China detains own people for contesting PLA's Galwan casualty figures; forces retractions

China has detained several of its citizens for making "inappropriate remarks" about soldiers who died in a clash with India near the Line of Actual Control (LAC) last year. According to a report in South China Morning Post, at least six have been punished or investigated under a Chinese law passed three years ago that banned acts diminishing “heroes and martyrs”. The law has been criticised as being a means to silence people for questioning the official narrative.

The development comes days after the Chinese military ended its months-long silence to say that four soldiers - Chen Hongjun, 33, Xiao Siyuan, 24, Wang Zhuoran, 24 and Chen Xiangrong, 18 - were killed in the conflict in the Galwan Valley in June last year. Their commanding officer Qi Fabao, 41, was badly wounded.

China arrests popular blogger

One of the detained persons includes a popular blogger named Qui Ziming, who had over 2.5 million followers on China's Twitter-like platform- Weibo. The Nanjing Bureau of Public Security said on Saturday that Qiu Ziming, 38, was charged with "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", a vague crime that carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. The authorities accused him of demeaning military casualties of the border clash, South China Morning Post reported. He also suggested that more Chinese soldiers might have been killed in the conflict than those disclosed by the authorities.

Qiu wrote on Weibo that “all the four soldiers who died were in the process of rescuing [the colonel]. Now that the rescue team have all died, it’s clear evidence that the rescue effort failed, and there must be more people dead.”

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Meanwhile, according to a report in the Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece Global Times, Chinese netizens cheered after police detained Qui "for smearing PLA martyrs killed in the Galwan Valley border clash with India." Qui has made a full confession to his illegal smearing of martyrs which he made in order to cause an internet sensation, the mouthpiece said. 

The topic #Labixiaoqiu (Qui's online name) being detained has been viewed 180 million times and garnered 15,000 comments on Weibo as of press time. In just the past few years, the government has attempted to muzzle critics by making them disappear without a trace, ordering people to physically barge into their houses, or locking up those close to critics as a kind of blackmail.

Thousands of messages including many abusive messages have also been sent to the Indian Embassy in Beijing’s account on Chinese social media platform Weibo, expressing anger over the four deaths.

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(With agency inputs)