By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW June 01, 2015
The Chinese police have detained Wu Gan, a burly rights activist with a signature bald head and black beard, who supporters say skillfully merges cyberspace and real-life protests but whom authorities have painted in a barrage of articles and reports on state-run television as a morally degenerate troublemaker from a bad family.
The ferocity of attacks in news reports from People’s Daily, the official news agency Xinhua, CCTV and the Public Security Bureau newspaper after the detention last week of Mr. Wu, 42, surprised even seasoned observers. They likened the reports to a political campaign, and interpreted them as a sign the Communist Party is focusing its attention on a new kind of activist: socially popular individuals with no particular organization, platform or network behind them. Such criticism had previously been directed at high-profile individuals like the imprisoned political activist Liu Xiaobo or the artist Ai Weiwei, but rarely at people operating at the grass-roots level, who command support in China but are little known outside the country.
Mr. Wu’s online handle is “Super Vulgar Butcher,” a term that mocks the officials that Mr. Wu says he wants to “slay” for their corruption and misconduct, his lawyer, Ge Wenxiu, said by telephone from Guangzhou. Mr. Wu “has a sense of humor,” Mr. Ge said, and parodies the officials’ vulgarity.The police initially detained Mr. Wu, a native of Fujian Province, on May 20 for “disturbing order in a work place” and “insulting people” outside the High People’s Court in Nanchang, in Jiangxi Province. He had traveled there to support lawyers demonstrating to gain access to the court papers of an old and controversial case they wanted to reopen.
Video on CCTV appeared to show Mr. Wu exiting from a taxi and immediately joining the demonstration, shouting and hanging up posters on the court gates. The police arrived at the scene and Mr. Wu was later taken into custody.
A week later, the charges against Mr. Wu were changed to the more serious “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” and “slander.” The first charge is a catchall phrase that the police have used against numerous rights activists in recent years.
Mr. Wu has been moved to a detention center in Fujian, Mr. Ge said.
One prominent case that Mr. Wu helped to publicize recently was the death by shooting of Xu Chunhe, 45, in a railroad station in Qing’an, in Heilongjiang Province, by a police officer.
The reports, many of which ran on the front pages of newspapers or appeared in the main national news broadcasts, quoted neighbors or acquaintances of Mr. Wu’s as saying that he came from a troubled family. Flouting social conventions, his father moved to his mother’s house when they married. In China, the woman usually moves to the man’s home. “Wherever there was trouble, he is on to it like a fly chasing stink, making the most of a mess, afraid that the world was at peace,” said one man who gave his name as Mr. Chen.
Mr. Wu specialized in “cat and mouse” tactics and in “diverting attention then striking,” the reports said, and he had unfairly criticized numerous officials. The reports also accused Mr. Wu of smearing the reputation of a deceased police “hero,” and criticized him for his divorce.
Mr. Wu, a native of Xiashi village who served in the military and was a former security guard at Xiamen Airlines, “wrote a crude novel” and “was never serious at work.” His father “destroyed a chicken farm” — a crime for which he was sentenced to three years in prison, and a fourth year was added for escaping — the reports said.
Friends and acquaintances of Mr. Wu’s lauded him as a courageous rights activist who dared to stand up to officials despite not having an organization behind him.
“He is very direct, helpful and forceful,” Wen Yunchao, an activist who goes by the name Bei Feng, said from New York. “He does have a side to him where he can be pretty crude in his language,” Mr. Wen said in a WeChat message.
“‘The Butcher’ (Wu Gan) is a legend,” Xiang Xiaokai wrote in a message circulated widely on social media. “Under the dark yoke of tyranny, where protecting rights meets everywhere with difficulty, despair is everywhere. But The Butcher again and again used concrete cases to show that in this boundless dark, on a micro level, it’s all just a big pile of lowlife behavior,” he wrote.
The state news media reports were aimed at “demonizing” Mr. Wu, said a politics professor at Peking University, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the risks that come with speaking out publicly.
“Mr. Wu is a link from the cyberworld to the real physical world,” the professor said. “He is a really smart user of technology and a cutting-edge figure for getting money, attention and support for cases. But he’s also really successful at ‘being there.’ ”
“So he is at the nexus of the cyberworld and the physical world, the combination of the two is something the government fears most,” the professor added. “This explains why the government was so anxious to smash him with all its media.”
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