【雪饼的朋友心声】China: My friend won a scholarship to study in Britain, then vanished Subtitle: Sophia Huang Xueqin is one of thousands who are 'disappeared' every year in China
By Simina Mistreanu
18 December 2021 • 6:00am
It had been a weekend of celebrations. My friend, Sophia Huang Xueqin, had marked her 33rd birthday with a series of dinners and parties organised by her friends, complete with barbecue, karaoke, two separate birthday cakes and games of mahjong.
The celebrations felt especially sweet as they were capping two difficult years for her.
A Chinese investigative journalist who had risen to prominence by documenting the #MeToo movement in China, Sophia was coming off a rocky stretch that had included a three-month detention in 2019.
This was followed by a year and a half of close surveillance by police in her hometown, the southern metropolis of Guangzhou.
Now, she was hoping she could finally leave the country. She had been admitted into a master’s programme at the University of Sussex to study gender, violence and conflict, and secured a prestigious Chevening scholarship, funded by the British government.
The last missing piece was the police’s approval to fly to Britain.
Police had told her that once she had her British visa and a plane ticket, she should call them and ask for permission to leave. Sophia was hopeful she would get it.
So the celebrations at the end of August doubled as a farewell party. “I was surrounded by love and joy, though I also knew I was being watched,” she wrote a few days later on her Facebook page.
She received her British visa in early September. A few days later, she had booked a flight, leaving from Hong Kong. She called the police to ask if she could go. The voice on the other end of the phone told her, perhaps surprisingly:
“Sure, you can leave. Would you like us to drive you to the airport?”
“I rejected them nicely,” she told me in a message.
On September 19, she was planning to travel to the border city of Shenzhen accompanied by a friend, the one-time labour activist Wang Jianbing. From Shenzhen, she was going to cross the border into Hong Kong and board her flight the next day.
But that afternoon, friends lost contact with both Sophia and Jianbing. Calls and text messages went unanswered.
They had disappeared.
Thousands like her
Thousands of people disappear annually in China into a system called “residential surveillance at a designated location”. A law passed in 2013 allows authorities to detain virtually anyone without charges and without notifying family. While more than 27,000 such disappearances have been documented by the Safeguard Defenders nonprofit since 2013, the real number could be much higher.
Recently, the disappearance of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai made international headlines: she vanished from public view last month after accusing a former vice-premier of coercing her into sex. Other high-profile cases from recent years include the temporary disappearances of Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma and Hollywood actress Fan Bingbing.
Thousands of lesser-known activists, lawyers, businesspeople and officials have also gone missing.
I reported often on such disappearances during my six years as a China correspondent. But Sophia’s case felt personal.
I met her in December 2017, when I was writing about China’s fledgling #MeToo movement.
She had decided China needed a reckoning with sexual harassment similar to what the United States was experiencing. In January 2018, she broke the story of an engineer who accused her former professor at a prestigious Beijing school of sexual harassment.
In the beginning, Sophia was very cautious about not getting in the authorities’ crosshairs.
“You have to think about what’s the safe line and what’s the red line,” she told me in the summer of 2018. “Of course, sometimes you really don’t know where it is until you touch it.”
The invisible line
In the summer of 2019, Sophia did unwittingly cross that line.
She was studying law in Hong Kong and joined the first massive anti-government protest of that summer. She wrote an essay about it, which she distributed on the Chinese social media platform WeChat.
That same night, around midnight, police turned up simultaneously at her partner’s and parents’ houses in Guangdong province, where Guangzhou is located, with the intent to take her away from wherever she was staying.
They didn’t get her that evening, but she was detained in October 2019, when she returned to Guangzhou to renew her documents so she could continue her studies in Hong Kong.
The charge authorities eventually brought against her was “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Sophia never spoke publicly about her detention but was planning to if authorities did prevent her from going to Britain, she told me. Even if that wouldn’t have secured her freedom, she wanted to hold them accountable.
She was held at a villa in Guangzhou, the location of which was unknown to her family and lawyers. During her months in detention, two police officers would stare at her for hours and scribble notes while she sat on a couch or walked around the room.
She was frequently interrogated. On occasion, police would sit her down and dissect passages from her diaries. They threatened to throw her into prison for many years. They tried to extract a written confession – a common practice in cases considered politically sensitive by authorities – but Sophia refused and insisted journalism was not a crime.
Making her life hell
After her release, in January 2020, police asked that they meet monthly for dinners at some of the fanciest restaurants in Guangzhou, she told me. They also called for frequent meetings at her neighborhood Starbucks, though she had pleaded with them to meet at the police station instead.
After her passport was returned to her this year, police encouraged her to travel outside the province so they could accompany her and have a trip on expenses.
On Chinese New Year 2021, they gifted her a red envelope with cash, and, when she refused to take it, they pressured a family member who was a public servant to accept it.
I called the Guangzhou public security bureau several times last week for a reaction, but the calls went unanswered.
Sophia was frustrated with the amount of public funds police were spending to make her life hell.
She was also steeling herself against the mind games she felt she was being subjected to. The last time I saw her, in August, she told me that as long as she could continue to stand up for herself in front of her captors, it didn’t matter whether they would detain her again.
When she was finally getting ready to leave the country, she was disappeared.
More than a month after Sophia and Jianbing’s disappearance, authorities notified their families that the pair were being investigated for “inciting to subvert state power,” though it’s unclear what events the charges refer to.
More than 50 of their friends have been temporarily detained and interrogated since. Questions have focused on the weekly dinners that Jianbing would hold for friends at his home.
Last week, the EU Delegation to China and a group of 112 Chevening scholars publicly asked for Sophia’s and Jianbing’s release – in a show of accountability the type of which Sophia had demonstrated throughout her career.
Sophia’s friends hope that international attention her case has attracted will lead to some sort of accountability. When she was detained in 2019, Chinese feminists abroad encouraged people to mail postcards to the detention centre in Guangzhou where she was initially held to let authorities know that they too were being watched.
I dare to hope that she will be freed again and allowed to pursue her studies abroad. But in today’s China, there is no telling when that might happen.