U.S. Student Jailed in China After Critical Tweets About Government
A 20-year-old University of Minnesota student named Luo Daiqing was arrested in China and sentenced to six months in prison for sending tweets critical of the Chinese government while he was in the U.S., according to court documents reported on by Axios.
The report says that Luo was arrested in his hometown of Wuhan, where he returned after finishing up the spring semester at Minnesota, in July 2019. He was then held for several months and sentenced in November, all for posts that the government referred to as “denigrating a national leader’s image.” . . .
The student’s name is Luo Daiqing, now 20 years old. He was a first-semester freshman in Minnesota when he opened a Twitter account and posted pictures of Lawrence Limburger, a cartoon villain with an uncanny likeness to Xi Jinping: pic.twitter.com/iZbMpL9dWl
— B. Allen-Ebrahimian (@BethanyAllenEbr) January 23, 2020
This arrest and sentence could chill any criticism of the government by Chinese citizens, even when they’re in foreign countries. Over the past year, the Chinese police has escalated their fight to censor social media and crack down on critical posts by arresting more and more users who post content that they consider objectionable. (Read more from “U.S. Student Jailed in China After Critical Tweets About Government” HERE)
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