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Beijing Beats Back Dissent
as Olympics Approach
Paul Mooney
Newsmax
Tuesday Aug 28, 2007
On any given day, about a dozen plainclothes police officers
mill around the entrance to Hu Jia's housing complex on the outskirts
of Beijing, on the lookout for anyone attempting to visit the
well-known human rights defender.
A former AIDS activist, Hu now helps other dissidents by funneling
information about their cases to foreign diplomats, international
human rights groups, and the media. He is both a way station for
dissidents and a megaphone for their causes.
"Only if we help them can they help others," he says.
Over the past five years, the slim, bookish 34-year-old Beijing
native has spent more than 600 days in detention or under house
arrest. Authorities have failed to notify his wife and parents
of his whereabouts on many of these occasions, and he says that
he has been tortured while in detention.
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He stands to demonstrate how police put their knees on his extended
forearms until he lost feeling in his hands. Since Hu was released
from his most recent detention, his house has been surrounded
24 hours a day, seven days a week. His phone is tapped, and his
Internet access and telephone are sometimes blocked. When he is
allowed to leave his home, a phalanx of police cars follows; he
can tick off the car models and license plate numbers from memory.
All this for a man who has not been formally charged with any
criminal offense.
Dissidents Receive 'Special' Treatment
Hu’s experience remains typical for China’s dissidents,
despite official promises that the 2008 Beijing Olympics would
bring about change. “By hosting the games,” said Wang
Wei, secretary general of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, in
2001, “social progress and economic development in China
would move forward, as would China’s human rights situation.”
Instead, the government’s recent actions — harassing
activists, tightening domestic media restrictions, and continuing
to carry out large numbers of executions — have exposed
Wang’s words as newspeak.
"Many observers agree that human rights and political freedoms
have contracted sharply under the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao regime,"
says Robin Munro, research director for the China Labor Bulletin,
an influential Hong Kong-based labor rights group founded by former
political prisoner Han Dongfang. "They're getting ready for
the Olympics, so public displays of dissent and social protests
are an anathema to the central government."
The Communist Party of China’s (CPC) dangerous ambivalence
toward public dissent punctuates modern Chinese history. During
the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956, the Beijing Spring of 1978
and the 1989 “Democracy Movement,” the CPC tolerated
and even encouraged a degree of public dissent — only to
crack down as soon as momentum picked up. In 2004, just a few
years after the Olympic Bid Committee signaled the country’s
willingness to reform human rights policies, housing rights activist
Ye Guozhu attempted to organize the kind of demonstration authorities
fear most: one that would have tapped into a tremendous pool of
roiling discontent among the masses.
Ye wanted to protest the forced evictions of a large number of
residents from their homes in the Xuanwu District of Beijing,
because of collusion between developers and district officials.
Hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents have been displaced
as large swaths of the city, some historically significant, have
been razed in the effort to “modernize” Beijing’s
image in time for the games. For challenging the authorities,
Ye was sentenced to four years in prison, where he remains today.
Amnesty International reports that he is suffering from health
problems, partly as a result of being tortured in detention, and
that guards at Chaobai Prison beat him with electro-shock batons.
In February, authorities assigned Ye to a period of “discipline”
in Qingyuan Prison, apparently in connection with his ongoing
attempts to appeal his conviction, reports AI.
Chen Xiaoming, a self-taught housing rights activist from Shanghai
who sued the government over forced evictions, is one of many
who did not survive the punishment for dissent. After Chen was
imprisoned in January 2007, his family informed officials that
he suffered from a chronic illness and repeatedly asked that he
be given medical parole. Prison authorities refused the requests
and his family’s attempts to see him or provide medicine
to him.
By late June, he had been reduced to “skeletal condition”
and was vomiting blood. Chen died July 1, the same day medical
parole was granted.
Human Rights in China, a New York City-based group founded by
1989 Tiananmen Square dissidents, confirmed that “ill treatment
and beatings in prison were major factors in Chen's death."
Death for Dissidents
In addition to stepping up house arrests and indefinite detention,
authorities have also sought to deter mass protest by charging
activists with subversion — a crime punishable by death
in China. AI estimates that at least 1,010 people were executed
and 2,790 sentenced to death during 2006, although actual figures
are believed to be much higher. The U.S.-based Dui Hua Foundation,
which has successfully intervened on behalf of many Chinese dissidents
persecuted by authorities, estimates that the real number of executions
in 2006 was between 7,500 and 8,000, based on its contacts with
people in China with access to official information. Among these
are an unknown number of political prisoners.
On Jan. 1, 2007, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) formally reassumed
the role of approving all death sentences passed in China, a reform
that AI welcomed in the hope that it would significantly reduce
executions. An article by China’s official news agency,
Xinhua, however, stressed that the SPC usually does not have the
authority to issue a new decision or declare a defendant innocent
if the court discovers errors in an original judgment.
In most instances, such cases must be returned to a lower court
for retrial, and there appears to be no limit to the number of
possible retrials, raising fears that capital punishment cases
could be retried repeatedly. Ultimately, it has been impossible
to assess whether this reform has teeth due to lack of information
about the SPC reviews. Indeed, gauging the authenticity of any
recent reform in China is difficult when the flow of information
is so restricted.
As part of China’s pre-Olympics “reforms,”
the government announced in December 2006 that it would temporarily
lift restrictions on foreign journalists seeking to travel within
the country — increasing the likelihood that, for a limited
time at least, foreigners could gain new insights into China’s
complex internal politics.
Yet the government has simultaneously put domestic Chinese media
on notice, giving new meaning to “One Country, Two Systems”
— the slogan once meant to reassure Hong Kong that Chinese
sovereignty was nothing to fear. In February, China’s Propaganda
Department established a new penalty point-system for the domestic
print media and notified news organizations that they would be
subject to closure if all their points were deducted. In typical
fashion, officials did not clearly define the infractions for
which organizations can be penalized.
Propaganda officials have also recently dismissed editors and
journalists at about a half dozen newspapers, including staff
at the legal newsweekly Minzhu yu Fazhi Shibao (Democracy and
Legal Times), one of China's most influential newspapers. Furthermore,
many journalists have been detained, arrested, and beaten for
reporting on corruption, land seizures, and disasters. According
to Reporters Without Borders, at least 32 journalists and 50 “cyber
dissidents” are imprisoned in China, more than in any other
country.
"There will be no real improvement of press freedom in China
if the journalists are not released before the Games. It has a
huge chilling effect," says Vincent Brossel, head of the
organization’s Asia–Pacific Desk.
While the CPC has clearly made recent gestures to address the
international community’s human rights concerns, those who
dare challenge the government continue to play the deadly cat-and-mouse
game that has defined political protest for decades. Dissidents
have borrowed a few techniques from the Underground Railroad,
James Bond, and China's own tradition of Samizdat.
Last summer, when Yuan Weijing observed that undercover police
had lifted her house arrest in Shandong Province, she planned
her dash for Beijing. Once there, she would meet with lawyers
helping her husband, Chen Guangcheng, a blind, self-taught legal
activist who is in prison for accusing local Shandong officials
of forcing women to undergo late-term abortions.
She would also meet with Hu Jia and other dissidents who support
her husband.
On July 3, Yuan visited a friend who lived nearby, in Linyi City,
and slipped out the back door. She climbed three 2-meter-high
walls and walked to a nearby bus station — where a relative
was waiting according to plan with Yuan’s 2-year-old daughter
— and hopped on a bus for the 11-hour ride to the capital.
Hu was quietly notified of her arrival by a middleman using Skype
— activists believe it cannot easily be tapped — and
was waiting at the Beijing bus station. He drove her past unsuspecting
public-security officers and ushered her into his small apartment
in the early morning hours.
Since the discovery of Yuan’s escape, a dozen or so police
and officials have traveled all the way from Shandong Province
to station themselves apart from the Beijing plainclothes police
monitoring Hu. Someone has affixed a small photograph of her inside
the guardhouse nearby. Thus far, the Shandong police have restrained
themselves from barging into Hu's home in order to avoid a scene
that might embarrass the Beijing authorities.
Inside, Yuan pulls out a photo of Li Fangping, one of a small
number of lawyers who have dared to take on human rights cases
like that of her husband. In the photo, Li is lying in a hospital
bed in Linyi, suffering injuries sustained when unknown attackers
beat him over the head with metal instruments.
China's Version of Human Rights
"It was probably the Shandong police, but it was done mafia-style"
says Hu, who is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of Chen
and the words "Blind man/Chen Guangcheng/Freedom." Chen's
lawyers have been attacked and detained on earlier occasions,
preventing them from being present at his trial. Yuan pulls out
another photo, this one taken from the second floor of her home.
It shows eight plainclothes police officers sitting in front of
her house.
As Hu and Yuan sit in Hu's home, surrounded by the muscle of
China's security apparatus, the jarring discrepancy between China's
"party line" and the real-life travails of its human
rights defenders is evident. In May, the Chinese Olympic Committee's
Wang Wei told The Associated Press, "Human rights conditions
keep improving in China." But Hu says the Communist Party
is in fact intent on wiping out all forms of dissent before the
2008 Olympics kick off. "By the time that day comes, there
will be no sound at all," he says.
This article appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Amnesty International
magazine, published by Amnesty International USA. It is reprinted
here with permission.
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