A woman who is known for defacing a poster of Chinese President Xi Jinping with ink has said that she is unable to afford surgery for her father as the government is owing her two months’ pay.

Dong Yaoqiong, also called “Ink Girl” because of the 2018 poster incident, also claims that the authorities have forbidden her and her father to look for other jobs, leaving the family almost penniless, according to a post on her Twitter account on Thursday.

She denied having slacked off or skipped work, and questioned whether the government’s failure to settle her wages was intended to force her into accepting foreign aid so that authorities could convict her in a court of law and impose punishment.

Dong emphasized in her tweet that she would not accept money from outsiders.

She further said that people who were related to her had been implicated by being turned into political suspects, and bemoaned Xi’s use of the power of the nation to try to isolate the family. She would not compromise, she said.

In July 2018, Shanghai police arrested Dong after she streamed a live video of herself splashing ink on a portrait of Xi. They then sent her to a psychiatric hospital in Zhuzhou, Hunan province.

The hospital admission was made against her will, she tweeted in December last year, insisting that she was not mentally ill. Upon discharge, she was assigned to work for the local government as a way of keeping her under strict surveillance, she wrote.

Her father, Dong Jianbiao, had a close encounter with death while working in a Hunan coal mine in November last year. The mine flooded and only two workers, including the senior Dong, escaped out of the 15 who were inside.

Meanwhile, authorities locked up a human rights activist in Hunan who retweeted Dong’s post last December.

Ou Biaofeng was held for 15 days for allegedly “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” and later put under surveillance in a state-designated residential facility. Officials also changed his charge to the more serious offense of “inciting subversion of state power.”

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