Chinese journalist disappeared after criticizing leader

A Chinese journalist disappeared March 15 and was later confirmed to be detained by the police March 18.

Jia Jia, a Beijing-based freelance journalist and columnist at the website Tencent Online, was on the phone with his wife around 8 p.m, waiting to board his flight. However, when she called 15 minutes later, he was unreachable, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. He was incommunicado until his lawyer confirmed Jia Jia had been detained by authorities, according to The New York Times.

Before he disappeared, Jia had told friends he believed the police were looking for him in relation to an open letter that went viral calling for the resignation of President Xi Jinping, according to CPJ.

“Comrade Xi Jinping, we have no choice but to point out that, precisely due to your gathering of all power into your own hands and making decisions directly, we are now facing unprecedented problems and crises in all political, economic, ideological, and cultural spheres,” the letter said, according to a translation by China Digital Times, a website run by the University of California at Berkeley.

A friend of Jia Jia, Yunchao Wen tweeted about police questioning his parents about Wen being the author of the letter. It is uncurrently unknown who the author of the letter is.

刚才我父亲告诉我，一众官员12日上午到家找他，让他问我有没有写过一封“公开信”，除了村长，其他官员不愿意说明身份，也没说明是什么“公开信”。如果指的是“关于要求习近平同志辞去党和国家领导职务的公开信”，那跟我一毛钱关系没有。我只是好奇查找出处时发现“无界新闻”刊发了这封公开信。

— Wen (@wenyunchao) March 12, 2016

“It seems it’s no longer enough for Chinese authorities to erase all trace of criticism — it now seems bent on erasing all trace of its critics, too,” Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said according to the Times.

Earlier in March, the Chinese magazine Caixin published an article on its English-language website about an interview that had been deleted by the censors from Caixin's Chinese-language website, according to the BBC. However, that article on the English-language website was deleted within a day.

China is ranked 176 out of 180 countries in the 2015 World Press Freedom Index, and had 49 journalists in its prisons, as of December 2015, according to CPJ.