Police on Wednesday blocked a Chinese family from holding a news conference in Beijing to publicize complaints of police brutality in their village.
Members of the Feng family invited reporters to a Beijing hotel but said police from their home province warned them against doing so. Two family members and another villager were questioned by Beijing police and prevented from leaving their hotel.
Stories like the Fengs' are becoming more common in China, where police abuses are reported frequently and the communist government tries to control information. Hundreds of people travel to Beijing each year to file complaints and often write to reporters.
But the Fengs showed unusual determination and media savvy, setting up a news conference and faxing invitations to foreign reporters.
The Fengs and their fellow villager complain that police where they live in Xiong County, 75km from Beijing in Hebei Province, beat two of them and refused to pursue complaints of rape and assault.
The event on Wednesday was the second time in a month that police blocked the family from holding a news conference about their complaints.
Feng Shuangxi, 29, said by mobile telephone that police followed him on Tuesday as he drove to Beijing from Xiong County.
When Feng's mother, older sister and their fellow villager gathered at a downtown hotel on Wednesday to talk to reporters, more than a dozen Beijing police came to their room and began questioning them.
A reporter was told to leave the hotel by Beijing police.
Feng Shuangxi later said Hebei police took the three women away and he didn't know where they went.
Before the Beijing police arrived, Feng Jianhuan, 32, Feng's sister, complained that Xiong County police refused to act on her claims that she was raped twice at the age of 15.
Feng's mother, Tian Qiuluan, 62, said police hit and threatened her after she repeatedly asked them to arrest the alleged rapist.
Liu Jing, another farmer from Xiong County, said police pulled her hair, beat her and kicked her in the abdomen on Dec. 20 after she filed an assault complaint against a local man.
Liu said she required 20 stitches after the man slashed her on the face in October last year. She said police told her to drop the case because the assailant was a family friend of the local police chief.
Liu, 53, said she traveled to Beijing earlier this week to seek medical help for bleeding that hasn't stopped since she was kicked and to tell her story to the media.
"If even the police kick us, then how can we protect ourselves?" she said.
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