By Laura HeJust ahead of what is expected to be a massive pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong on July 1 (coincidentally, the birthday of China’s Communist Party), four elderly Chinese women reportedly staged a nude protest against government corruption in front of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
According to several reports and photos by private websites Siyibao.org and Beijingcream.com, four Chinese women from the city of Xinyang in Henan province on Thursday took off their clothes and raised signs near the visa-section entrance of the embassy, demanding justice in specific cases involving their own families.
While such protests are not uncommon in China, the extreme form of the demonstration drew a lot of attention on Chinese social media and various websites.
In the photo posted on the websites, the four elderly women had words written in black all over their bodies, while they held signs reading “Grievance.”
The report by Siyibao said the words written on the bodies of the four women — aged 65, 66, 68 and 73 — included “Throw out corrupt officials! Down with corruption!” “My daughter Guo Hailing was framed in a case of blackmailing the government and arrested by corrupt officials, while my granddaughter was raped when she got lost on her way home,” “My son Yang Jin’de was done wrong! He was sentenced to 18 years in jail just because he petitioned for a redress of his grievances. And he was disabled after being tortured to extort a confession.”
On Saturday afternoon, two of the four women were “forcibly” taken away by police from Henan province who also made their way to the Chinese capital, the Siyibao report quoted Xing Mei, an eyewitness to the protest, as saying.
According to photos posted by Xinyang Guohailing, a microblogger on Sina Weibo, it was the second nude protest by the same group of women in recent months. On May 25, three of them protested in naked at Tiananmen Square before being taken away by police. (Marketwatch.com)
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