Chinese woman kidnapped to labor camp on her wedding day over sarcastic re-Tweet

In an effort to prove that there are authorities even stupider than those in the UK when it comes to parsing Twitter, the Chinese government has sentenced a woman to a year in a labor camp for retweeting a message about young demonstrators who’d patriotically trashed Japanese products during a dispute over claims to some empty islands in the East China Sea. Cheng Jianping was kidnapped and sent off for forced labor on the day of her wedding, and her family didn’t discover where she was for nearly a month:

Her fiance Hua Chunhui made a satirical comment mocking youth demonstrators who smashed Japanese products in protest over a dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.

“Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan [an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]. It’s no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion,” Hua wrote.

Cheng retweeted the message and added “Charge, angry youth!” in a message, which has since disappeared from the micro-blogging site.

Hua has not been arrested. The BBC reports that Cheng has been sent to Shibali River women’s labor camp in Zhengzhou city in Henan province.

Chinese Twitter sentence: a year in a labor camp for a retweet

(via /.)