Chinese Police Detain Activist Who Documents Labor Protests
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times, JUNE 27, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/world/asia/china-lu-yuyu-detain.html?_r=0
BEIJING--An activist who has spent the last several years documenting labor
protests across China has been detained by the authorities since mid-June,
friends of his said on Monday.
The activist, Lu Yuyu, was taken into custody by the police on June 16 in
the southwestern town of Dali, where he lives, a writer who has had regular
online contact with him, Xu Hui, said by telephone.
Dali, a popular and mountainous tourist area in Yunnan Province, has in
recent years drawn a growing number of Chinese fleeing hectic, polluted
urban centers. Mr. Xu also lives in Dali and said he had twice visited the
detention center where Mr. Lu is being held but had not been allowed to see
him.
The authorities are accusing Mr. Lu and his girlfriend, Li Tingyu, of
"picking quarrels and provoking trouble," said Mr. Xu and another friend,
Wei Xiaobin. Ms. Li has also been documenting worker unrest.
That accusation is one that has been used with increasing frequency by the
police in China to silence dissent. In Sichuan Province, another liberal
activist, Chen Yunfei, who advocates the remembrance of the 1989 Tiananmen
Square massacre, is expected to stand trial on the charge on Thursday.
Mr. Lu, a native of the southwestern province of Guizhou, is a former
migrant worker who has used data gleaned from social media and other online
platforms to collate information on labor protests. He has published his
findings on his social media accounts.
Those accounts are often deleted by censors, and the police have questioned
him at home before.
"He lives in Dali but is quite low profile," Mr. Wei said, also by phone.
"He doesn’t publish much of his personal information online."
Mr. Wei said he visited Ms. Li’s father in Foshan, in Guangdong Province, a
few days ago and brought two lawyers with him. They are trying to win the
trust of the father to help the couple, he said.
As the Chinese economy slows, the number of labor protests and strikes
across the country has grown. China Labor Bulletin, a workers’ rights group
based in Hong Kong, counted 2,700 protests and strikes in 2015, double the
number the previous year. The group uses data from Mr. Lu to help put
together its strike maps, after reviewing the data.
Communist Party leaders are aware of the potential political ramifications
of mass labor protests, given that the party was founded on an ideology that
had worker revolution at its core. But most such protests have recently
focused on demands for unpaid wages and benefits rather than expressing
broad political discontent.
"Citizen journalists Lu Yuyu and Li Tingyu performed a unique and invaluable
service in monitoring and cataloging incidents of social unrest in China,"
said Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for China Labor Bulletin. "By ‘shooting
the messenger’ in this case rather than dealing with the root causes of
social unrest, the authorities have once again simply made matters worse."
