China’s Ailing Prisoners Gao Yu, Like so Many Others, is Denied Basic Medical Care.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-ailing-prisoners-1435595053
Gao Yu is 71 years old, a grandmother and a political prisoner of China’s Communist regime. She’s now 14 months into her latest prison term, and her family says her health is deteriorating because the government is denying basic medical care.
After a prison visit this month, Ms. Gao’s brother reported that she is suffering from severe heart pain and a chronic skin allergy. Her heart troubles date to 1989, when she was jailed for 15 months amid Beijing’s suppression of the student-led pro-democracy movement, which she covered as a journalist. She was jailed again for six years in 1993 for “leaking state secrets,” the same pretext used to imprison her most recently.
Ms. Gao’s supposed crimes include exposing “Document No. 9,” a government directive exhorting officials—diplomats, state-media journalists, university administrators and others—to battle seven “false ideological trends.” These include “Western constitutional democracy,” the notion that “freedom, democracy and human rights are universal and eternal,” and “the West’s idea of journalism.” Ms. Gao denies revealing the secret memo, but her persecution is consistent with its authoritarian contents.
So is her brother’s claim that she is suffering medical neglect in prison. In 2013 activist Cao Shunli was detained at Beijing’s airport while trying to fly to a United Nations meeting in Geneva. At the time she had a manageable liver condition treated with medication. But her jailers withheld the medication and watched her condition worsen. Ms. Cao then developed tuberculosis and uterine fibroids. Her family protested, but she died six months later at age 52.
Chinese leaders rarely face diplomatic or journalistic questioning about such cases. If pressed, they issue denials or blame local officials. But these abuses are widespread.
Imprisoned rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was denied his medication upon arrest last year. The family of Zhu Yufu—who has been jailed since 2011 for writing a poem—says he suffers hypertension, angina and other ailments without adequate treatment. Chen Kegui, jailed since 2012 for scuffling with police who raided his home in search of his uncle, blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, received treatment for appendicitis only after his case earned international headlines.
Ms. Gao’s plight also deserves greater attention. As a journalist she is a leading expert on China’s leaders, having documented Xi Jinping’s disdain for the Soviets who allowed their regime to collapse peacefully.
“Your sentencing can destroy my health but it can’t destroy my spirit,” Ms. Gao told a Chinese court in 1994, as quoted recently by the South China Morning Post. “I believe China’s history will declare me innocent.” She shouldn’t have to wait for the verdict of history.
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