“Because I sent those e-mails, the police came this morning and took me away,” Dong Jiqin (董繼勤) said one afternoon in the middle of this month, shortly after his release from a few hours in police custody.
Police officers visited Dong’s home and demanded that he accompany them to a station in Beijing’s Xicheng District.
They freed him once the time had passed for his planned interview with foreign journalists, which Dong arranged by e-mail.
Such ploys have often been used by Chinese police to prevent foreign journalists from meeting rights activists and dissidents, especially before and during high-profile events such as the Olympics.
Three middle-aged women sporting the typical red armbands of neighborhood committee members blocked the path to Dong’s house, which was the subject of a legal wrangle with the local government and developers.
The neighborhood committees have for a long time been the eyes and ears of the police and the Chinese Communist Party in residential communities.
They stepped up their monitoring role for the Olympics, joining at least 100,000 police, 200,000 security guards and hundreds of thousands of “social volunteers.”
Dong wanted to raise the case of his wife, Ni Yulan (倪玉蘭), a lawyer and housing rights activist who was taken away from their home in mid-April and remains in police custody on charges of damaging public property.
Another lawyer made the only visit allowed to Ni during her three-month detention, telling Dong that his wife appeared in poor health and was beaten during police interviews.
“We still don’t know her situation,” Dong said in an interview.
Dozens of other rights activists and dissidents have been detained, sentenced to prison or kept under some form of house arrest in the last few months as the government intensified its efforts to minimize the chances of embarrassing protests or interviews with foreign media during next month’s games.
Among those was Huang Qi (黃琦), the operator of a popular Web site on missing people and injustice, who was formally charged with “illegal possession of state secrets” on July 18 in Chengdu.
Huang was released from prison in June 2005 after serving more than two years of a five-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power,” China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) reported.
He resumed his work since leaving prison and the new charges were apparently linked to him giving information to foreign journalists about protests by families of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake in May.
The US-based Dui Hua Foundation (中美對話基金會) said the arrest of prominent dissident Hu Jia (胡佳), who was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for subversion in April, “cannot escape being connected to the Olympics.”
Two more activists, Yuan Xianchen (袁顯臣) and Liu Jianjun (劉建軍), were detained this month on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power,” CHRD said.
Yuan’s arrest was thought to be linked to him helping the already jailed Yang Chunlin (楊春林) to collect signatures for an the open letter that said: “We want human rights, not the Olympics.”
“Less than a month before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government is taking security measures against activists and potential protesters on a scale unseen since the period immediately after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989,” CHRD said.
US-based Human Rights in China also said Chinese authorities had “significantly escalated and broadened their systematic crackdown on rights defense activities, religious and cultural expression, and critical voices.”
“The efforts of the authorities to maintain control now include targeting health care activists, religious practitioners, and parents grieving for their dead children [after the Sichuan earthquake],” the group said.
“The month of June in particular saw an upswing in the instance and severity of crackdowns,” it said.
“We are witnessing the proliferation of serious human rights abuses committed under the banner of the official ‘Olympics stability drive,’” Human Rights in China executive director Sharon Hom (譚竟嫦) said.
The pre-Olympic surveillance and control activities are also used to keep activists from other areas out of Beijing.
“I’m sure they will interfere if I try to come [to Beijing],” Yao Lifa (姚立法), a well-known legal activist said by telephone from the central province of Hubei.
Yao said extra security officers were posted near his apartment and usually followed him home whenever he went out.
“Their surveillance is very open,” he said, adding that he felt the extra control was because of the Games.
Beijing-based dissident writer Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) was among several activists who were harassed early last month because they tried to organize a public mourning of the victims of the military crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy protesters.
“Previously, I thought the human rights situation would improve as they promised,” Liu said. “But now it seems not,” Liu said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.