Democracy activist Qin Yongmin is detained again, house raided

On Friday, Jan. 9, 2015, Qin Yongmin and Zhao Suli were detained by officers of Wuhan’s Qingshan District Xingouqiao police station. After 8 p.m. that evening, Qin was told that he would be detained for ten days. There was no formal procedure. It was only after Zhao Suli returned to their home that she found it had been raided. Missing were two computer servers and three copies of Zhao’s journal, two old completed ones and one new one.

Qin Yongmin was told he had written too many articles and been interviewed by foreign media too much recently.

Qin Yongmin was born on August 11, 1953, and is a Wuhan native. He is a political scholar, dissident, and one of the founders of the China Democracy Party. In order to exercise his basic human rights to freedom of speech, publication, and association, since the 1970s he has endured repeated arrests, imprisonment, residential surveillance, administrative detention and re-education through labor. He refuses to leave China. Between 1970 and 2012, he was arrested and taken into custody 39 times and imprisoned for a total of 22 years, becoming one of the political prisoners who has served the longest time in prison since Deng Xiaoping’s era. Formerly a worker at Wuhan Iron and Steel Plant, he became editor-in-chief of a democracy periodical known as “Sound of the Chime” in Wuhan at the end of the 1970s. In 1980, he helped found the China Democracy Party. Qin Yongmin was arrested in 1981. In the following year, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for the crime of counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement. He was released in 1989. On November 14, 1993, he helped launch the “Peace Charter” movement, which demanded the rehabilitation of the 1989 democracy movement and the release of all political prisoners. Subsequently he was sentenced for two years re-education through labor for disturbing social order.

In 1997, Qin Yongmin published his open letter to Jiang Zemin, demanding that the 15th National Congress of the Communist Party restructure the political system and implement democratic constitutionalism. In 1998, he founded the “China Human Rights Observer,” a newsletter, in Wuhan. In the same year, he launched the Hubei Provincial branch of the China Democracy Party. He was arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison for subversion. He was released in November 2010.