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23 March, 2009
Yao Fuxin, a Chinese labour activist who led a 2002 peaceful protest against the corruption that drove a steel mill into bankruptcy, was released from prison 16 March. He served a full seven-year term for “subversion of state power.”
In March 2003, after a hasty four-hour trial two months earlier, Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang were sentenced to prison terms for leading worker protests demanding back wages and pension payments at the Liaoyang Ferroalloy mill in northeastern Liaoning Province.
In March 2002, some 15,000 workers at five metal-working operations protested against government and management corruption at state-run enterprises in China’s steel belt. At the Liaoyang Ferroalloy facility a year earlier, workers there alleged that 2,000 tons of iron ore disappeared, leading to bankruptcy and non-payment of wages and benefits.
Xiao Yunliang, a retired metalworker, was released just three weeks before his four-year prison term was up in March 2006.
But Yao Fuxin persevered through harsh conditions at Lingyuan No. 2 prison where he suffered two heart attacks, a stroke, and was consistently placed before an open window in the cold of winter. He also suffered from sleep depravation. Prison officials ordered other prisoners to step on him when he fell asleep.
Upon his release last week, Yao Fuxin, now 63, expressed no remorse. “There’s nothing wrong with what I did,” he said in a telephone interview with a news wire service, adding he and others were only exercising their rights under China’s constitution. “I feel no regret at all. What I did was protect the interests of the country and the interests of the people, the law-given interests of the workers.”