Authorities in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan detained a mother whose child was killed under a collapsed school building in the devastating 2008 earthquake after she posted information about parents' campaigns for compensation to a popular Twitter-like service.
Zhou Xingrong, whose child died in the collapse of the Juyuan Middle School in Sichuan's Dujiangyan city, near Chengdu, on May 12, 2008, said she was taken away by police on Wednesday and held for nine hours, tied to a chair.
After she fainted several times, police transferred her to a nearby detention center.
"They tormented me in the interview room from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.," Zhou said. "I fainted several times."
During her detention, Zhou was shown a document charging her with "revealing state secrets," although she wasn't allowed to keep a copy, she said in an interview after her release on Thursday.
"I was sitting there in the [police station] interview room, and they charged me," Zhou said. "They [said they could] haul me in or let me be, and that they would haul me in if I didn't behave myself."
"If I did behave myself, they would cut me some slack," she said.
She said police had linked the charges to various posts she had made on a popular microblogging platform about the struggle by parents who lost children in the earthquake to receive compensation that had already been promised by the authorities.
The posts also included certain "secret documents," police told Zhou, and also pointed to her previous contact with the Sichuan-based Tianwang rights website, run by activist Huang Qi, as evidence of previous "law-breaking," she said.
Compensation
Parents of thousands of schoolchildren killed in the earthquake have been harassed and detained by police after they tried to sue the government over allegations of shoddy construction in local schools, and lawyers across China have been warned not to take any cases.
They have also met with official harassment following long-running attempts to claim compensation they say is owed them under the government's quake reconstruction plan.
The government says it has poured 787.1 billion yuan (U.S $120 billion) in reconstruction funds into the region since the devastating earthquake killed more than 80,000 people on May 12, 2008, and that reconstruction work in Sichuan is "basically complete."
A group of 26 parents from four schools in the area were detained in Chengdu after they traveled to petition at China's annual parliamentary meetings in Beijing last month, according to a Juyuan Middle School parent surnamed Zhao.
Zhao said that two or three other local parent activists had been detained in addition to Zhou while the group was away.
The petitioning group had only just now been released, Zhao said in an interview on Thursday.
Reconstruction
