Interview with Four Elderly Women Protesting at the Foreign Affairs Ministry (video)

Sun Lin, activist and freelance journalist, interviews four elderly women, average age 72.5 years old, who have been staging a sit-in in front of the Foreign Affairs Ministry for more than 40 days to call for open government information and citizen participation in drafting China’s human rights report. The women think the Sino-U.S. Human Rights Dialogue, though a step forward in improving the human rights situation in China, is opaque and therefore difficult to understand. The video finishes with an excerpt from an opera produced during the Cultural Revolution, showing an anti-Japanese hero singing a plaintive song about the suffering of the people under Japanese rule.