China Jails Activist Granny for Organising Protests

A 65 year old grandmother in Shanghai has been sentenced to three and a half years in jail, for what authorities say was a public disruption of order when she organised a protest campaigning for better retirement benefits.

A 65 year old grandmother in Shanghai has been sentenced to three and a half years in jail, for what authorities say was a public disruption of order when she organised a protest campaigning for better retirement benefits.

According to a report by the AFP, Madam Zhang Weimin was planning a peaceful demonstration of hundreds of likeminded retirees in Shanghai, in November last year, when the Chinese authorities decided to put a stop to her campaign. 

Zhang is the leader of a group of Shanghai residents — now retired — who was sent to the far western region of Xinjiang in the 1960s to work as part of a policy of dispatching so-called “educated youth” to rural areas.

Many have now returned from the eastern commercial city of Xinjiang, but they complain their pension and health benefits are much lower than other Shanghai retirees.

In April this year, Zhang was arrested by plain-clothes policemen for being an alleged ringleader, as she stood trail yesterday in a Shanghai court for “organising a crowd to cause a disturbance”, a crime that carries a three to seven-year sentence.

A fellow protester, Lu Liying, 65, recounts her story with the Telegraph.

[quote] I went to Xinjiang in 1963 with my older sister. They told us we could come back in three years, but actually we were forced to stay. We were sent to Aksu to grow cotton, wheat and rice. It was a life you could never imagine. It was desolate, hard, labour. At dinner the food was put on the ground and eight of us huddled around it. At night we dug holes in the ground and filled them with straw to sleep on. We often thought about hanging a rope from the ceiling and ending it all.[/quote]

In 1981, Shanghai agreed to take back 60,000 of its 100,000 students, who then fought for years for the same housing, medical and pension rights as citizens who never left the city. They won in 2000, a victory that has galvanised a second wave of returnees who, like Zhang and her supporters, only returned at the end of the 1990s.

But many of them think that the central-planning in China has taken away much autonomy in their problems.

“It is so expensive in Shanghai now. I cannot live on my pension. All I want is for the government to control the property prices so we can afford a one-bedroom apartment for 200,000 yuan ($31,500), but the government keeps saying it cannot help the market,” said Guan Haidong, 63, a pilot-in-training who was sent to Xinjiang in 1965.