Chinese police in Zhengzhou city in east-central Henan province arrested editor and columnist Min Liangchen (閔良臣) in April 2024 on the charge of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble."
Min, a retired editor for the local newspaper Zhengzhou Evening Post, was indicted for publishing 290 articles online and overseas. Min's lawyer, Wang Shengsheng, visited him at the Zhengzhou No.3 Detention Center on April 9, according to the Chinese human rights news website Weiquanwang. According to the website, Min will stand trial on April 23 at the Zhengzhou Zhongyuan People's Court.
Min was born in 1956 in Shangcheng County in Henan Province. He began publishing articles on newspapers and magazines in 1986, and later served as a news editor, columnist, and writer for the fortnightly literature magazine "Zawenyuekan," Henan newspaper City Morning Post, Dahe Daily, and Zhengzhou Evening Post until his retirement in 2016 due to declining eyesight.
After his retirement, Min continued to write columns and political commentaries for overseas Chinese blogs and periodicals. He wrote about philosophy, U.S.-China relations, China's censorship and its lack of freedom of expression, as well as the government's nationalist economic policy for multiple Chinese-language news outlets and websites, including Yi Bao, an dissident outlet founded by the Washington-D.C.-based Chinese human rights organization Citizen Power Initiatives for China, and state-run newspaper China Economic Times.
On May 1, 2024, Chinese human rights website Minzhuzhongguo.org published an article by Min titled "Let's just watch after all," in which he describes the restrictive media environment in China by referencing his previous column published in the Hong Kong's magazine Phoenix Weekly 14 years ago:
...my “independent opinion” could only be independent in the act of watching—certainly not in daring to say that we shouldn’t stop at just watching. Just like the line the editor pulled from my article and placed under the headline: “In Chinese writing, especially when it comes to real life, the phrase ‘protesting the government’ is almost entirely absent.
One day in the future, if I’m allowed to say that we shouldn’t stop at just “watching” but should also learn from other countries, then I believe Chinese society will have taken a significant step forward. Of course, by the time I can say such a thing, perhaps there will no longer be a need to say it at all.
The Henan Province Public Security Department did not immediately reply to Rti’s email requesting comment.