A Chinese woman took to social media to talk about a scary ordeal she and her five friends went through with the Chinese police. She accused the police of forcing her and her friends to sign blank arrest warrants and detaining them in secret locations for attending a protest in Beijing last year, The Guardian reported.
The video, which reportedly shows Cao Zhixin, a 26-year-old editor at Peking University Press, began spreading online on Monday. In the video, Cao said she and five friends attended a riverside vigil in Beijing on November 27 last year to mourn the victims of a building fire in Urumqi. The fire had become a catalyst for vigils and protests and had been linked to the public backlash against the government’s stringent zero-COVID policy.
They were summoned by police a few days later, and released after 24 hours, the video said. However, between December 18 and 24, all were detained again, Cao being the last of them. She said she had instructed her other friends to publish the video if she was arrested having recorded the video after several of her friends had been detained.
“When you see this video I have been taken away by the police for a while, like my other friends,” Cao says in the video. Cao said her friends were made to sign blank arrest warrants, without criminal accusations listed, and that police refused to reveal the location of their detention. Her video was widely shared on western social media platforms and in messaging groups which monitor human rights in China. However, there was little sign of it on China’s internet, which is strictly monitored and controlled, reported The Guardian.
Chinese authorities started rounding up people who protested against Covid-19 policy
On January 11 this year, NPR confirmed that Cao along with seven other people had been arrested in connection with peaceful demonstrations held across the country last November. The protests began after the Uruqmi fire which took the lives of ten people after they were unable to escape their blazing apartment due to pandemic lockdown measures.
Infuriated by nearly three years of stringent COVID-19 policies, residents of nearly every major Chinese city held vigils commemorating the lives of the those who had died while trapped under lockdown curbs or because they were denied potentially life-saving care.
China is currently seeing a massive rise in COVID-19 infections with authorities reporting that more than 60,000 people have died since December.