The imprisoned Liaoyang worker activist, Xiao Yunliang, has been transferred to a prison with inadequate heating facilities in a mountainous rural area near Shenyang, where temperatures are currently around minus 20 degrees C. This is his eleventh transfer since he was first imprisoned in 2002.
Xiao suffers from a wide range of serious medical conditions. However, prison authorities have so far provided him with no medication or medical treatment, other than an operation in August 2004 to correct a cataract in his right eye.
Xiao and his fellow Liaoyang worker activist Yao Fuxin were first detained in March 2002 for leading some 30,000 laid-off workers from the Liaoyang Ferro-Alloy Plant and other local factories in large-scale street protests against managerial corruption and many months of unpaid wages. In June 2003, Xiao was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, while Yao was given a seven-year prison sentence, both on trumped-up charges of political “subversion.”
Sign the new appeal for the release of Xiao Yunliang and Yao Fuxin on the China Labour Bulletin website