When the village of Wukan in southern China threw out Communist Party officials and protested for three months this past fall, one village leader paid for the resistance with his life, dying in police custody under suspicious circumstances.
Xue Jinbo’s family now faces a choice: they can continue to demand a complete and just accounting of what happened to Xue, and seek punishment for the officials responsible, understanding that in doing so they will likely bring retribution on their own heads; or they can forget about it, accept a cash payoff, and “admit” that he died from a heart attack, disavowing what they believe was Xue’s torture and murder.
The deceased leader’s daughter, Xue Jianwan, has for months maintained a public and emotional microblog documenting her family’s struggle with decisions like these. She describes her own feelings in often raw detail, carries on conversations with other microblog users to evaluate her options, and above all keeps a chronicle of her encounters with Communist Party officials—the source of much of her distress.
Her account on Sina Weibo, the most popular of the Twitter-like microblogs in China, appears to have been opened in late September—but not until January of this year does her writing begin in earnest. That was after her father died and the public Wukan standoff was largely resolved.
Xue Jinbo, her 43-year-old father, died on the evening of Dec. 11, two days after he was taken into custody. Officials said it was “sudden death due to heart failure.” But Xue Jinbo had no history of heart problems (the authorities confiscated his medical records, so the family can no longer prove that.)
Xue and her family were able to see the body. It bore signs of torture: the wrists were swollen, the thumb had been broken back, the forehead and chin were bloodied, the chest was badly bruised, blood was caked in the nostrils, the neck was black, and the body was scarred, bruised, swollen, and black.
The body already smelled, and Xue suspected that he'd been beaten to death on the same day he was abducted from a restaurant while eating lunch.
