Beijing: A lawyer for a Chinese journalist who was detained last week after being linked with an online petition calling for the resignation of President Xi Jinping says his client’s exact whereabouts remain unknown after police blocked his efforts to meet his client.
Jia Jia, a 35-year-old freelance writer, was preparing to board a flight from Beijing to Hong Kong on March 15 when he was taken away by airport police. He has had no contact with family or lawyers since.
His lawyers, Chen Jiangang and Yan Xin, said police had confirmed only that Jia was taken away to “assist with an investigation”, but provided no other details, including which detention centre he was being held in.
“All I know is my client’s name is Jia Jia, and that he has been detained by police,” Mr Chen told Fairfax Media. “Other than that, we have been unable to get a single word of information [from police].”
JiaJia’s friends believe he is being investigated in connection to an incendiary open letter which criticised Mr Xi’s handling of economic, domestic and foreign affairs and called on the Chinese president to resign “for the future of the country”. The letter has sparked intense interest among watchers of elite Chinese politics, but is unlikely to have reached the broader masses with references to the letter blocked on social media platforms such as Weibo and Chinese search engines.
The letter criticised Mr Xi’s abandonment of the party’s recent tradition of “collective leadership” in favour of his centralisation of power, and said his intervention in the economy had created instability in the sharemarket and property market, “allowing the wealth of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to vanish”.
“Comrade Xi Jinping, we have no choice but to point out that, precisely due to your gathering of all power into your own hands and making decisions directly, we are now facing unprecedented problems and crises in all political, economic, ideological, and cultural spheres,” the letter said.
The anonymous letter, signed under the name of “Loyal Communist Party Members”, surfaced on the government-linked news website Wujie during China’s politically-sensitive National People’s Congress this month, before being swiftly taken down. The website said it had been hacked.
Jia has previously written pieces critical of China’s government and social problems, but had told friends before his detention that he had no involvement in the online petition.
Friends believe he may have unwittingly implicated himself when he warned an editor friend at Wujie, about the publication of the anonymous letter, believing it to be a mistake.
Early on March 5, Jia told a group chat in an online messaging app that he had spoken to Ouyang Hongliang, a Wujie editor, to let him know that the petition had been published on the site. Mr Ouyang is also thought to be missing.
“They’re handling it,” Jia told the chat group, The Associated Press reported. “I bet someone will be fired.”
A spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry said her ministry was not the right one to direct a question to.
“Lots of things happen in China every day,” spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular press briefing on Monday. “There are lots of things worth reporting in China, and you should not focus so much on individual cases.”
Jia is the latest critic of China’s government to disappear amid a sweeping crackdown on dissent and freedom of speech under Mr Xi.
Dozens of lawyers, intellectuals, activists and journalists have been detained, while five Hong Kong booksellers had also disappeared in recent months after publishing salacious material about Mr Xi and other Chinese leaders before eventually surfacing in mainland detention. Many detainees have been refused access to their lawyers.
“If you look at all of these recent political cases in China, all legal avenues have proven ineffective,” Mr Chen, the lawyer, said. “That’s because these cases have nothing to do with the law.”
