Fu Yuehua

Fu Yuehua (; born 1945) was a Chinese construction worker and dissident who participated in the Democracy Wall Movement. She was detained after helping organize a demonstration in Tiananmen Square in 1979 and charged with violating public order and libel, for alleging that she was raped by a Communist Party official. She was sentenced to two years in prison.

Early life and work Fu Yuehua was born in China around 1945. She completed middle school, but was not assigned to work in the countryside. Her family lived in Beijing. She was fired from her job in 1974 and was unable to find employment elsewhere.

Fu helped to organize a protest of peasants in Tiananmen Square on 8 January 1979, the anniversary of the death of Zhou Enlai. The demonstration, calling for improved living conditions, disrupted traffic for one hour. Fu marched in the demonstration holding a bedsheet carrying the message "Against hunger, against persecution and for democracy, for human rights." At a protest against the arrest of Fu in January 1979, a dissident said that "without the freedom to criticize... the Constitution is nothing but a scrap of paper". She was held for two and a half months before being charged in April. Several articles were published about her case in unofficial newspapers. A journalist from Exploration magazine said that police had tortured her while she was incarcerated and that had to be transferred by stretcher to another prison.

Fu's trial, on 17 October, came one day after the trial of human rights activist Wei Jingsheng, who had posted the essay "The Fifth Modernization" on the Democracy Wall in the previous December. He received a 15-year sentence. At her trial, her description of her rape "so moved the court that there was a spontaneous eruption from the spectators". One report indicated that an older party member stood up at one point to call a witness for the prosecution a "hooligan". Fu raised questions during her final summation that caused the judge to call for a recess to allow for further time to "check up on certain facts and evidence, in accordance with the principle of not wronging the innocent and not letting the guilt go free". Her family was denied visitation rights.