A Chinese citizen journalist who has produced satirical videos about President Xi Jinping went missing earlier this month after being taken away by police.

Ding Lingjie is believed to have been taken into police custody on June 3 after she told her friend that the police of Dingzhou city of Hebei Province were going after her. The police of the city told Ding’s younger brother that they had no knowledge of the incident.

Ding was a volunteer editor of the Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch website. She had been taken away by Beijing police multiple times being accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a charge commonly used on activists in China. In September 2017, she was nabbed over a video mocking Chinese President Xi Jinping. She was sentenced to 20 months in jail in December 2018 and was released in May 2019.

Meanwhile, another Chinese citizen journalist has been released on his 43rd birthday after spending four years in jail.

In 2013, Lu Yuyu and his girlfriend Li Tingyu founded the influential platform “Not News” covering civil rights protests in mainland China. In June 2016, they were arrested for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” They were awarded a Reporters Without Borders-TV5 Monde Press Freedom Prize in the same year.

Li was given a suspended sentence in April 2017 and was later released. Lu was sentenced to four years by a court in Dali in Yunnan Province in August that year, over eight posts on his platform.

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