Jiangsu Human Rights Defender Ma Yuzhen Arbitrarily Detained by Police While Eating on Beijing’s Wangfujing Street

(Rights Defense Network Information Center report) On October 14, 2026, this outlet learned that at 12 noon on October 12, 2026, Jiangsu human rights defender Ma Yuzhen had just finished eating at a McDonald’s restaurant on Beijing’s Wangfujing Street and come outside when two police officers suddenly appeared. They asked how she had come to Beijing and what she was doing there. Ma Yuzhen said, “Is eating also against the law?” Although the officers said verbally that eating was not illegal, they still took her to the Wangfujing Street Police Station and detained her for several hours. During this time, the officer with badge number 028283 behaved abusively.

Ma Yuzhen had come to Beijing this time to collect the detention notice for her husband, Jiang Zhanchun. On September 16, 2026, Jiang Zhanchun went sightseeing at Tiananmen in Beijing. Despite having committed no offense, he was detained for 10 days by the Tiananmen Branch on the grounds of “disrupting public order” solely because he had not made an appointment in advance, and his family was not notified promptly. Only after Ma Yuzhen called 110 did the police call back to inform her that her husband had been detained. They then failed to provide or mail the detention notice to his family. Ma Yuzhen had no choice but to apply to obtain the detention notice by mail. On October 1, Ma Yuzhen received a phone call from the petition office of the Tiananmen Branch, informing her that the detention notice could be obtained and arranging for a family member to collect it after October 8. But when Ma Yuzhen went to collect the detention notice, she was told that the local government’s representative office in Beijing had taken the notice that should have been collected by the family. On her way to the representative office, Ma Yuzhen was stopped and questioned by police again at the south entrance of Zhengyi Road. Ma Yuzhen asked the police to show their police identification to carry out law enforcement, but the officer said that wearing a uniform meant there was no need to show law enforcement credentials. The officer then took Ma Yuzhen to the Qianmen Police Station, saying that Ma Yuzhen was not an ordinary petitioner but a “special petitioner.” Ma Yuzhen asked the police to provide law enforcement paperwork, but they refused and behaved abusively, until an auxiliary police officer sent by the local government’s representative office in Beijing came to pick her up.

The experiences of Jiang Zhanchun and Ma Yuzhen, along with those of many other rights defenders in Beijing, show that Beijing has become a forbidden zone for rights defenders. Beijing police can stop, question, detain, and restrict the personal freedom of rights defenders at will and without any legitimate reason. The only reason is that these people have been labeled “petitioners.”