An Open Letter

2005-09-30

September 7, 2005

On March 10, 2001, my husband Yang Zili went back to his old home in Handan, Hebei Province to attend his grandmother's funeral. According to schedule, he should have returned to Beijing at about 5 am on March 13th. To my disappointment, he didn't return. When I left home at 8:00 am, I found I was tailed and a while later I was led away by some agents of the Beijing State Security Bureau and taken into an interrogation room.

After a frisk and an inspection of my bag, they went to my home and searched the entire house. They turned everything inside out and ransacked every corner, taking away Yang Zili's computer, all kinds of documents and a lot of daily-use items. More viciously, they seized many love letters between Yang Zili and me written during the years before our marriage. During the search, I firmly refused to sign the detention warrant and search warrant by the State Security Bureau, because I believed they had seriously violated my civil rights.

After 3 days of detention by the Beijing State Security Bureau, I was released at 7:30 pm on March 15th. Before my release, a chief state security agent named Wang Jian told me, ※You have passed our investigation and may leave now." However, the condition that they released me is that I had to write a pledge to "promise not to tell anyone of the detention of Yang Zili and myself."

I hadn＊t seen my husband for more than half a year until the first trial was held. Looking at each other across the courtroom, we couldn＊t exchange any words nor were allowed to have any bodily contact.

My husband and his three friends were finally convicted of ※subversion§ and sentenced to 8 to 10 years＊ imprisonment on May 18, 2003. Three of them are now kept in the Beijing No. 2 Prison, while Mr. Zhang is in a jail in Zhejiang.

I am allowed to visit the prison to see my husband once a month across the thick window pane between us. We talk to each other by phone. We can hardly hear each other, since the room is full of visitors. Then we can only communicate with eye contact. I always found tears streaming down my cheeks on such occasions. I saw his lips move, but I could not hear anything -- we were like two weak creatures trapped in a soundless world. Time and again, I ask the Heaven and God when I can talk to my husband without policemen＊s cutting eyes and when I can hold his hands which have become so rough through hard labor.

My husband and his friends are innocent. They shouldn＊t be punished just because they initiated a study group to discuss matters of building a better society of more justice and more chance for the less privileged people, like the peasants and unemployed workers. What they said and wrote pose no threat to the society or to any specific person.

When my husband and his friends were put into prison they were at their twenties and when they have served the whole sentence they will be in the late thirties, the best years of their lives will be consumed in endless education through labor, leaving their families waiting year after year in despair. Please help to free them. Their families, some with grandparents as old as 80 years old, with wives or girlfriends as young and helpless as I am, are waiting for them to return.

I give my heartfelt thanks for your help on behalf of all the four families.

Lu Kun (the wife of Yang Zili)