Sarcasm and 'abusive language': the remarks that led China to rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang's arrest

Detained human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was incriminated for his scathing remarks on the government’s handling of an ethnic conflict in southwestern China last year and his sarcastic comments on two officials, according to his indictment, which was circulated on the internet on Wednesday.

The Beijing People’s Procuratorate’s second branch indicted Pu last Friday on the charges of “inciting ethnic hatred” and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” for posting messages on his microblog account that “openly insulted others”. It said his acts “damaged social order” and he “should be held criminally responsible”.

The authenticity of the indictment was confirmed by Pu’s lawyer, Shang Baojun.

For the charge of “inciting ethnic hatred”, the indictment said that between January 2012 and May last year Pu had “sowed ethnic discord” by posting comments on the knife attack at a Kunming railway station in March last year on several Sina Weibo accounts. It said Pu had more than 130,000 followers, and his widely-circulated commentaries “damaged ethnic unity”.

In one message, Pu criticised the hardline policies of former Xinjiang Communist Party chief Wang Lequan after the deadly attack that was blamed on Uygur separatists. “I can believe that the terror was created by Xinjiang pro-independence [forces] – but this is the outcome, not the cause,” Pu wrote on March 2, last year. “Wang Lequan ... you’re most familiar with that place, tell me: Why? Who are they aiming at?”

For the second charge, the indictment said that since 2011, Pu had “vented his emotions” by posting messages on several Sina Weibo accounts and used “abusive language” to insult two individuals surnamed Tian and Shen. It said Pu had more than 200,000 followers on these accounts and concluded that “[this] had an adverse impact on society”.