China briefly detained two prominent dissidents ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the men said yesterday, even as the government defended its record. Police seized veteran dissidents Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) and Zhang Zuhua (張祖樺) late on Monday night and only released them yesterday, Zhang said by telephone.
“They said we had been getting intellectuals’ signatures for a charter, and so they took us away,” Zhang said, referring to a document he had been helping draft calling for greater respect for human rights in China.
“It was a very constructive document,” he added. “We asked them which clauses were miswritten and they didn’t say. But tomorrow is international human rights day, so it’s natural to ask for respect for human rights at this time.”
Zhang quit the Communist Youth League once headed by late Chinese Communist Party chief and reformist Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦) in protest against the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.
Meanwhile, a Chinese newspaper report alleging authorities locked up people in mental hospitals for criticizing the state and filing complaints about corruption focused rare attention on the usually taboo topic of psychiatric abuse in China.
An article in the Beijing News on Monday has been widely reproduced by other media and prompted a highly critical editorial yesterday in the English-language China Daily.
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