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GAO YU |
One of the first arrested at Tiananmen Square during the 1989 demonstrations, Gao Yu was jailed repeatedly and labeled an “enemy of the people” for reporting on Chinese reform efforts in Hong Kong’s Mirror Monthly. She remains under house arrest.
Gao was one of the first people to be arrested in the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. She was detained on June 3, 1989, the day before the Chinese army put a bloody end to the reform movement. She was later labeled an “enemy of the people” by the mayor of Beijing for a November 1988 article in Hong Kong’s Mirror Monthly, which the mayor called the “political program” for “turmoil and rebellion.” After her arrest in June 1989, she was jailed without formal charge for 15 months until the authorities released her on grounds of ill health.
Gao was arrested again on Oct. 2, 1993, for supposedly leaking state secrets in a series of four articles written under a pseudonym, which appeared in Mirror Monthly and Overseas Chinese Daily. The secrets in question described structural and economic changes planned by the Chinese Communist Party, which had already been reported in the Hong Kong press, including pro-Beijing papers. Her arrest came two days before she was to depart for New York to begin a one-year fellowship at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Held incommunicado by state security officials for several months, she was sentenced on Nov. 10, 1994, to six years in prison after grossly unfair judicial proceedings.
Gao was initially tried on April 20, 1994, at which time the court held that evidence against her was insufficient. However, instead of acquitting her, the court ordered the prosecutor’s office to find additional evidence for its case. According to court papers, she was charged with having obtained classified documents from Gao Chao, a Communist Party official and a former university acquaintance. Gao Chao was given a 13-year prison term for accepting bribes and providing state secrets to Gao Yu and others.
Gao Yu’s sentence was widely viewed as a warning to other Chinese journalists not to report on sensitive topics. “This sentence can devastate my health but not my spirits,” Gao said. “I am willing to sacrifice all that I have for my country’s modernization and journalism.” She served all but nine months of her sentence despite suffering from Ménière’s disease, which causes hearing loss and heart problems. She was promised parole for medical treatment if she signed a confession, but, maintaining her innocence, she refused the offer.
Gao was born in February 1944 and began her career in 1979 as a reporter for the China News Service. In 1988 she became deputy chief editor of the Economics Weekly magazine, which was run by dissident intellectuals and shut down by the authorities after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. She also worked as a free-lance journalist for several newspapers and magazines in China and Hong Kong.
She has received many international awards in absentia for her principled stands, including the first annual UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize in 1997. At the time, Beijing threatened to withdraw from UNESCO in protest and condemned Director-General Federico Mayor for supporting her nomination. In a message relayed through relatives during one of their monthly prison visits, Gao expressed her gratitude for the support and vowed, “When I leave prison and regain my freedom, I will use my pen to repay the world and my homeland.”
Go to the List of IPI Press Freedom Heroes
Go to the IPI Publication "IPI 50 World Press Freedom Heroes", 2000