As the painfully shy Liu Di sips a coffee near the business district of Beijing, she observes the stream of shoppers and commuters flowing by the window. She comments on their 'normal, safe, predictable' lives, and thanks her lucky stars that for her, too, 2005 was dull and uneventful.
Better known by her online moniker, Stainless Steel Rat, Ms Liu's preceding couple of years were anything but. This plump, 25-year-old psychology student spent more than a year in Beijing's notorious Qincheng Prison, sharing a cell with up to five other women. By day she would sit on a production line and put together paper bags, mind-numbing work that gave her plenty of time to think about how exactly she had landed herself in such a dire situation. Now, just a year after her release, she is still not a whole lot wiser.
By her own admission, she's not a particularly sociable type, and found comfort in the faceless world of the internet. All her life she had gobbled up books, from science fiction to political science, and as a student loved the cut and thrust of online debates, with postings rich in satire and sarcasm. While she would merrily poke fun at the society around her and the Communist Party that controls it, her writings did not stand out as being particularly subversive. So it didn't make sense to her friends when a dozen public security officers swooped on her university and took her away in a squad car, its siren screeching.
Along with three acquaintances, she was accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Online, she had met Spring Snow, whose real name was apparently Li Yibing. He said he was a great admirer of her writings and wanted to meet her and her online friends, to whom she introduced him. At times he would come out with comments about laying down political challenges to the government, which Ms Liu and her friends laughed off. At one stage he said he wanted to set up his own party and showed them a poorly written platform which, after much pestering, she finally agreed to help him edit.
That edit came back to haunt her in the interrogation cell, as did some of the conversations she and her friends had had with Mr Li. This was all evidence that there were plans afoot to attempt to overthrow the state, the police said. But the accusations of subversive behaviour were not being levied at Mr Li, but only at Ms Liu, her friend Wu Yiran and in particular Jiang Lijun, an online associate she had met only once. The upshot was that she and Ms Wu were held for more than a year, while the 38-year-old Jiang was convicted of subversion and sentenced to four years in prison.
Spring Snow, however, disappeared. On her release, Ms Liu tried desperately to find him, but failed: she is now convinced he was an agent sent to entrap them.