Coronavirus Mutual Aid Volunteers in Beijing Held in "Black Jails" (RSDL)

Coronavirus Mutual Aid Volunteers in Beijing Now Held in "Black Jails" (RSDL) , 3 Millennials Forcibly Disappeared by Police 7 Days Ago 

#Terminus2049

Cai Wei and Chen Mei were frequent volunteers for many different causes while they worked in Beijing, including an online anti-censorship project called “Terminus2049” that became a critical repository of web content related to the COVID-19 outbreak in China, ranging from individual Chinese citizens’ experiences to mainstream media reports at risk of being scrubbed from the internet. Chen Mei, Cai Wei, and Cai Wei's partner, Xiaotang, went incommunicado on April 19. Their friends, family, and colleagues searched for them repeatedly and made numerous reports to the police until they were finally informed that on the same day of their disappearance, they had been taken away by public security.

When Cai Wei's mother and father discovered that they could not reach Cai Wei and his partner Xiaotang, they called the police from where they reside in another province. The police claimed to have no information. Friends went to the couple's apartment and knocked on the door to no answer. Upon calling a locksmith to open the door, his friends were stopped by the building management. They then called the local public security bureau, who informed them that the two were not inside their apartment.

Between April 23rd and 24th, the families of Cai Wei and Xiaotang both received detention notices from the Beijing Public Security Chaoyang District Branch. Cai Wei's notice stated that he was suspected of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" and had been placed under RSDL—"residential surveillance in a designated location," a form of forced disappearance that UN officials have declared to be a violation of international human rights. Xiaotang had also been placed under RSDL on suspicion of "harboring," in addition to "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" like her partner. Chen Mei's family has not yet received written notice about his status.

Cai Wei and Chen Mei were close friends who often spent their time outside of work volunteering. Among the projects they worked on was "Terminus2049" (duandianxing), a crowd-sourced online repository created in 2018 for Chinese netizens to archive content before it was censored from mainstream media outlets and social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo. The archive was hosted on the open-source code repository Github, with the goal of preventing important content from disappearing completely due to the heavy-handed censorship of the Chinese internet, where online content is often quickly removed or blocked from distribution after being posted. The project was named for the remote planet in Isaac Asimov's science fiction series Foundation where the scientific and cultural legacy of a declining galactic civilization was archived.

The work of Cai Wei and Chen Mei was critical to the defense of Chinese citizens' freedom of expression, particularly during the coronavirus outbreak. During this time, the website became an archive for articles related to the epidemic, publishing information on conditions during the epidemic and individuals' personal experiences related to the virus.

At present, it is unclear whether the detention of the three by Beijing authorities is connected to their contributions to this website.

Prior to their disappearance, the three communicated regularly with their friends and family. Now that they have been suddenly taken away, their parents and friends are desperately anxious, with no knowledge of their present condition. They sincerely hope that the world can pay close attention to their situation.

Who are they? Background information about Cai Wei, Chen Mei, and Xiaotang

Cai Wei, born in 1993, is from Hubei province and worked at an internet company in Beijing. In 2015, he obtained his undergraduate degree from the Central University of Finance and Economics. He graduated with a master’s degree in sociology from Tsinghua University in 2018. During his time in university, Cai Wei volunteered for university student-run educational summer camps for students in rural areas as well as other educational programs for adolescents.

Chen Mei was also born in 1993 and is from Shaanxi province. In 2016 he graduated from South China Agricultural University. At the time of his disappearance, he was working at a nonprofit in Beijing. Since college, he has shown steady enthusiasm for civic engagement, at one time helping to maintain a library for a students' civic engagement space and organizing speakers on related topics, among other activities.

Xiaotang is from Anhui and was born in 1990. She graduated with a master’s degree in sociology from Peking University and works for a consulting company in Beijing.