His name was familiar to US President George W. Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) months before he won the EU’s Sakharov prize for human rights, yet just a few years ago China’s most prominent dissident was a largely unknown activist for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS.
Hu Jia’s (胡佳) international reputation grew while he was forced to spend most of his time confined inside his suburban apartment on the outskirts of Beijing in 2006 and last year.
Before his formal arrest in late December, Hu had spent most of the previous two years under virtual house arrest or other forms of detention.
With no paid employment and few visitors allowed, he used his enforced isolation to act as a bridge between foreign media and the growing number of rights activists across the country.
Each weekday, Hu collected and disseminated information on rights cases and other issues in China via the Internet and telephone.
He also learned the names of many of the State Security officers who loitered outside his apartment every day.
Some of them remain stationed there to prevent his wife, fellow activist Zeng Jinyan (曾金燕), from speaking to foreign media and governments.
But Hu and Zeng did manage to testify by telephone to a European Parliamentary hearing on China’s human rights record in November last year.
Hu’s activism began in the late 1990s when the economics graduate volunteered to work on environmental projects.
In 2001, he began helping villagers infected with HIV/AIDS through blood-selling schemes in the central province of Henan.
The following year, Hu and four friends had their first run-in with state security police who intercepted them and seized film after they traveled to Henan villages.
The group took Christmas toys and clothes to children in poor villages that were decimated through AIDS spread by the illegal collection and sale of blood.
“It seemed like the worst scenes of AIDS in Africa, with old and young people infected,” Hu said.
“State security police threatened us and said that AIDS was a state secret,” he said.
Hu believes that China was “lucky” to be shaken out of its complacency on AIDS by the scandal over a cover-up of cases of SARS in Beijing.
“After SARS in 2003, nobody dared to say that AIDS was a state secret any more,” Hu said. “It gave us an opportunity to be more open.”
His continued advocacy for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS in China brought him international attention and several awards.
But after two “golden years” of relatively open activism, the climate began to change with the arrest and harassment of AIDS activists in 2005, he said.
His own surveillance became a little more relaxed after the birth of the couple’s first child in November last year.
The Dalai Lama sent a Tibetan name for their daughter at their request, he said, in a move that can only have further angered the Chinese government.
Hu is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist and Zeng met the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, in his Indian exile in 2006.
Hu and Zeng also released a short documentary last year about their surveillance, and excerpts are now widely available on the Internet.
“A week after our wedding party, Hu Jia was put under house arrest by the State Security police and after a month he disappeared ... and there was no news for 41 days,” Zeng said at the start of the 30-minute film, Prisoners of Freedom City.
The title of the documentary reflected the irony of the couple’s restricted life in a modern, low-rise estate known as BOBO Freedom City.
Hu said he was seized by state security police from the party’s Central Political and Judiciary Committee and taken to a secret site, where he was detained for 41 days in February and March 2006.
“They tied my hands behind my back, pushed me to the floor [of their car] and put a black bag over my head,” he said. “It was just like a kidnapping by the mafia.”
He believed the arrest was linked to his support for rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), who was convicted of subversion in December 2006 but given a suspended prison sentence.
Hu and Gao, who is believed to be held under house arrest at a secret location in Beijing, were both nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Hu said that during his own house arrest he was constantly expecting the fateful knock on the door that would mean the authorities had decided to press charges against him.
That knock came just 18 days after Hu’s interview was interviewed by Deutsche Presse-Agenturr.
Despite appeals from the EU, the US and rights groups for his release, a Beijing court sentenced Hu to three-and-a-half years in prison in March for “inciting subversion of state power.”
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
RSS