Chen Yunfei’s Closing Statement Before the Court

Chen Yunfei, March 31, 2017

The Sichuan-based activist was arrested in April, 2015, for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” He was tried on December 26, 2016, a six-month delay from the scheduled trial in June. On March 30, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. He attended yesterday’s hearing in pajamas, and upon hearing his sentence, called out, “I will appeal; it’s much too light!” — The Editors

Dear lawyers and crooks of public security apparatus, procuratorate, and court,

I’ve been tormented for two years now, to the point that I’ve started to feel like the Monkey King (孙悟空) trapped in the searing flames of Lao Zi’s crucible — exceedingly comfortable. The persecution, the beatings, the shackling, have all turned into mathematical problems for me to solve. The harder they get, the more interesting it is, the more meaningful it feels to unravel them. I must once again give thanks to you crooks in the public security, the procuratorate, and the court systems — it’s you who made me what I am. I’m grateful to you for turning me into a brand ambassador for freedom of speech and opposition to violent tyranny! That sort of international renown has almost overwhelmed even my vaingloriousness, because I’m actually not that great or brave.

My case is pretty typical, actually. Anyone with an ounce of common sense and conscience knows that I’m innocent. You crooks, with your baseless accusations, are the ones flagrantly guilty of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Everything I’ve ever said and done has been entirely within the framework of the law: lodging complaints against, exposing, and criticizing Zhou Yongkang (周永康), Li Chuncheng (李春城), and Li Kunxue (李昆学), all of them imposters and tyrants. There are only two possible reasons for the crooks in Chengdu city, Sichuan province, and the Central Politico-Legal Commission, to get involved in this sort of naked attack on a dissident: either they’re lackeys of Zhou and Li and they want to get in some payback, or else they’ve taken the political terror tactics of the Zhou Yongkang era — surveillance, threats, beatings, black jails, kidnappings — and are now plainly and flaglantry regularizing them.

Put another way, you crooks in the public security, the procuratorate, and the court systems are now even more poisonous, even more diseased than ever. In both the Zhou and post-Zhou eras, I used to earnestly, from my heart, tell those officials hanging about outside the jailhouse: “Before you is an endless abyss; behind you is the shore, a way out.” But they didn’t listen. Later, they themselves got investigated and jailed one after another: from Zhou Yongkang to Li Chuncheng, then to Li Kunxue. Netizens joked that I was able to put the hex on people.

Right now, given the present circumstances, everyone’s asking me to give a closing statement at the end of my trial. I can only say this: even if you crooks yank back the reins right now, you’re still going over the cliff, and the dictatorship with it. After Wen Qiang (文强, a top judicial official in Chongqing, executed by Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun) it was Wang Lijun (王立军); after Li Kunxue, who will it be? I pray once again: Lord, forgive me my sins (not the “sins” the crooks accused me of). I pray that you also forgive these crooks, for they know not what they do. This prayer is made in the name of Jesus, Son of the Heavenly Father.

Stated by: Chen ‘Criminal’ Yunfei (advanced amateur beast tamer)

Title: In the process of being upgraded

March 30, 2017

Related:

Tamer of Beasts, Tamer of Despots, Liao Yiwu, May 24, 2015

Translated from Chinese by China Change.

Share this: Tweet



Print

Email



Like this: Like Loading...