no signal

There seems to be a trend emerging; relatives of people detained in China blogging about the experience. Now Nina Wu, Hao Wu’s sister, has followed in the footsteps of Hu Jia’s wife Zeng Jinyan and started her own blog. It’s in Chinese, but her first lengthy post has been translated and is available at RConversation. As Rebecca says, “it is a chilling account of what it's like to be the family member of a Chinese person who has been detained without charge.” This extract struck me as particularly sinister:

In the evening, while eating dinner with friends, I found out that a friend had a terrifying experience this afternoon. He tried calling me and J for a long time, but the call wouldn't go through. He worried that we had had an accident. Thankfully, he persisted in dialing the number until the call went through. Only then was his mind at ease. It was strange, because at the time I was in XXXX's [sic] hall, where the cell phone signal was excellent, but my phone didn't ring. I checked the call record but there were no missed calls. Why didn't it go through? I thought about it and realized that other friends also complained that I wasn't answering my phone.

Very fishy. Finally, like a martyr saying her final words, I gave my friends contact information for my husband and my former employer. I felt disconnected from reality, like in a novel. Would anything really happen? I had thought that a person disappearing without a trace was something that only happened in novels, but hadn't that already happened in real life too?

Isolation through cutting off mobile telephony; a model of modern dictatorial practice.

Anyway, more as and when.