A Notice of Appeal
To the Relevant Leaders:
My name is Chen Jingyuan, and I was sentenced to 20 months in prison for the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble [Refer to: Criminal Judgment (2023) Yun 0112 Xing Chu 57]. After carefully reading the judgment, I found that there are many inconsistencies with the actual situation, and the logic of the judgment is quite hasty and arbitrary. After much thought, I decided to file an appeal, mainly to discuss the following two points:
First, my actual behavior does not meet the conviction conditions for picking quarrels and provoking trouble in the Criminal Law. According to the relevant provisions of the Criminal Law, the crime of spreading rumors and picking quarrels and provoking trouble on the Internet must meet two necessary conditions: the disseminator himself knows and there is indeed false rumor in the content disseminated; the dissemination process leads to disorder and even mass incidents. Regarding the first type of condition, I can only say that I am currently unable to determine the truth or falsity of the articles I forwarded. In fact, as Plato said, I am just a prisoner imprisoned in a cave. Objective reality is obscured to me, and I can only perceive and imagine the tip of the iceberg, not the whole picture. Years of study and research have taught me that I should maintain a critical and open attitude towards various information or viewpoints, and should not categorically deny or accept them all. Relatively speaking, the effect of the dissemination process can be evaluated more objectively. I myself have conducted in-depth research on similar issues in the research institute, and can even quantitatively calculate relevant physical quantities such as propagation speed, propagation distance, network topology variables, and complexity or chaos indicators such as Shannon information entropy and Kolmogorov metric entropy. Simple reasoning can show that my forwarding behavior did not cause an effective dissemination process, let alone the so-called serious network order chaos. Therefore, the two types of conditions for the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble are not met, and my behavior does not constitute the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble.
Second, I feel that the sentence is too heavy, far beyond my expectations. After I was arrested, through the repeated pointing out of relevant personnel handling the case, I realized that I did have some undesirable or emotional inappropriate remarks on the Internet, which fortunately did not lead to major catastrophic consequences, but I may indeed bear the unshirkable responsibility for it, and I should accept the necessary punishment and discipline, which is beneficial for me to further improve myself and for my future life. However, the sentence in the judgment was still far beyond my expectation. In my understanding, I have never seen a precedent of being imprisoned for watching videos, cartoons, or other works of art, or for forwarding and commenting on online articles; and what makes me especially incomprehensible is that thousands of netizens who watched, forwarded, and commented on the same content as me, as well as the original authors of these works, have not been arrested or even sentenced like me, and I am the only person who has been tried and sentenced as the only criminal without accomplices. I think such a judgment is extremely unfair to me.
I hope that the relevant leaders can conduct a further reasonable and regular trial of my case on the above two points, clarify the basic facts, clarify the vague and hasty judgments in the previous judgment, conduct a reasonable and accurate assessment of my mistakes or errors and their degree of harm, and give me a fair judgment. I am extremely apprehensive and grateful!
[Chinese]