The parents of Xin Shang, a 29-year-old filmmaker from southern Dalian, China, received a notice this week that he had been arrested for reciting a William Shakespeare sonnet at an anti-government protest in November, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Thursday.
An interview published in the Chinese-language edition of Deutsche Welle last week with an anonymous friend of Xin’s indicated that the young aspiring filmmaker disappeared around January 7, presumably into police custody, after checking in regularly with police following his appearance at a protest on Beijing’s Liangma Bridge in November.
Xin’s status remains unknown at press time. He is believed to be facing charges of “endangering public safety” for the crime of reading poetry.
Xin is the latest in a growing number of missing young Chinese people to resurface in security agent custody after the nationwide anti-communist protests in November. On the last weekend of that month, thousands of people took the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and other major cities against the communist regime. Protesters, disgusted by the needless deaths of dozens in a locked-down apartment complex in Urumqi, East Turkistan, demanded an end to China’s brutal lockdown and forced quarantine policies. Many additionally challenged the regime itself with what is now known as “blank paper” protests by holding up blank pieces of paper, a symbol of what their government legally allows them to express.
Following the protests, many young people – especially young women, and especially those in white-collar careers or with advanced educations – began disappearing. Some resurfaced in prison on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – a Communist Party catch-all for political dissidence – or public endangerment. The Chinese government announced it would “optimize” its coronavirus protest, claiming to eliminate large-scale lockdowns and quarantine imprisonment, after the protests. The number of suspected protesters confirmed disappeared into police custody has continued to grow following that announcement, however, prompting a wave of fear and silencing the protest wave for now.
Xin Shang, known also as Alan Xin or Alan Shinn, attended the Liangma bridge protest in November but by all accounts did not shout anti-government slogans or engage in any overtly political discourse. Instead, the young man requested to address the crowd and proceeded to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, known most commonly by its famous first line, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Xin shouted the poem’s lines into the faces of frustrated police officers, who demanded he “cooperate” and the crowd disperse. While he was not filmed making any political statements, the crowd responded to his reading by shouting “freedom of speech,” a dangerous sentiment outlawed in China.
Fellow attendees at the protest filmed Xin’s reading and video of the incident went viral on Chinese social media. Chinese speakers abroad translated the event and shared it on Western outlets. Xin wore what appears to be a sanitary mask on his chin but did not cover his face, which likely made it easier for police to later identify him.
In an interview with Deutsche Welle published on Friday, a woman identified only as Lily, a friend of Xin’s, stated that Xin did not have any involvement with other groups of dissidents arrested following the protests, the most prominent of which was a group of young, professional women using a WeChat account to discuss politics and society. WeChat is a heavily censored Chinese social media application.
Lily described Xin as being from a family of “highly educated intellectuals” and confirmed that he studied photography at the University of Westminster. She said he did not know he was being filmed when he recited Shakespeare and she believed that police used face recognition technology on the viral video to find and arrest him.
“I hope Xin Shang’s experience will be widely reported. He just went to the scene and read a poem,” Lily said. “They are so scared because they are the ones who did something wrong, right?”
She added that he spent his birthday, January 15, in police custody, but said that she, personally, felt the protests had helped her overcome feeling “disheartened and hopeless about this place.”
Xin appears to have received his master’s degree in documentary photography at the University of Westminster in 2018. He maintained an Instagram account, potentially left over from his time in the West, and a Facebook account. Most Chinese citizens are forced to use WeChat, Weibo, or other government-controlled outlets, barred from Western alternatives.
An account appearing to belong to Xin most recently posted on Instagram in April to protest the brutal lockdown of Shanghai, a city of 26 million people, that month.
“Some of my friends have been in their room for nearly 30 days,” the account posted in a comment.
Xin belongs to a younger Chinese generation that has drifted politically far from the Communist Party and made up a significant percentage of those protesting in November. The WeChat group Lily mentioned in the Deutsche Welle interview contains several women still missing at press time. One woman, 26-year-old Cao Zhixin, filmed a video and left it with friends to be published if she disappeared following the protests. Cao remains missing at press time and her video went viral.
Cao said in her video that she and her friends had attended a peaceful vigil for the victims of the Urumqi fire before police rounded them up.
“They were forced to sign a blank arrest warrant with no location of their detention or their charges,” Cao said of her friends.
“What we did was to express our feelings in a reasonable way. We were sympathetic to those who lost their lives, so we went there. It was a mourning event attended by thousands of people,” she asserted. “We observed order. If attending a mourning event is the reason to arrest us, how much room is there left for sharing our feelings?”
Another of the missing, Nankai University professor Wu Yanan, managed to post a message on social media denouncing that she had been abducted into a psychiatric facility in December and staff there were drugging her. Wu had posted messages on social media supporting her students who participated in anti-government protests before her disappearance.
Wu’s social media account later posted a strange statement claiming she was “under the influence of mental illness” when she denounced her abduction.
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