Chinese activist Lu Yuyu freed from prison after four years behind bars, lawyer says
- Lu and partner Li Tingyu were charged in 2016 with ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ for publishing the daily Wickedonna blog about protests and demonstrations staged across China
- Reporters Without Borders awarded the couple a Press Freedom prize later the same year
A Chinese activist jailed in 2016 for publishing censored information about protests, strikes and demonstrations in China has been freed, his lawyer said on Friday.
Lu Yuyu and his then girlfriend and fellow campaigner Li Tingyu were apprehended in Dali, southwest China’s Yunnan province, on June 16, 2016.
For the three years before their arrest, the couple had been running the popular Wickedonna blog, which provided a daily record of protests happening across the country, which they gleaned from social media platforms like Weibo – China’s Twitter-like service – and online message boards.
In that time they are thought to have published details of about 70,000 incidents that would otherwise have been lost to China’s censors, who strictly patrol social media accounts and delete material deemed offensive to the authorities.
After being detained, Lu and Li were charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a vague charge often used to detain dissidents in China.
