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July 3, 2013

The arrest of the two brave Dus

Du_Bin
Du Bin, a Chinese filmmaker, photographer and writer has not been seen since his arrest on May 31, days before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
One day, on the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) chat room, the writer and web-master Ye Du complained about having been sentenced to house arrest four times this year. Altogether, he had lost his freedom for one and half months. The most recent time was around June 4th when he couldn’t leave his home for 12 days.

Every year in China on the eve of June 4th a lot of “sensitive figures” need to “disappear” so that they do not “disturb the social order” of the country. Most of them come back after the specified date. This year, two of them did not return, and their absence has sparked international attention and worry.

On May 31 the journalist and filmmaker Du Bin was taken away by a group of policemen who also raided his house and confiscated his computer and laptop, along with his films, books, discs, files, and other items.

The 41-year-old Du Bin is now detained in Fengtai, Beijing. His friend, the famous human rights activist Hu Jia, believes that the arrest is related to his documentary film on Falun Gong titled Women Above the Ghosts’ Heads, which was recently released in Hong Kong. The film shows the torture and inhumane treatment of female Falun Gong practitioners in Masanjia Forced Labor Camps in the Liaoning province. Besides the controversial documentary, Du has spent the last eight years researching and collecting material to write a book entitled The Tiananmen Massacre, which was also published in Hong Kong only weeks ago.

In these works Du has addressed the two main political taboos in China. As such, his arrest was almost predictable. Even his status as a former contractor and photographer for The New York Times could not protect him.

According to China’s law of criminal detention, the police can detain a person for no more than 30 days with an extension of seven days. The detention concludes either with release or official arrest. It seems that Du could not escape the fate of the legal process.

For years, Du Bin has worked on the bottom of society and recorded the miserable fate of the underprivileged through his photography and writing. The protagonists of his books are common people who were kept in the so-called illegal prisons for trifling infractions, or those whose homes have been demolished, or persecuted Falun Gong practitioners, to name a few. He also wrote a book on Mao Zedong which exposed the tyrant’s schizophrenic character and his book on dissident artist Ai Weiwei is well known too.

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