A woman who defaced a poster of Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2018 appears to have released a new video in which she says she is on “the brink of breaking down” due to intensive surveillance.
Dong Yaoqiong is known as “ink girl” for live-streaming a video of herself splashing ink on a poster of Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2018 while accusing the Communist Party of “thought control. Dong, then aged 28, was sent to a psychiatric facility and released in January this year.
HKFP was unable to verify the veracity of the clip uploaded to Twitter on Monday.
In the clip, Dong said it had been arranged that she should work at a local government office after being released from the psychiatric facility: “It’s actually surveillance in the name of work, because my every move is restricted, all I do at work is typing up documents and making phone calls,” Dong purportedly said.
“I have decided to tweet now because I no longer fear them. If they lock me in an institution again, it’s fine – I’ll take being locked up for life. However, I must fight for my own freedom, my freedom to work, my freedom to meet friends. I have lost all my freedoms, they’re restricted.”
Dong also said she had lost contact with her father until recently, and she only knew from activist Ou Biaofeng that he had barely escaped from a collapsed mine in Yuan Jiangshan, Hunan.
“I didn’t even know what happened to my father until Ou Biaofeng told me. That’s why I don’t want to live this life anymore.”
Ou told Apple Daily that Dong had finally managed to contact her father on Tuesday. Ou had tweeted updates about him on Sunday, saying he was one of two miners who escaped while 13 more were trapped.
At the end of the new video, Dong said she would accept the consequences for tweeting it.
“I won’t think about the consequences of tweeting tonight, I will take the consequences. I just want to ask what did I do wrong? Have I violated the law?”
Dong’s video has since been deleted from her account. Twitter is banned in China but can sometimes be accessed through a VPN.
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