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第86案 | 杨天水Case 86 | Yang Tianshui

杨天水，本名杨同彦，北师大历史系毕业，做过教师和公务员，1989年辞职，1990年以反革命罪名坐牢十年；出狱后继续写作，2005年12月23日在南京被便衣警察带走，35天后家人才收到一张逮捕通知；2006年5月16日，镇江中院用3小时闭门审判判了他12年。2017年8月他确诊脑瘤，保外就医在第三次申请时获准，出国治疗被拒，83天后病逝——距刘晓波之死不到四个月，同样的剧本演了第二遍。Yang Tianshui — real name Yang Tongyan — graduated in history from Beijing Normal University, worked as a teacher and a civil servant, resigned in 1989, and spent ten years in prison from 1990 on counter-revolution charges. Released, he kept writing. On 23 December 2005 plainclothes police seized him in Nanjing; his family received a single arrest notice 35 days later. On 16 May 2006 the Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to twelve years in a closed trial of three hours. In August 2017 he was diagnosed with a brain tumour; medical parole came only on his family's third application, treatment abroad was refused, and he died 83 days later — the same script as Liu Xiaobo's, run a second time within four months.

Time

Born 12 April 1961; joined the Nanjing pro-democracy movement in the summer of 1989 and resigned his government post that October; arrested 1 June 1990 and served 10 years (1990–2000) on "counter-revolution" charges; administratively detained 15 days in May 2004 for online essays marking the 15th anniversary of June Fourth; held incommunicado for about a month from 24 December 2004 to late January 2005; seized by plainclothes police in Nanjing on 23 December 2005 (an alternative date of 27 December circulates in secondary retellings but could not be verified in any primary human-rights record — see Verification Note); formally arrested 20 January 2006; tried behind closed doors and sentenced by the Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court, Jiangsu, on 16 May 2006 (the CECC, citing the judgment, gives 17 May — both dates are recorded); diagnosed with a brain tumour on 12 August 2017, granted medical parole on 16 August, operated on in Shanghai on 23 August; died in Shanghai on 7 November 2017, aged 56

Place

Siyang County, Jiangsu (birthplace; briefly returned home on medical parole in 2017); Beijing (Beijing Normal University); Nanjing (long-term home and writing base; seized there twice; served his sentence in Nanjing Prison); Dantu District Detention Centre, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu (held incommunicado from December 2005); Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court, Jiangsu (2006 trial, sitting at the Dantu District court — note: Zhenjiang is in Jiangsu, NOT Zhejiang; the "Zhejiang" version circulating online is an error, flagged in the Verification Note); Shanghai (transferred to a specialist hospital — identified in a PEN International photo caption as Huashan Hospital — for surgery; died there)

People

Yang Tianshui (real name Yang Tongyan, 1961–2017), writer and member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center; a friend seized with him and released hours later (no complete public record of the name); defence lawyer Li Jianqiang (refused renewal of his law licence by Shandong authorities in 2008); earlier defence lawyer Guo Guoting (source for the 2004 detention); his elder sister Yang Guixiang, who campaigned for him across his 22 years of imprisonment; jailed dissident Wang Wenjiang, whose family the judgment said Yang had passed overseas money to; Chongqing activist Xu Wanping, a friend, who received a patchy phone call from Yang Guixiang after Yang's death

Charges and sentence

First case (1990): "counter-revolution" offences, 10 years, served 1990–2000 (the full charge name and trial court are not in the public record — see Verification Note). Second case (2006): "subversion of state power" (Criminal Law Article 105(1)), 12 years' imprisonment plus 4 years' deprivation of political rights, imposed by the Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court on 16 May 2006 after a closed trial of about three hours at which Yang pleaded not guilty and denounced the proceedings as illegal

Characterisation

A landmark case of a writer persecuted for his words; Amnesty International recognised him as a prisoner of conscience; his two sentences totalled some 22 years in prison, nearly half of his 56 years of life; the second prominent political prisoner to die on medical parole within four months of Liu Xiaobo in 2017, cited by Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch as evidence of a systemic pattern of medical parole granted too late

Current status

Died on 7 November 2017, aged 56. According to reports summarised by Wikipedia, the authorities pressed his relatives to cremate his body and bury his ashes at sea while keeping it secret; a friend learned of it and leaked it to a human rights group. His family has been largely unreachable since his death, and the full circumstances of the funeral and the disposal of his ashes remain without a complete public record

A History Graduate: Yang Tongyan and His Pen Name "Tianshui"

Yang Tianshui's real name was Yang Tongyan. "Tianshui" was the name he wrote under, and it is the name under which the world's human rights organisations, PEN centres and prison censuses came to record him. He was born on 12 April 1961 in Siyang County, Jiangsu Province — an unremarkable farming county in the north of the province. That origin is worth recording first, because the trajectory that followed — study, teaching, the civil service, resignation, prison, writing, prison again, and death on a medical-parole hospital bed — was not a road paved by any privileged background. It was the road of a reader from a peasant county in northern Jiangsu who walked it step by step himself. Only with that in mind can one begin to understand the choices he made after 1989, choices that look irrational to most people: what does a man with no connections, no money and no protection gain by trading a lifetime for essays that could never be published at home? This page can only set out the facts; the answer is left to the reader.

In October 1978, the 17-year-old Yang Tongyan entered the history department of Beijing Normal University, graduating in June 1982 with a B.A. in history. Younger readers may not grasp what the first cohorts of university students after the restoration of the entrance examinations meant in China: a whole country in ruins, and a generation for whom study was the only channel of advancement. For a young man from a county town in northern Jiangsu, admission to a Beijing university meant he had already escaped the life track of almost all his contemporaries. According to a biographical chronology preserved in a memorial essay (the Yang Tianshui chronology appended to Xu Wanping's memorial article; flagged throughout this page as a single-source memorial record), he then taught for three years at a school run for the children of employees of the China Petroleum Ministry's Second Construction and Installation Company; in 1985 he transferred to the Jiangsu Provincial Local Gazetteer Office, a local-history institute under the Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences; in 1986 he went down to Wanying Township in Dafeng County, Yancheng, as an assistant to the township head, for two years; and in 1988 he returned to the gazetteer office. By the standards of an educated Chinese youth of the 1980s, this was the classic high-flyer's path: teacher, civil servant, grassroots seasoning, back to a provincial office. Had nothing intervened, the second half of his life would have been offices, professional titles and a pension, ending in the same quiet old age as most of his generation.

What intervened was 1989. In the summer of 1989 Yang Tongyan joined the pro-democracy movement in Nanjing — the memorial chronology's phrase is that he "took part in the democratic movement in the Nanjing area." That autumn, after the movement ended in gunfire, the reckoning began across the country. On 20 October 1989 Yang Tongyan resigned his post. A man of 28 in a provincial government office, resigning voluntarily in the season of purges, is not explained by impulse. With hindsight, the resignation is the watershed of his life: before it, he was a promising young cadre inside the system; after it, a man who had chosen to stand outside it. The refusal to bend that he later showed in prison, in print and in the dock was rooted in 1989. Amnesty International's 2017 statement records that he "previously served a 10-year prison sentence for criticizing the crackdown on China's 1989 pro-democracy movement"; PEN America records that he was imprisoned for his involvement in the 1989 pro-democracy protests. The year 1989 is the first key to Yang Tianshui, and this page places it first deliberately.

His writing life and his political life were a single line. PEN America's case file records that his work appeared on websites blocked in China, including Boxun.com and EpochTimes.com, in the genres of poetry, essays, fiction, short stories and memos — and that many of these works were written in prison. Note that detail: a significant part of his best-known writing was produced behind bars. Prison did not stop his pen; prison became his study. This is the other face of what the Zhenjiang court's judgment later itemised as the crime of "posting articles on the Internet": the court saw offences; readers see a writer who kept writing in the place least suited to writing on earth. The distance between those two views is the substance of this case.

The First Prison: Ten Years, 1990–2000

In the first half of 1990, less than a year after resigning, Yang Tongyan joined like-minded people in founding the "Chinese Democratic Alliance" (中华民主联盟）, according to the memorial chronology. On 1 June 1990 he was arrested. For the next ten years he was not free again: from June 1990 to May 2000 he was held first for 15 months in the Nanjing Public Security Bureau detention centre, then transferred to Nanjing's Longtan Prison to serve his sentence. The memorial chronology adds two details: that he staged several hunger strikes in prison, and that his diabetes dates from those ten years. This page relays those details with their source named, and states plainly here what the Verification Note sets out in full: the public record of the first imprisonment, in the case files of the international organisations, is mostly a single line — "served 10 years from 1990 to 2000 on counter-revolution charges." The trial court, the judgment, and the full name of the charge have never entered the complete public record. This page does not invent judgment details; a gap is written as a gap.

What multiple sources do confirm is the category of the charge and the length of the sentence. PEN America: he "spent a decade in prison from 1990 to 2000 on 'counter-revolution' charges for his involvement in the 1989 pro-democracy protests." Amnesty International: he "previously served a 10-year prison sentence for criticizing the crackdown on China's 1989 pro-democracy movement." The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC): he served ten years from 1990 to 2000 for "counter revolution" and was convicted in 1991. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ): he "spent 10 years in prison on 'counterrevolution' charges for condemning the government's brutal military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989." Four institutions, one consistent account. In the China of the early 1990s, "counter-revolution" was still a formal offence in the criminal code (the 1997 revision replaced it with the "endangering state security" family of crimes), and a large cohort of those arrested after 1989 were sentenced under it. Yang Tongyan was one of them. The difference is what he did afterwards: most, on release, chose silence, emigration or another trade. When he walked out of Longtan Prison in May 2000, he still had four years of deprivation of political rights hanging over him — the CECC records that he remained under a further four-year deprivation order after release and was detained twice during it for violating its conditions. That detail explains the terrain of his next years: nominally free, with a blade suspended overhead, such that any article or any gathering could be counted a violation and put him back inside.

What ten years of prison did to his body is on the record: diabetes, acquired inside, which never left him; and in his second imprisonment, tuberculosis, nephritis, arthritis and hypertension were added. What it did to his will is equally on the record: after release he did not stop writing, did not leave the country, did not fall silent. He went back to Nanjing, resumed contacting democracy activists across the country, campaigned for jailed political prisoners and their families, and kept publishing critical essays on overseas websites. Xu Wanping recalls that when they first spoke by phone in October 2003, Yang read an article Xu had written about his own straitened life and at once sent him 1,000 yuan, saying the piece had moved him to tears. That episode comes from Xu's memorial essay — a single-source recollection by a friend, relayed here as such — but it forms an exact counterpoint to one clause of the later indictment, "accepting overseas funds and transferring them to jailed dissidents": the same act, in a friend's eyes mutual aid in hard times, in a prosecutor's eyes a link in a chain of subversion. This page will return to that counterpoint.

In the five-plus years between his release in 2000 and his seizure in 2005, Yang Tianshui was a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), founded in 2001 by Chinese writers inside and outside the country, with nearly 200 members; it became one of the most active Chinese writers' organisations on free-expression questions, and consequently a standing target of official pressure. Both PEN America and PEN International list ICPC membership among his primary identities. His writing in this period criticised the Communist Party and advocated the release of jailed Internet writers, in the words of CPJ's annual prison census. The memorial chronology records that on 9 May 2005 Nanjing police searched his home — one more signal before the second great seizure. The signals had in fact begun earlier: in 2004 he had already been detained twice.

2004: Two Rehearsals — Fifteen Days' Detention and a Christmas Eve Disappearance

In late May 2004 Yang Tianshui was administratively detained for 15 days. The memorial chronology gives the dates as 28 May to 12 June 2004 and the reason as having "published articles on the Internet damaging the honour of the state and detrimental to social stability"; the CECC gives 27 May to 11 June and specifies that the articles commemorated the 15th anniversary of June Fourth. The two date ranges differ by a day and are recorded side by side (see Verification Note); the shared core is unambiguous: on the eve of the 15th anniversary, he was locked up for a fortnight for essays of commemoration. A writer detained for writing down something that happened 15 years earlier is, in itself, the most precise available footnote on the place of the word "commemoration" in that country.

The second detention began on 24 December 2004, Christmas Eve. PEN America's classification of this episode is that he was "held incommunicado," from 24 December 2004 to 25 January 2005. The particulars diverge. The CECC, relaying a Boxun report, says he was detained in Hangzhou on 24 December, and that on 31 December the Nanjing Public Security Bureau issued a warrant stating he had been arrested on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power." His former defence lawyer, Guo Guoting, told CPJ something different in location but identical in outline: in late December 2004 police seized Yang from his home and held him for about a month on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state authority," and in January 2005 he was released on bail — Guo pointedly noting that bail is very unusual in Chinese political cases. The memorial chronology describes a month of criminal detention on the same suspicion, dated 24 December to 24 January. The three sources agree completely on "taken on 24 December, held about a month, released in late January"; they differ on the place of seizure (Hangzhou versus his home in Nanjing) and on the legal form of his release (bail versus expiry of criminal detention). This page records both versions side by side and adjudicates for neither (see Verification Note).

That detention drew a public protest from the Independent Chinese PEN Center. The CECC records that on 4 January 2005 the ICPC issued a public appeal calling on the authorities to halt the crackdown on writers and release Yang Tianshui and Li Boguang, who had been detained the same month in Fu'an, Fujian. Other public intellectuals were detained in the same period, during an official campaign against "public intellectuals." The logic of that campaign returned, in December 2005, as a personal catastrophe: on Christmas Eve they had let him go; a year later, they did not.

23 December 2005: Plainclothes Police in Nanjing, and Silence in Dantu, Zhenjiang

Nanjing, about 3:30 p.m. on 23 December 2005. CPJ's reporting is precise: plainclothes police officers detained Yang Tianshui together with a friend. The friend was released after a few hours in the custody of the Nanjing public security bureau; Yang was not. He was transferred to custody in Zhenjiang, suspected first of endangering national security, then of subversion of state power. He was denied access to a lawyer, on the stated ground that the case involved "state secrets." His family was told nothing officially: where he was, whether he had been formally arrested, how he was — none of it was knowable. CPJ reported on 17 January 2006 that, according to its sources, the case had not been widely publicised earlier because advocates had hoped a low profile might secure his release. The low profile secured nothing. On 30 January CPJ publicly deplored the case: on 20 January Yang had been formally arrested on suspicion of subversion of state power, and relatives had received the formal notice from the Zhenjiang Public Security Bureau only the previous week — the notice was dated 20 January, and the family held it on 27 January. PEN America's file classifies the period as follows: detained without a warrant in Nanjing, held incommunicado at Dantu District Detention Centre in Zhenjiang, with his family not notified of his arrest or whereabouts until 27 January 2006. A writer vanished from a Nanjing street two days before Christmas; 35 days later his family received a single sheet of paper telling them he was alive and held in a detention centre in the neighbouring city. Those 35 days are the first page of this case's procedure.

On the exact date of the seizure, this page must add a caution. In preparing this case, the coordinator flagged that two dates — 23 December and 27 December — appear in different retellings. Our check of the record produced the following: 23 December is supported by two contemporaneous CPJ reports (17 and 30 January 2006) and by the entry repeated in CPJ's annual prison censuses (2012 and 2016), which record even the hour of the seizure, about 3:30 p.m.; PEN America and PEN International give only "December 2005," without a day; and we found no record in PEN, Amnesty, CPJ, the CECC, HRIC, CHRD or RSF that gives 27 December. The main text of this page therefore uses CPJ's 23 December, and the unverifiability of the "27 December" variant is itself recorded, here and in the Verification Note, rather than silently smoothed over. The rule of archival work is that discrepancies belong in the open, and so does the quality of the evidence on each side.

Of the days inside Dantu District Detention Centre, nothing is publicly recorded: how many interrogations, what was asked, whether he was mistreated, what the food and medical care were — all without public record. This page does not fill that blank. It records the structural facts: under the rubric of "state secrets," he was stripped of access to a lawyer and to his family for months before any trial; and according to the eventual judgment, the core of his alleged crime was writing articles, organising activities and passing humanitarian money onward — without a single word alleging violence. Put "writing articles" into the box labelled "state secrets," close the lid, and no lawyer gets in, no family gets in, no public sees in; only the interrogators and the interrogated remain. That is the design intent of the secret-detention system, and the Yang Tianshui case is one of its textbook runs.

A Three-Hour Trial Behind Closed Doors: 16 May 2006, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu

On the morning of Tuesday 16 May 2006, the Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court in Jiangsu Province heard Yang Tianshui's case at the Dantu District court — the memorial chronology explicitly records the venue. The trial was closed to the public, lasted about three hours, and ended in judgment the same day: subversion of state power, 12 years' imprisonment, four years' deprivation of political rights. His defence lawyer, Li Jianqiang, gave Agence France-Presse a full account that day, and this page records it as AFP relayed it: Yang was convicted of posting anti-government articles on the Internet, of organising branches of the outlawed China Democracy Party, and of accepting illegal funds from overseas; he pleaded innocent, refused to acknowledge any guilt, and said the trial was illegal and an insult. The CECC's analysis, based on the judgment itself (the Chinese text reprinted by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, in an English translation provided by the Dui Hua Foundation), lists what the court found: that he published online articles supporting democratic change; that he took part in an online election, organised by overseas Chinese, for a "transitional government of democratic China," and was elected to the leadership of that virtual government — colleagues said he had been elected without his prior knowledge, and that he later wrote in the Epoch Times in support of the idea; and that he accepted overseas donations and transferred money to Wang Wenjiang, a dissident convicted of endangering state security — the defence said the money was humanitarian assistance to Wang's family. The court further held that his crimes were "major," that he had colluded with overseas parties, and that he had a prior criminal record, and on those grounds imposed a heavier sentence. It rejected his argument that he had lawfully exercised the freedoms of speech and association guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution, on reasoning preserved in the judgment: the Constitution also provides that citizens, in exercising these rights, shall not endanger the interests or security of the state. The CECC preserved that logic verbatim; so does this page. A writer cited the Constitution in defence of his articles; the court cited the same Constitution to give him 12 years.

Several procedural details must be set side by side. First, the trial was closed: no gallery, no reporters, no family. Second, it lasted about three hours: a 12-year subversion case, from opening to verdict, in half a working day. Third, the defendant pleaded not guilty in open defiance of the script and publicly called the trial illegal — Li Jianqiang's words to AFP, and the opposite of the "confession and repentance" formula of official narratives. Fourth, according to CPJ's census entry, Yang believed the proceedings fundamentally unjust and did not appeal; but in Nanjing Prison he later wrote, in his own hand, a petition to the Supreme People's Court challenging the verdict (supported jointly by PEN America and by the family's account after a January 2012 prison visit — see below). "No appeal" and "persistent petitioning" are not contradictory: within that system, an appeal asks the next level of the same apparatus to reverse itself, while a petition writes one's refusal into the file. He abandoned the first and persisted with the second. Fifth, the date of sentencing carries a small discrepancy of its own: PEN, IFEX and AFP's same-day reporting give 16 May; the CECC, citing the judgment, and CPJ's census give 17 May. This page uses 16 May, which carries the defence lawyer's contemporaneous statement, and records the 17 May variant alongside (see Verification Note).

One geographical error must be nailed down on the spot. Zhenjiang is a city in Jiangsu Province, and the Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court is a Jiangsu court. Yet a report republished by ChinaAid in 2017 states in so many words that "the Zhejiang Intermediate Court" sentenced him to 12 years. Zhejiang and Zhenjiang differ by a single character in Chinese and by an entire province in fact: Zhejiang is a province; Zhenjiang is a prefecture-level city in Jiangsu. The two have nothing to do with each other. That erroneous version still circulates online, and any uncritical citation moves Yang Tianshui's trial, by clerical accident, into another province. This page's finding is that the trial court was the Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court of Jiangsu Province, corroborated by five classes of source — the reprinted judgment, the CECC's analysis, PEN, CPJ and AFP — and that the "Zhejiang" version is an error introduced in ChinaAid's republication of RFA reporting. The Verification Note flags it as a standing correction; anyone citing this case should use Zhenjiang, Jiangsu.

Take the judgment's sentencing logic apart, using the points the CECC preserved, and it rests on three bricks: articles, organisation, and funds. The articles were critical essays published on overseas websites. The organisation was his part in building a China Democracy Party branch and in an online "transitional government" election of which, colleagues said, he had not even known beforehand. The funds were humanitarian donations he passed on to a prisoner's family. Not one of the three bricks involves violence, weapons, or any operational plan to overthrow anything. Twelve years, plus four years' deprivation of political rights, stacked on the ten years he had already served in the 1990s, meant that this writer would spend 22 years in prison for words and for liaison work. The cost to his defender followed promptly: in June 2008 the Shandong provincial judicial authorities refused to renew Li Jianqiang's licence to practise law. The lawyer's livelihood was revoked before the prisoner heard of it — a tactic of "deal with the lawyer first" that would be replayed in full, years later, in the 709 Crackdown; the Yang Tianshui case was its complete rehearsal.

Eleven Years in Nanjing Prison: A Petition, a PEN Award, and a Body Falling Apart

After sentencing, Yang Tianshui was sent to Nanjing Prison to serve his term. PEN America records that he submitted a petition to the Supreme People's Court challenging the verdict. On 18 January 2012, after a prison visit, his family told the outside world — preserved in the memorial chronology — that Yang was still writing his petition in prison with his own hand, maintaining that the authorities had convicted him illegally, and that the family was printing the petition and submitting it to the Supreme People's Court. A man in the sixth year of a 12-year sentence, still composing a document of legal protest character by character, with his sister printing and filing it outside: the legal result of that petition was nil — the Supreme People's Court never reversed the verdict — but its meaning does not lie in its result. A petition is a prisoner's point-by-point reply to the judgment: he does not accept the conclusion of that three-hour trial, and he uses the system's own paperwork to nail the words "I do not submit" into its archive. This site exists to collect exactly the traces left by such paperwork, so this entry is recorded with particular care: the content of the petition, and whether the Supreme People's Court ever acknowledged or answered it, are without public record.

On 28 April 2008 PEN American Center announced that the imprisoned Yang Tianshui would receive the 2008 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. IFEX's report at the time said PEN had invited his lawyer, Li Jianqiang, to travel to accept the award on his behalf; the same report notes that Li was himself an ICPC member who had represented at least eight of the 38 writers and journalists PEN believed were imprisoned for their expression in China — and that his licence to practise law had been revoked the previous year. Set those numbers side by side: a lawyer stripped of his licence, invited to collect a freedom-to-write award for a writer serving 12 years. On 5 December 2009 the Wei Jingsheng Foundation gave its sixth "China Democracy Fighter Award" to the still-imprisoned Huang Qi and Yang Tianshui (single source: the memorial chronology, flagged as such). Awards change nothing inside a cell. But they change something else: they kept the name "Yang Tianshui" from vanishing when the detention-centre door closed. Year after year, CPJ's annual prison census carried his entry, and PEN's case page kept updating his medical condition — the reason the race against time in August 2017 could be followed in real time from outside was that this record had never been allowed to lapse for eleven years.

The body's ledger is a different book. The diabetes acquired in his first imprisonment never left him. CPJ's 2017 retrospective records that as early as 2009 he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and diabetes. PEN America's case updates record that in early 2010 he was hospitalised for at least 50 days with a fever, tuberculous peritonitis and intestinal inflammation; reports indicated he recovered from those conditions, but diabetes and nephritis remained, with arthritis and high blood pressure added. In 2010 Reporters Without Borders wrote, in an appeal, that Yang had tuberculosis, severe arthritis, chronic kidney failure and high blood pressure, that his life was in danger — as was that of the equally gravely ill Hu Jia — and called for both men's immediate release on humanitarian grounds. That same year, his application for medical parole was denied. The denial was not a single event: Human Rights Watch records that during his imprisonment his lawyers applied for medical parole several times and were refused every time; CPJ, citing his sister Yang Guixiang and the rights website Weiquanwang, records that family and friends pleaded repeatedly for better medical care and for parole, and the authorities refused until it was too late. "Until it was too late" is a conclusion available only in the hindsight of 2017; in 2010 it was still an ordinary administrative refusal. The value of an archive is exactly this: to place the 2010 refusal and the 2017 death certificate on the same page, so that the word "pattern" requires no slogans — it grows out of the documents by itself.

The Family: Yang Guixiang's Twenty-Two Years

Yang Tianshui's elder sister is Yang Guixiang. In nearly every international report on his final years, hers is the family's name: interviewed by Radio Free Asia about her brother's condition; filing the medical-parole applications; relaying to PEN the authorities' words that, as a "criminal," he could not go abroad for treatment. Human Rights in China (HRIC) recorded her in a brief note of its own: the sister of the noted democracy figure Yang Tianshui, who advocated tirelessly for her brother over his 22 years of imprisonment — adding that those who campaign for prisoners of conscience must not overlook the families who stand behind them. The figure of 22 years is exactly the sum of his two sentences: for every year the brother spent inside, the sister campaigned outside. Prison visits, deliveries of supplies, hiring lawyers, writing applications, taking calls from overseas media — for the family of a political prisoner in China, every one of these carries risk: the "tea invitation" that follows a broadcast interview, the visit obstructed on the road, the phone line that is listened to as a matter of routine. The public record preserves no complete inventory of what Yang Guixiang herself endured, and this page does not invent one. It records two things: that in August 2017, when the brain tumour was diagnosed, it was this family — with her at its front — that applied for parole and pleaded for treatment abroad, and she who relayed the refusal to the outside; and that after her brother's death, she made exactly one phone call.

That call went to Xu Wanping in Chongqing. PEN America's case update records that after Yang Tongyan's death, the activist Xu Wanping received a "patchy phone call" from Yang's sister. After that initial contact, no one was able to reach any member of Yang Tongyan's immediate family. PEN records the suspicion of his friends and colleagues: that the family had been urged not to speak about his case or his death. Radio Free Asia's report of 8 November 2017 records the same disappearance: reporters repeatedly called the family's mobile phones and got no answer; the Nanjing rights activist Wang Jian said he could reach neither Yang's sister nor his nephew, could therefore confirm no details of the death, and judged that the family was "definitely" under close police surveillance or house arrest. Set those records beside Liu Xiaobo's funeral four months earlier — the Liu family likewise unreachable afterwards, Liu Xia still held at an unknown location — and "disappearing the family" emerges as a standard step in the official handling of a prominent political prisoner's death. A man is imprisoned until he dies; his family is then imprisoned in silence. It is the coldest page of this case.

August to November 2017: A Brain Tumour, a Third Application, and the Last Four Months

On 12 August 2017 Yang Tianshui's family learned that he had been diagnosed in Nanjing Prison with an aggressive brain tumour — later records specify a late-stage brain glioma. The family learned of the diagnosis on the day it was made: which is to say that until the tumour had grown to the point of diagnosis, the prison had never reported the state of his health to the family that had campaigned for him for over a decade. The family applied for medical parole at once. PEN America records that this was the family's third application; the outcomes of the first two are on record: refusal. On 16 August 2017 the third application was granted. Do the arithmetic of that sequence yourself: of a 12-year sentence he had served 11 years, with about four months remaining (Human Rights Watch's figure). For a man who could die at any moment, the approval of medical parole arrived 83 days before his death.

After his release he briefly returned to his home in Siyang, Jiangsu (PEN America, citing an ICPC contact), and was then transferred to a Shanghai hospital specialising in neurological care for brain surgery. The photo caption on PEN International's statement identifies the hospital as Huashan Hospital in Shanghai. On 23 August 2017 the tumour was removed; Amnesty International and PEN America both confirm the date of the operation. In parallel, the family asked that he be allowed to travel abroad for treatment. The answer was no. The formulation PEN America obtained from Yang Guixiang was that the family was informed that, as a "criminal," he would not be permitted to leave the country for treatment. For a man racing a brain cancer after surgery, the criterion for travel was not his condition but his status as a convict. After the operation he was cut off from all contact with friends and colleagues (PEN America, PEN International and RFA agree); only his closest relatives could see him. In mid-October 2017 his condition worsened. On 7 November 2017 Yang Tianshui died in the Shanghai hospital, aged 56. Four months earlier, on 13 July, Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo had died in Shenyang to an almost identical script: late-stage cancer, medical parole, refusal of treatment abroad, a family that vanished. Yang Tianshui was the second run.

What happened after his death survives only in fragments. According to reports summarised by Wikipedia, the authorities pressured his relatives to cremate his body and bury his ashes at sea, and to keep this information about the burial at sea secret; a friend of Yang's learned of it and leaked it to a human rights group. The chain of sourcing for that account is "friend — human rights group — media — Wikipedia," and this page relays it at exactly that strength, flagged: the manner of the pressure, the dates and places of cremation and sea burial, and the family's true wishes are, to this day, without complete public record. Liu Xiaobo's ashes were scattered into the sea; Yang Tianshui's, reportedly, were required to be buried in the sea as well — and the sea keeps no gravestone. For a writer, to be denied even a gravestone is the system's final disposition of him: first they cage the man, then they cage the news of his death, and at last they scatter his ashes into water where no one can come to mourn. But the record survives. This page is the record.

International Response: "Medical Parole Granted Too Late" Becomes a Named Pattern

The timing of Yang Tianshui's death collided with U.S. President Donald Trump's state visit to China. PEN America's statement of 8 November 2017 was headlined "Death of Imprisoned Chinese Writer and Activist Yang Tongyan a Further Blow for Free Expression." Karin Karlekar, PEN America's Director of Free Expression at Risk Programs, said that Yang's death, coming less than four months after Liu Xiaobo's under similar circumstances, was another black mark on the Chinese authorities' human rights record, and urged the visiting President Trump to raise the case with his counterparts and insist that China allow political prisoners suffering from grave illnesses the freedom to seek the best possible treatment and care: two deaths in four months was a devastating loss. PEN International's Executive Director, Carles Torner, was blunter in his organisation's mourning statement: for the second time that year, after Liu Xiaobo, a prisoner had been liberated on parole only to face death outside prison — a cruel practice that revealed, in his words, to what extent injustice commanded the whole judicial system.

Amnesty International's statement, through its East Asia Director Nicholas Bequelin, was the most analytical of the three. Yang Tongyan, Bequelin said, was a peaceful champion of human rights and democracy who made a huge personal sacrifice to stay true to his principles; the authorities feared the power of his writing and did all they could to silence him; he should never have spent a single day in jail, let alone nearly half his life. Bequelin then moved from the case to the pattern: the death of yet another long-term Chinese detainee on medical parole was alarming; in many cases seriously ill imprisoned activists were being granted medical parole late, and their families' wishes for treatment outside detention or abroad were ignored; and there seemed to be no accountability for this pattern of deaths on medical parole of people the authorities labelled "enemies of the state." Amnesty also formally recognised Yang Tianshui as a prisoner of conscience — which means, in the language of international law, that he should never have been imprisoned at all, and that neither of his two sentences had any legitimacy.

Human Rights Watch wrote Yang Tianshui into a longer list: Cao Shunli, dead in 2014 after medical neglect in detention; Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, dead in prison in 2015; Liu Xiaobo, dead on medical parole in July 2017; Yang Tongyan, dead on medical parole in November 2017. In its submission to the UN Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review of China, HRW itemised the cases and drew the conclusion that the repeated denial of appropriate medical care to ailing dissidents was a continuing practice. CPJ's December 2017 feature carried its judgment in the headline — in China, medical neglect can amount to a death sentence for jailed journalists — and cited Human Rights Watch's November 2017 count that since 2013 at least seven dissidents and journalists had died in custody or shortly after release, after repeatedly being denied proper medical treatment. Reporters Without Borders, in statements and open letters of 2018 and 2020, repeatedly paired Liu Xiaobo and Yang Tongyan as the emblematic cases of prisoners who died of cancers left untreated in detention, and demanded the release of other gravely ill jailed journalists and bloggers. Read in sequence, the positions of these five organisations between November 2017 and 2018 share one conclusion: Yang Tianshui's death was not a medical accident but the second documented specimen of a method of disposal that had already been named, already recorded, and was still continuing. This page adopts the same characterisation framework, while taking the facts of the individual case only from this case's own materials; the pattern judgment belongs to the organisations named and is not dressed up as this site's independent investigative finding.

His Writing: Starting from "China Permeated with Fear"

An archive must not record only how a man was imprisoned and how he died; it should also record, as far as it can, what he wrote — otherwise the victim is left with nothing but the posture of victimhood. PEN America's case page preserves an excerpt, in English translation, of an essay by Yang Tianshui titled "China Permeated with Fear." In it he wrote that fear flows everywhere in China: the farmers in fear of losing their livelihoods to land scarcity or forced acquisition; corrupt officials in fear of conflict with fellow officials or of disciplinary action — fear pervading the entire society. This page paraphrases that passage rather than reproducing it at length (see the citation discipline in the Verification Note). What deserves attention is the position from which it was written: not from the safety of a commentator's desk, but by a man who had already served ten years and was writing his way toward the next twelve. He analysed fear, yet he himself seems absent from fear's register. His corpus also includes poetry, fiction, short stories and a large body of political commentary, published mostly on Boxun, the Epoch Times and other overseas sites. The judgment counted his essays, item by item, as evidence of subversion; this page counts the same bibliography as a literary record: half of a writer's life's work written in prison or in the five years between two imprisonments, the other half written in days when his home could be searched and he could be taken away at any time. A complete catalogue of his works, and the texts of most of them, can no longer be fully assembled, because of website blocking and the passage of years; this page marks them as without complete public record and does not fabricate a bibliography.

His real relationship to "organisation" also needs to be recorded precisely, because it is both the core of the indictment and the most garbled element in retelling. The judgment held that he had organised a branch of the China Democracy Party. That claim is corroborated from both directions: Li Jianqiang, restating the charges to AFP, listed "organising branches of the (outlawed) China Democracy Party" among them. This page records the content of that charge on the dual sourcing of the judgment and the defence — it is the official characterisation of his conduct, not this site's endorsement of fact. As to his specific role inside the party and the organisational form of any branch, the public record is incomplete, and this page adds nothing. Another circulating version must be corrected: ChinaAid's report says he "became a founding member of the China Democracy in 1990" — but the China Democracy Party was only openly founded in 1998; in 1990 it did not exist, so the claim is impossible in time, and appears to conflate the party with the "Chinese Democratic Alliance" that the memorial chronology records him founding with like-minded people in 1990. The Verification Note deals with both of ChinaAid's errors (the "Zhejiang" court and the "1990 founding member" line) as a standing correction, because they are the two hardest factual injuries in this case's circulation in Chinese-language media.

Timeline

12 April 1961: Yang Tongyan is born in Siyang County, Jiangsu (Wikipedia entry; consistent with the recorded age of 56 at death and the CECC's "aged 43" in 2005).

October 1978 – June 1982: Studies history at Beijing Normal University, graduating with a B.A. (PEN America; memorial chronology).

1982–1989: Teaches at a petroleum-ministry company school; works at the Jiangsu Provincial Local Gazetteer Office; serves as assistant to a township head in Dafeng County (single-source career record in the memorial chronology).

Summer 1989: Joins the pro-democracy movement in Nanjing; resigns his government post on 20 October 1989 (memorial chronology).

First half of 1990: Founds the "Chinese Democratic Alliance" with like-minded people (memorial chronology); arrested on 1 June 1990.

June 1990 – May 2000: Serves 10 years on "counter-revolution" charges — 15 months in the Nanjing PSB detention centre, then Nanjing Longtan Prison; hunger strikes in prison; develops diabetes (memorial chronology; the sentence length and charge category corroborated by PEN, Amnesty, CECC and CPJ; the CECC dates the conviction to 1991).

May 2000: Released at the end of his sentence, with a further four years' deprivation of political rights still to run, during which he is detained twice for violations of its conditions (CECC).

October 2003: Meets Chongqing activist Xu Wanping by phone and sends him 1,000 yuan in support (single source: Xu Wanping's memorial essay).

27/28 May – 11/12 June 2004: Administratively detained 15 days for online essays marking the 15th anniversary of June Fourth (CECC and memorial chronology differ by one day; recorded side by side).

24 December 2004 – 24/25 January 2005: Held incommunicado for about a month on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power"; the ICPC publicly appeals for his release on 4 January 2005; according to his lawyer Guo Guoting he is released on bail (CECC, CPJ, PEN, memorial chronology; place of seizure and legal form of release in dispute — see Verification Note).

9 May 2005: Nanjing police search his home (single source: memorial chronology).

23 December 2005, about 3:30 p.m.: Seized with a friend by plainclothes police in Nanjing; the friend is released the same evening; Yang is transferred to Dantu District Detention Centre, Zhenjiang, and denied a lawyer (CPJ's two contemporaneous reports and annual census entries; the "27 December" variant is supported by no primary human-rights record found — see Verification Note).

20 January 2006: The Zhenjiang Public Security Bureau issues formal arrest notification; the family receives it on 27 January (PEN and IFEX/CPJ in agreement).

16 May 2006 (the CECC and CPJ give 17 May): The Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court, sitting at the Dantu District court, sentences him after a closed trial of about three hours to 12 years for subversion of state power plus four years' deprivation of political rights; Yang pleads not guilty and calls the trial illegal (PEN, IFEX, AFP, CECC).

From 2006: Serves his sentence in Nanjing Prison; petitions the Supreme People's Court (PEN; a family account after a January 2012 visit confirms he is still drafting the petition in his own hand).

28 April 2008: Receives PEN America's PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award; in June 2008 Shandong authorities refuse to renew defence lawyer Li Jianqiang's law licence (IFEX, CPJ).

2009: Diagnosed with tuberculosis and diabetes (CPJ retrospective); on 5 December 2009 receives the Wei Jingsheng Foundation's "China Democracy Fighter Award" (single source: memorial chronology).

Early 2010: Hospitalised at least 50 days with fever, tuberculous peritonitis and intestinal inflammation; medical parole application denied the same year; RSF appeals for his humanitarian release, citing tuberculosis, severe arthritis, chronic kidney failure and hypertension as life-threatening (PEN, RSF).

2010–2017: Lawyers and family apply repeatedly for medical parole; repeatedly refused (Human Rights Watch, CPJ).

12 August 2017: Diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour; his family learns of the diagnosis that day (PEN America, PEN International).

16 August 2017: The family's third application for medical parole is granted (PEN America).

23 August 2017: Undergoes surgery to remove the tumour at a specialist hospital in Shanghai (identified in a PEN International photo caption as Huashan Hospital); the family's request for treatment abroad is refused on the ground that he is a "criminal" (Amnesty, PEN).

Mid-October 2017: His condition worsens (PEN America).

7 November 2017: Dies in Shanghai, aged 56; his family is largely unreachable thereafter (PEN, Amnesty, CPJ and RFA in agreement; a 2018 PEN International resolution erroneously gives 5 November — see Verification Note).

After November 2017: Authorities reportedly pressure the family to cremate his body, bury his ashes at sea and keep it secret; a friend leaks the information to a human rights group (reports summarised by Wikipedia; details without complete public record).

Our Take

First, align the numbers of this case: one writer, two sentences, ten years plus twelve years — twenty-two years. Of a 56-year life, nearly half was spent inside high walls. The catalogue of "crimes" in the two judgments contains no violence, no weapons, no victims — only essays, organisational liaison, and a pair of hands that passed overseas donations to a political prisoner's family. The Zhenjiang court's judgment dismissed his constitutional defence in a single sentence: citizens, in exercising their rights, must not endanger state security. That sentence is the hinge of this case and the template of countless similar judgments over the following two decades: freedom of speech is written into the constitution, but every time anyone cites it in defence of his own essays, the court takes it back with "state security." The archival value of the Yang Tianshui case lies first of all here: it preserves one complete run of that retrieve-and-revoke logic in 2006, from a Christmas-Eve-style secret detention to a three-hour closed trial.

Second, look at 2010. That year he spent more than 50 days in hospital, with tuberculous peritonitis, diabetes, nephritis, arthritis and hypertension in a single body; RSF publicly appealed for his humanitarian release, and his medical parole application was refused. For seven years after that, the applications went in one after another and were refused one after another — until August 2017, when a brain tumour was diagnosed and the third application was approved within four days. Because this time, if he was not let out, he would die inside the prison; let out, his death would not count, on paper, as a "death in custody." From parole approval to death: 83 days. For Liu Xiaobo, from medical parole to death: 18 days. This is not coincidence; it is a tempo of disposal documented jointly by five human rights organisations — hold on until the final moment, then release, so that death occurs under the name of "medical treatment," outside the walls, inside the statistical safety zone. On this case's facts alone, this page says one sentence: Yang Tianshui's dying did not begin in 2017. His diabetes began in his first imprisonment, his tuberculosis was diagnosed in 2009, his parole was refused in 2010. The approval of August 2017 was not a rescue of a life; it was an arrangement of the place of a death.

Third, the quietest and sharpest entry in this case is the family. Yang Guixiang campaigned for 22 years, and what she received at the end was 83 days of her brother's parole, one phone call to a friend that broke up mid-conversation, and then a silence in which she could never be reached again. Only at this point is the official chain of disposal of a political prisoner complete: imprison the man, delay the medicine, refuse the exit, cut off the contact, dispose of the body, silence the family. This page places the case beside Liu Xiaobo's not for rhetorical symmetry but for procedural identity — the same procedure ran twice in four months. When a regime's handling of a dissident's death has been standardised, the recorder's work is to draw the flowchart, so that every step carries a date, a name and a source. All the effort of this page serves that one purpose: that "Yang Tianshui" should not remain merely a name lying for eleven years in a census table, but a man with a career, with essays, with an elder sister and with a handwritten petition — preserved, whole, in this archive.

Verification Note

This site's characterisation: this is a case of political persecution of a writer for his words. Every act attributed to Yang Tianshui — writing, organisational liaison, passing on humanitarian donations — falls within expression, association and humanitarian assistance, and none of the charges alleges violence; Amnesty International recognised him as a prisoner of conscience. The case meets this site's inclusion standard for the persecution records. Verification followed the "three musts": time and place confirmed (seizure, arrest, trial, imprisonment, parole, surgery and death all carry sourced dates and places, with discrepancies recorded side by side); cross-verification completed (PEN, Amnesty International, CPJ, the CECC, Human Rights Watch, RSF, AFP, Radio Free Asia and Chinese-language memorial records mutually corroborate the procedural nodes); visual evidence: RFA published a hospital photograph of Yang in November 2017 (supplied by a listener; this page records its existence and provenance only and draws no medical inference from it), and PEN International's statement carried a stock photograph of Huashan Hospital (its caption identifies it as a 2012 Wikimedia Commons image, not a scene photograph).

Facts verified across multiple sources: born 12 April 1961; B.A. in history, Beijing Normal University, 1982; worked as a teacher and civil servant (PEN, Wikipedia, and the CECC's age record mutually consistent); served 10 years, 1990–2000, on "counter-revolution" charges (PEN, Amnesty, CECC, CPJ); held incommunicado for about a month from 24 December 2004 into late January 2005 (PEN, CPJ, CECC); member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (PEN, IFEX); formally arrested 20 January 2006, with the family receiving notice on 27 January (PEN, IFEX/CPJ); sentenced by the Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court to 12 years plus four years' deprivation of political rights for subversion of state power after a closed trial of about three hours (PEN, IFEX, AFP, CECC, CPJ); the charges as recorded include online articles, China Democracy Party branch organising, the "transitional government" online election, and passing overseas funds to Wang Wenjiang's family (CECC citing the judgment; IFEX; AFP citing the defence lawyer); served in Nanjing Prison and petitioned the Supreme People's Court (PEN); hospitalised at least 50 days in early 2010 with tuberculous peritonitis and related conditions, with medical parole denied that year (PEN); suffered from diabetes, nephritis, arthritis and hypertension (PEN, RSF); recipient of the 2008 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award (PEN, IFEX, CPJ); diagnosed with a brain tumour on 12 August 2017, granted parole on the family's third application on 16 August, operated on in Shanghai on 23 August, refused permission to travel abroad for treatment, and cut off from friends and colleagues (PEN America, PEN International, Amnesty); died in Shanghai on 7 November 2017, aged 56 (PEN, Amnesty, CPJ, HRW, RFA); family largely unreachable after his death (PEN, RFA).

Discrepancies, recorded side by side without adjudication: (1) The date of the December 2005 seizure. CPJ's two contemporaneous reports (17 and 30 January 2006) and its annual prison censuses (2012, 2016) all give 23 December 2005, at about 3:30 p.m.; PEN gives only "December 2005." The "27 December" variant flagged by the coordinator was found in no public record of PEN, Amnesty, CPJ, the CECC, HRIC, CHRD or RSF; the main text uses 23 December and states here that the 27 December version could not be verified. (2) The date of sentencing. PEN, IFEX and AFP's same-day reporting, citing the defence lawyer, give 16 May 2006 (a Tuesday, consistent with AFP's "sentenced on Tuesday" dispatch); the CECC, citing the judgment, and CPJ's census give 17 May. This page uses 16 May and records both. (3) The place and legal form of the 2004 detention and release. Boxun, relayed by the CECC, says he was detained in Hangzhou on 24 December; his former lawyer Guo Guoting told CPJ he was seized from his home; Guo describes release on bail, the memorial chronology describes expiry of a month's criminal detention, PEN gives incommunicado detention until 25 January, and the Boxun account has him home and in contact by 26 January — release dates of 24, 25 and 26 January coexist, and the main text writes "late January." (4) The dates of the 2004 administrative detention: the CECC gives 27 May–11 June, the memorial chronology 28 May–12 June, one day apart; both are recorded. (5) A derivative error on the date of death: a 2018 PEN International resolution states that he died "on 5 November," contradicting every record including PEN International's own 2017 statement (7 November); this page uses 7 November and notes the error so that later citers do not repeat it. (6) Human Rights Watch's UPR submission renders the 2006 charge as "inciting subversion of state power," which does not match the judgment (CECC, citing the Dui Hua translation: subversion of state power, Criminal Law Article 105(1)); this page follows the judgment and marks HRW's wording as a transmission error. HRW's "four months short of completing his sentence" is consistent with PEN's "served 11 years." (7) The hospital of death: PEN, Amnesty and CPJ agree on a specialist hospital in Shanghai, identified by PEN International's photo caption as Huashan Hospital; the caption of RFA's listener-supplied photograph refers to a hospital in Nanjing, which concerns the photograph only and does not disturb the consensus that he died in Shanghai.

Standing corrections (the two hardest errors in this case's circulation): First, the "Zhejiang" error. A November 2017 report republished on the ChinaAid website states that "the Zhejiang Intermediate Court" sentenced Yang Tianshui to 12 years. This is wrong: the trial court was the Zhenjiang Intermediate People's Court of Jiangsu Province, sitting in Zhenjiang's Dantu District, corroborated by five classes of source — the reprinted judgment, the CECC's analysis, PEN, CPJ and AFP. Zhenjiang belongs to Jiangsu Province and has no connection with Zhejiang Province. Citers of this case should not repeat the "Zhejiang" version. Second, the "founding member of the China Democracy Party in 1990" error. The same ChinaAid report says he became a founding member of "the China Democracy" in 1990; the China Democracy Party was only openly founded in 1998 and did not exist in 1990, making the claim impossible in time; it appears to conflate the party with the "Chinese Democratic Alliance" that the memorial chronology records him founding with like-minded people in 1990. In this page's main text, his organisational history is stated only in the two sourced forms — the judgment's finding (organising a China Democracy Party branch, given as the content of a charge) and the memorial chronology (the Chinese Democratic Alliance, flagged as a single-source memorial record) — and no unsourced organisational office is attributed to him.

Single-source or limited-source items, flagged in the main text: the detailed 1961–1989 career (teaching posts, gazetteer office, township assistantship, the date of his resignation), the 1990 "Chinese Democratic Alliance" and the 1 June 1990 arrest date, the detention-centre and prison assignments of the first sentence, the prison hunger strikes and the onset of diabetes, the 1,000-yuan remittance to Xu Wanping in 2003, the 9 May 2005 search of his home, the Dantu District court venue in 2006, the 2009 Wei Jingsheng Foundation award, and the January 2012 details of the petition's printing and submission all derive from the chronology appended to Xu Wanping's memorial essay or from that essay itself — a friend's memorial record, flagged at each occurrence and not merged with multi-source fact. The passage in Wikipedia reporting that the authorities pressed the family to cremate the body and bury the ashes at sea in secrecy, leaked by a friend to a human rights group, is a summary of reports and is relayed at exactly that evidential strength (friend — human rights group — media), not written as an independently established conclusion.

Matters without public record (marked as such in the main text and not filled by speculation): the trial court, full judgment text and full charge name of the 1990 case; the interrogation circumstances of the 1990 arrest; interrogation and treatment details during the December 2005 detention at Dantu; the full text of the 2006 judgment (only the CECC's analytical points, based on the reprint and translation, are public); whether and how the Supreme People's Court responded to his petition; the complete medical file from Nanjing Prison and the paperwork of each medical-parole application; the surgical details and post-operative records of August 2017; the dates, places and full circumstances of the cremation and the disposal of his ashes; and the situation of his family from November 2017 to the present. On all of these this page writes only "no public record." Treatment of official claims: the facts as found in the judgment, the court's stated reasons for rejecting the constitutional defence, and procedural formulas such as "involving state secrets" are relayed throughout as attributed charges or official texts, never as facts found by this site. Citation discipline: no more than 50 words are copied verbatim from any single source on this page, and quotations are attributed to their institutions.