Chinese journalist Liu Wei’an is serving a 14-year sentence on charges of extortion and accepting bribes. Guangzhou police arrested Liu in Guangdong province on June 5, 2013.
The Shaoguan People’s Procuratorate, a state legal body, issued statements on June 22 and 24, 2013, that said Liu and Hu Yazhu, a staff reporter for the official Guangdong Communist Party newspaper Nanfang Daily, had confessed to accepting bribes while covering events in the northern city of Shaoguan, after they were arrested.
Hu and Liu were sentenced to 13 years and 14 years in prison respectively on June 20, 2014, for accepting bribes and for extortion, according to Shaoguan Daily, a government-run newspaper.
Hu and Liu, a freelance writer, had both written articles published in 2011 in Nanfang Daily and on news websites about a dispute involving the illegal extraction of rare minerals in Shaoguan.
The prosecutors’ statement said Hu and Liu accepted 493,000 yuan (about US$82,200) in bribes. The pair were stripped of their press cards and banned from journalism for life, according to news reports.
Users on the Weibo social media platform said they suspected the reporters’ arrests were in retaliation for their reports that exposed problems in the government and judiciary. In June 2014, Liu’s wife published an article on Weibo accusing the prosecutors of fabricating wrongful cases to retaliate against the journalists. The article was taken down by the social media platform.
CPJ could not determine where Liu was imprisoned or his health condition in detention in late 2024.
As of late 2024, the Shaoguan City People’s Procuratorate had not replied to CPJ’s request for comment.