While China has stepped up its reduction in independent reporting, authorities have detained a journalist who recently worked on books criticizing communism and the Chinese Communist Party, the journalist’s friends and family said on Friday.
Journalist Du Bin, 48, was detained by police in Beijing on Wednesday, his sister Du Jirong said. Police officers told Ms. Du on Thursday that her brother had been placed in administrative detention because “he had quarrels and caused problems.” The vaguely formulated crime is one that the government often uses to stifle activism and discuss social and political issues.
Friends of Mr. Du, who worked as a freelance photographer for The New York Times, say they believe his detention could have been linked to several of his recent book projects.
A book, published in Taiwan in 2017, was a historical account of what is known as the “siege of Changchun” when communist troops blockaded the northeastern Chinese city in 1948 to starve their rival nationalist soldiers. , leading to the deaths of at least 160,000 civilians. Another book by Mr. Du, on the worse aspects of Lenin’s experiments with communism, was scheduled to be published in Taiwan on January 1, 2021.
Liu Hua, a friend of Mr. Du’s, said writing books was a small but important source of income for the journalist. She also said that Mr. Du had recently been summoned several times by police officers and was told not to post online on sensitive topics.
“It seems that the words coming out of Du Bin’s pen hurt their feelings,” Ms. Liu said.
Arriving by phone on Friday morning, an employee of the Daxing County Police Station in Beijing, where Mr. Du is believed to be detained, said he knew nothing about the case and had never heard of Mr. Du.
This is not the first time that Mr. Du’s work has angered Chinese authorities. In 2013, he was detained for just over a month after launching a documentary on a Chinese forced labor camp and publishing a book, The Tiananmen Massacre, about the government’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. . During his detention, he said at the time, he almost developed an eye infection because he kept one of his contact lenses longer than he should have, so that he could see and document every detail of his experience in custody.
China has been the world’s largest jailer of journalists this year for the second year in a row, the Committee to Protect Journalists, a media support group, said in an annual poll released this week.
Several citizen journalists who were detained in China for covering the pandemic remain in detention. This year, authorities also expelled a dozen foreign journalists, detained a foreign employee of a Chinese state media organization and detained a Chinese staff member for Bloomberg for potential violations of national security.
Activists say the drone thrown by the authorities under Xi Jinping, the country’s strong line leader, has become so indiscriminate that it has been difficult to know where the so-called red line is.
“Xi Jinping has really researched the country and swept away almost any dissident who is active in one way or another,” said Yaxue Cao, a Chinese activist in the United States.
“Given how little these dissidents can do these days and how fragmented and powerless they are,” Ms. Cao said, “it’s amazing how insecure Xi feels as he projects the image of an invincible party.”
Amy Chang Chien contributed to the reporting.