Chinese Woman Sentenced to One Year of Hard Labor for Tweet

Cheng Jianping, @wangyi09, was sentenced to a year of hard labor in a Chinese "re-education" camp for retweeting a message from her fiance urging protesters to destroy a section of the Shanghai Expo.

The tweet was actually a retweet, sent by her fiance Hua Chunhui in the midst of anti-Japanese demonstrations in China last month. The original tweet urged the protesters to smash Japan's pavilion at the Shanghai Expo; Cheng Jianping merely retweeted it, adding the words, "Charge, angry youth."

According to Hua, the tweet was just a joke, but it was enough for the Chinese authorities to accuse her of disrupting social order, and sentence her to one year of labor in the Shibali River women's labour camp in Zhengzhou City in Henan Province. Hua was also arrested by the police but was released after five days.

The 46-year-old Cheng, whose Twitter nickname is wangyi09, is a social activist, and was already detained for five days in August this year after she voiced support for Liu Xianbin, the organizer of the China Democracy Party.

Read the full story at Mashable.