With his thin frame, shabby suit and graying hair, Chen Pingfu, who played his violin for handouts on the streets of the northwestern Chinese city of Lanzhou, hardly seemed to be a threat to anyone. But after he wrote a series of online essays criticizing the country’s ruling Communist Party, the 55-year-old laid-off teacher was accused of “inciting subversion of state power” — a criminal charge generally reserved for China’s most prominent dissidents.
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