This post has been corrected.
Holding out an umbrella and sticking out your middle finger while standing in front of the Taiwanese flag is probably not what any Beijing resident should be doing right now, especially with ongoing “Umbrella Revolution”protests in Hong Kong. But that’s exactly what 29-year-old Wang Zang did.
A poet and human rights activist, Wang tweeted this photo out on Sept. 30.
Inevitably, he was arrested by Beijing police, and now faces up to three years in prison. According to a statement by Wang’s wife, Wan Li, police raided their home with a blank search warrant taking a computer, router and, “for reasons that were not immediately clear, a pair of spectacles,” according to the Telegraph.
Wang, whose wife said he had been an activist since his university days, is one of at least 25 people in mainland China who have either been detained or imprisoned by Chinese authorities for supporting Occupy Central, one of the groups at the heart of the Hong Kong protests. Human Rights in China, a human rights advocacy NGO, has listed seven of them, including Wang.
Others include Wang Long, an activist in Shenzhen, who was detained after posting photos of the Hong Kong protests on Twitter, Facebook, and Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter). And activist, Ding ding, was allegedly detained for involvement with the protests, according to the Shanghaiist blog.
This post incorrectly reported that Wang was sentenced to three years in prison; his trial has not yet taken place.