post-release expulsions, because it proves that the four-year sentence was not this case's end but one paragraph of it. Within two months of his release, police were taking the man, his phone and his computer in, and warning him against the firewall and against interviews. When he went to Guangzhou, they put him on a train out. When he settled, eight men came through his door with the terms stated plainly: cancel your Twitter account, and no one will harass you again. That officer's sentence is the most honest official text in this entire case — it concedes that the harassment has nothing to do with anything he has done, and everything to do with whether he still has influence. Four years inside did not silence him, so the punishment continued outside as eviction without term: no judgment, no charge, just city after city in which he may not live. This page nails that chain to the same page as the 2016 sentence so that later readers can see it plainly: in cases of this kind, "release" is an administrative waypoint. The main text of the persecution continues beyond the wall.
Finally, return to the man himself. He was not a lawyer, not a scholar; he had no institution and no funding. He had been expelled from a university, had drifted through factories, warehouses and an internet café, and had already spent ten days detained in 2012 for asking that officials disclose their assets. With eight hours a day of unglamorous labour, that man built the most complete archive of Chinese protest that existed after the state stopped counting, and then paid for it with four years — on a tiger bench in a detention centre, and in a prison's depression and hallucinated voices. He came out to medication, exercise and English lessons, told an interviewer that there is no news in China, and said that persistence itself is what matters most in such a period. In 2026 he was still saying, of another arrested labour recorder, that what they fear is the ability to piece the fragments into a whole picture. This site's Case 110 ends there: the man who did the piecing has paid its price, and the picture he pieced together is still there — in China Labour Bulletin's maps, in scholars' datasets, and on this page. Which is exactly what he stored the archive beyond the firewall for.
Verification Note
This site's classification: this is a persecution case in which the offence of picking quarrels and provoking trouble was used against citizen journalism and the private recording of protest — Lu Yuyu, founder of Not News, was sentenced to four years for systematically documenting, verifying and publishing mass incidents across China, while his partner and collaborator Li Tingyu was tried in secret and her outcome remains in conflict across the sources to this day; the case meets this site's inclusion standard for the persecution archive. The source structure must be stated first: mainland officials have never issued any bulletin on this case, and neither the indictment nor the judgment has been published. The outside record rests mainly on CPJ's sustained case tracking (including Lu's first-person post-release interview), Amnesty International's urgent actions and long profile, Radio Free Asia's successive reports, Reporters Without Borders' award materials, the annual reports of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and Lu's own signed article. The subject's own account is this case's most important first-hand source; this page's uniform treatment of it is to mark every item "his account" and to carry its conflicts with the institutional record side by side, undecided.
Facts verified across multiple sources: Lu Yuyu is from Guizhou and a former factory worker; he began systematically documenting mass incidents in October 2012; Not News published through Twitter, Weibo, a blog, YouTube and Google Drive, covering protests over land, wages, corruption and pollution; Li Tingyu joined in 2013 and named the project (CPJ; Amnesty International; Global Voices). The couple were repeatedly harassed by state security, moved to Dali in 2014, lived on donations, and by 2015 Lu's Weibo accounts were deleted on sight (Amnesty International; CPJ). In mid-June 2016 the two were taken in Dali, black-hooded, and criminally detained on suspicion of picking quarrels (all sources agree; the date divergence is treated below). In late August 2016 Lu was alleged to have been beaten in custody and to have hunger-struck in protest (CPJ, on lawyer Wang Zongyue; Amnesty International's urgent-action update; Li Tingyu's corroboration through her lawyer Huang Simin). On 8 November 2016 the couple received the RSF Press Freedom Prize in the citizen-journalist category (Reporters Without Borders). Lu's case was heard on 23 June 2017; on 3 August 2017 the Dali City People's Court sentenced him to four years for picking quarrels, and lawyer Xiao Yunyang called the sentence unreasonable and appealed (CPJ; The New York Times; Radio Free Asia; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2017 annual report). On 13 October 2017 he was transferred to Dali Prison (Minsheng Guancha, relayed by CPJ's case profile). His depression in prison is recorded by Amnesty International, by the Commission's documents and by his own account. In June 2020 he was released on completion of his sentence (all sources agree; the one-to-two-day variance is treated below). After release he was tracked, repeatedly forced to relocate and warned against circumventing the firewall (his November 2020 Wall Street Journal interview, relayed by CPJ). On 9 March 2021 Guangzhou state security entered his home, forced him out of Guangzhou and demanded he close his Twitter account (CPJ's same-day report; his own "Goodbye, Guangzhou!"; the Commission's 2021 annual report).
Date conflicts and this page's treatment (the case's first key point). The detention date: CPJ's case profile (citing Radio Free Asia), Amnesty International's urgent action, RSF's award citation and Chinese Wikipedia all give 15 June 2016, and the Not News account's last update also fell on 15 June; CPJ's sentencing report of 2017 gives 16 June, and Lu Yuyu himself, in his 2020 account, also gives midday on 16 June. This site sorts to 15 June; the text and timeline carry both dates and decide neither. The object being collected at the arrest: CPJ's version of his account has the couple collecting packages at an express station (having first gone for rice noodles, with the station owner texting to hurry them); Amnesty International's version has them collecting a pot of catnip for their cat; the cores agree (arms twisted, black hood, Li led away by policewomen calling his name) and the details are carried side by side. The release date: Lausan gives 14 June 2020, Chinese Wikipedia 15 June, and Radio Free Asia reported on 16 June; the text takes 14 June as primary and carries all three. The appeal date: CPJ's case profile, on his lawyers, gives the appeal hearing of 13 September 2017 with the verdict upheld; Chinese Wikipedia gives 25 September for the second-instance ruling of the Dali Prefecture Intermediate Court; both are carried. In the English rendering of his CPJ interview Lu is also made to speak of an "August 17 judgment", which matches no other source's 3 August sentencing; this page treats it as an error of recollection or translation, does not adopt it, and leaves the trace here.
Li Tingyu's outcome: the conflict and this page's treatment (the case's second key point). The secret trial's date, 20 April 2017, is the common core of all sources (Radio Free Asia; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China). The outcome stands in three versions: CPJ's case profile, on Xiao Yunyang and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, says she was "released on probation" after the trial, without giving a term; Amnesty International's 2021 profile and Chinese Wikipedia give a two-year sentence suspended for three years; the Commission's 2017 annual report (citing Radio Free Asia and the Rights Defense Network) and CPJ's August 2017 report give release on bail with no verdict announced. The three versions are mutually exclusive in law, and this site holds no judgment or release instrument by which to decide between them; the text carries them in a dedicated section side by side, and every card and summary reference to Li's outcome in this case is marked as in conflict across sources. The exact date of her release is a matter of no public record.
Corrections of attribution and traces of transcription errors. First: the reporter of the 2016 beating was lawyer Wang Zongyue, who posted after his 31 August 2016 meeting in a Telegram group, as CPJ reported on 1 September 2016 — not Xiao Yunyang. Xiao Yunyang's public role was to call the four-year sentence of 2017 unreasonable and to lodge the appeal. The commissioning summary for this page, and some secondary summaries, assign both episodes to Xiao; this page has corrected the record in its text. Second: CPJ's report of 4 August 2017 misspells Li Tingyu as "Li Dingyu" and Xiao Yunyang as "Xiao Yungyang"; the traces are left here and the correct forms used throughout. Third: CPJ's "more than 30,000" and Amnesty International's "nearly 30,000" for 2015 coexist with Not News' self-reported 28,950; this page takes the self-reported original as primary and carries the roundings beside it. Fourth: the Independent Chinese PEN Center person page's English rendering of Lu's birthplace is garbled; this page takes only the agreed core, Zunyi, Guizhou, and records the birth date of 14 June 1977 on the single source chain of that page and Chinese Wikipedia.
Single-source or self-account items, graded in the text: Lu's early-life account (expulsion, drifting work, the detentions and beatings of 2011–2012) and the whole of his prison detail — the arrest scene, the beatings, the tiger-bench interrogations, the hunger strike, the voices (his accounts to CPJ and Amnesty International; the naming of officer Yang Wenjie within them is unverified, the detention centre denied assault in 2016, and CPJ's 2020 call to the Dali City Detention Center went unanswered); the "eight out of some 70,000" figure and the courtroom "35,000 years" remark (his account and Amnesty International's case-file version, with no indictment or judgment to check them against); the sewing of garments at a few dollars a month, the eve-of-release warning against travelling to Beijing, Shanghai or Xinjiang, and the two August 2020 dates (the Chinese Wikipedia source chain, not found in a second source); the Zhuhai stop (Chinese Wikipedia); and the late-2019 further appeal at the Yunnan High Court (an anonymous knowledgeable source to CPJ). Material this site excluded: several anonymous Medium attack articles of 2025–2026 — no real-name author, no evidence, no second source, and incompatible with the October 2026 record of a reputable publication relaying his comments — not credited, and noted only as found and excluded, in the text and here. Chinese Wikipedia's claim of a six-year juvenile sentence for a stabbing has no second source, is marked unverified, and is not adopted as fact.
Matters of no public record, each marked in the text where it arises: the full texts of the indictment and the judgment; the exact date of the formal arrest; the duration of Lu's hearing, the composition of any gallery, and a complete hearing record; Li Tingyu's judgment or bail instrument, the exact date of her release, and everything about her public life after 2017; any record of Lu's treatment in Dali Prison beyond the depression and his own account; the outcome of his further appeal; and Lu's settled residence and daily circumstances after March 2021 (dedicated Chinese- and English-language searches for 2022–2025 found nothing new; in October 2026 only his comments were relayed, with his whereabouts a matter of no public record).
The three-musts check: times and places confirmed — the start of the documentation work, the move to Dali, the criminal detention, the lawyers' first meeting, the beating allegations, the award, the two trials, the sentencing, the appeal, the prison transfer, the release and the Guangzhou expulsion all rest on the anchor sources above, at Dali, Guangzhou and Strasbourg, with every conflict carried side by side. Cross-verification completed — the CPJ case chain, the Amnesty International document chain, the Radio Free Asia reporting chain, the United States official-report chain, the subject's own-account chain and the Chinese secondary chain are labelled in six separate layers, and conflicts within each layer are itemised. Image and document evidence: the Not News account's silence after 15 June 2016 is a publicly visible archival anchor; the RSF award citation, Amnesty International's urgent actions and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's annual reports are public institutional documents; and "Goodbye, Guangzhou!" is the subject's own signed text. This site records their existence and provenance only.
Sources
- Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), case profile of Lu Yuyu: Dali police detained the couple on 15 June 2016 on suspicion of picking quarrels (citing Radio Free Asia); documentation of protests from October 2012; the ten-day detention of April 2012 for joining a protest demanding disclosure of officials' assets; Li Tingyu's Foshan origin and Sun Yat-sen University withdrawal (citing Radio Free Asia and Wen Yunchao); her joining the work in 2013 (citing The Initium); lawyer Wang Zongyue's report of the August 2016 beating; Li's "release on probation" after the secret trial of 20 April 2017 (on Xiao Yunyang and Chinese Human Rights Defenders); the four-year sentence of August 2017, the appeal of 13 September 2017, and the transfer to Dali Prison on 13 October 2017 (citing Minsheng Guancha); the late-2019 further appeal at the Yunnan High Court (an anonymous knowledgeable source); and CPJ's unanswered calls to the Dali City Public Security Bureau in late 2019. The backbone source for this case's procedural line.
- CPJ's successive reports: the detention statement of 28 June 2016 (Xu Hui's confirmation at the detention centre on 25 June, his being told of a transfer the next day, and the centre officer's claim of no information); the beating report of 1 September 2016 (Wang Zongyue's Telegram message of 31 August — arms twisted, choking, head against a wall, a doctor refused, a hunger strike; Huang Simin's relay of Li's hearing his screams; the centre officer's telephone denial); the sentencing report of 4 August 2017 (four years from the Dali City People's Court on 3 August, Xiao Yunyang's "unreasonable", Li released after trial with no verdict announced; for that report's "Li Dingyu" and "Xiao Yungyang" misspellings see the Verification Note; its detention date is 16 June); the post-release interview of 30 July 2020 (Lu's first-person account of the arrest, the tiger bench, Yang Wenjie, the hunger strike, the depression and the voices — the core first-hand source for this case's prison chapters); and the Guangzhou expulsion report of 9 March 2021 (some eight state-security officers entering his home, the demand to close his Twitter account, and the relay of his November 2020 Wall Street Journal interview).
- Amnesty International: Urgent Action UA 147/16 (July 2016 — criminal detention from 15 June, Li forced into an unmarked car and black-hooded, the lawyers' first meeting on 6 July, both maintaining their innocence) and its update of 7 September 2016, ASA 17/4778/2016 (the beating and sleep-deprivation allegations; the seizure of Li's English diary); and the long profile of February 2021, "Love in the time of censorship" (archived through ecoi.net — the catnip version of the arrest, the naming of the project, the 2014 move to Dali, the on-sight deletion of accounts by 2015, the "eight out of some 70,000" case-file arithmetic, the version of Li's outcome as two years suspended for three, the courtroom "35,000 years" remark, the depression diagnosis in prison, and the fruitless post-release search for Li — mostly Lu's own account, graded item by item in the text).
- Radio Free Asia (RFA), successive reports (as relayed by CPJ, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the Independent Chinese PEN Center): the June 2016 detention and Li's background; Li Tingyu's secret hearing of 20 April 2017; Lu's four-year sentence and Li's release on bail on 3 August 2017 (the Rights Defense Network carried the same version the same day); Lu's release on completion of his sentence on 16 June 2020; and the post-release interview of 31 July 2020 on rights defence having grown harder than four years earlier (the Epoch Times carried the same theme the same day).
- Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC): the freedom-of-expression section of the 2017 annual report (the Dali City People's Court's four-year sentence of August 2017; Li's release on bail after her closed April trial; Lu's rejection at trial of the fabrication charge and his statement that he was documenting history — on the lawyers' published hearing record); the 2020 freedom-of-expression volume (the four-year term and June 2020 release; November 2019 sources on his depression and the denial of medical treatment and exercise); and the 2021 annual report (the post-release harassment and forced departure from Guangdong, citing his "Goodbye, Guangzhou!" of 10 March 2021 and China Digital Times' translation of 11 March 2021).
- Reporters Without Borders (RSF), release of 7 November 2016 (relayed by the Independent Chinese PEN Center): the 2016 RSF–TV5 Monde Press Freedom Prize, awarded in Strasbourg on 8 November, goes in the citizen-journalist category to Lu Yuyu and Li Tingyu; the couple were arrested on 15 June and held incommunicado for over three weeks before seeing lawyers; the fellow laureates were Hadi Abdullah and 64Tianwang. And RSF's materials of 2017 (the two as imprisoned press-freedom laureates).
- Lausan Collective, the 2020 essay "Archives of Resistance: Documenting China's Grassroots Uprisings" (originally in Squatting): Lu's release on 14 June 2020; Not News' self-reported 28,950 incidents for 2015, 79 a day, up 34 percent; the April 2016 monthly count of 2,001 demonstrations, 236 crackdowns and at least 2,782 arrests; China Labour Bulletin's use of Not News as a primary source for its strike map; the "probation" version of Li's outcome; and the archived note that the Not News Twitter account's last update was 15 June 2016.
- Global Voices Advox, 23 June 2016: the couple missing since 15 June; 28,950 incidents recorded in 2015 and 9,869 in the first quarter of 2016; the working method of some eight hours a day cross-checking across search engines; and the 2014 Paopao.net interview's statement about amplifying protesters' voices.
- Independent Chinese PEN Center: the person page for Lu Yuyu (born 14 June 1977, in the Zunyi area of Guizhou — a single source chain for the birth details) and the 2016 honorary-membership statement; and Lo Shih-hung's article in Taiwan's Independent Opinion (Not News' 2015 tally of 28,950 and the background of the official statistics' suspension after 2007).
- Lingua Sinica / China Media Project, the long article of 28 October 2026, "Keeping China's Labor Misery Off the Record": Feng Rui's detention in Guangzhou in September 2026 on suspicion of picking quarrels (confirmed by Ming Pao on 4 October), quoting Lu Yuyu's comments on recording, piecing-together and information channels — the most recent public utterance by him that this site has found. And the Chinese Wikipedia entry on Lu Yuyu (the birth details, the Zhuhai stop, the sewing and monthly wage, the eve-of-release warning, the two August 2020 dates, and the 25 September version of the appeal date — secondary details, each graded in the text as a single source chain or unverified).