Policy | 14/01/2015
Hong Kong will paralyze political reform if China's plan is not approved (The newspaper.es)
Beijing, 14 ene (EFE).- Dozens of people remain detained in China since October and some of them have suffered torture, for supporting the historic Hong Kong protests, that for more than a month they took thousands of people to the streets of the Chinese region to ask for democracy.
Even though the student-driven movement was driven from the streets in December, The Chinese Government continues its repression by keeping people under arrest and, in some cases, under torture, about forty people from the mainland of the country, The NGO Chinese Human Rights Defenders informed Efe (CAD).
"Alrededor de un tercio de los activistas y artistas aún siguen detenidos, y algunos de ellos todavía ni han visto a sus abogados", Wendy Lin reported to Efe, ChRD researcher at Hong Kong.
According to the organization's data, were arrested 112 personas, among them an eight-year-old girl who was recently released with her father, although both now remain under surveillance.
"El movimiento de los paraguas fue una señal de esperanza, that if people stayed together, the Chinese government could be forced to listen. Y precisamente fue ese símbolo de esperanza por la democracia el que la gente en China continental quería difundir mientras el Ejecutivo quería desesperadamente aplastar", dice Lin.
The organization highlights cases of torture such as that of the artist Wang Zang, who was arrested after publishing a photograph of him with an umbrella - a symbol of the protests- on his Weibo account - the Chinese Twitter -.
Authorities interrogated Wang for five days and four nights in a row to get his Weibo and phone password., They deprived him of sleep and forced him to stand. If the artist couldn't do it, the authorities beat him.
Due to physical and mental attacks, Wang suffered a heart attack, as confirmed by the same artist to his lawyer, to whom he confessed that he thought he was going to die after having lived a life without any serious heart ailment.
These practices were also repeated in other cases, like that of activist Han Ying, who was interrogated for nine days in a row from nine in the morning until four in the morning the next day.
Another victim of the repression campaign promoted by the regime is Zhang Miao, interpreter for the German weekly Die Zeit, who was arrested after she posted images of the Hong Kong protests on her WeChat social media account and chose a yellow border as her profile photo, another of the symbols of the pro-democracy movement.
Zhang has been 12 weeks detained, as published today by the correspondent of the German weekly Angela Köckritz on her media's website, in which he told the story of the arrest and asked for the release of his assistant.
