China arrests feminist activist Huang Xueqin after HK visit

Police in southern China detained feminist activist and journalist Huang Xueqin after she returned to the mainland from Hong Kong and Taiwan, her friends said Friday.

Authorities in Guangdong province's Guangzhou city arrested Huang last Thursday on suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble," her friends said. The vague charge is commonly used against activists viewed as threatening by the ruling Communist Party.

The friends spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared government retribution for being publicly associated with Huang. Calls on Friday to Huang's lawyer and Guangzhou's Baiyun District Detention Center, where friends say she is detained, rang unanswered.

The friends said police harassed Huang's family after she published an essay describing her experience at a protest in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese city that has been roiled by months of anti-government demonstrations.

"Perhaps, under the powerful machine of the party state, ignorance and fear can be cultivated," Huang wrote in her essay.

"But if you have personally experienced it, witnessed it, you cannot pretend to be ignorant."