Preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, China's Authorities Go After Human-Rights Advocates
BEIJING—Qianci may well be the youngest political prisoner in the world. The 3-month-old girl and her 24-year-old mother are surrounded 24 hours a day, seven days a week by some two dozen members of China's state security apparatus. Since December 27, they have not been permitted to leave their small apartment in eastern Beijing, and visitors are brusquely turned away by the plainclothes police who guard the building. Connections to the outside world—mobile phones and the Internet—have been cut off.
The young mother and daughter hardly seem like a threat to the state. Their offense? Qianci and Zeng Jinyan are daughter and wife of Hu Jia, a leading activist on behalf of dissidents, human-rights lawyers, and abused farmers. He was dragged from his home by police on December 27 and subsequently charged with "inciting subversion of state power." His real crime, say analysts, is making Beijing lose face by reporting human-rights abuses in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics, which will be held in August. "These things exceeded what the government was willing to accept," says Teng Biao, one of Hu's legal advisers.
The Beijing games are being presented as a great coming-out party for China, a chance to showcase its remarkable economic strides and to claim its place as a 21st-century world power. International attention will be focused on China, and many human-rights activists here and abroad hoped that China's eagerness to shine in the spotlight would prompt its Communist Party leaders to ease repression and provide a modest opening for political liberalization. On this, they had some reason for optimism. In 2001, in order to win the right to host the games, Liu Jingmin, a Beijing Olympics official, promised that the games would be "an opportunity to foster democracy, improve human rights, and integrate China with the rest of the world."
Ironically, just the opposite is happening, at least on human rights. That situation is worsening as the authorities seek to ensure no one will spoil the party's coming out. Hu provides a case in point. The bespectacled activist is something of a one-man human-rights band, maintaining close contacts with dissidents and their families, tirelessly gathering information, and sending it out on the Web for the world to see. "The action taken against Hu Jia cannot escape being connected to the Olympics," says the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation, which has successfully intervened with the Chinese government on behalf of dissidents.
Image building. Teng, who is professor of law at the China University of Political Science and Law, says Beijing's efforts to rein in criticism comes as no surprise. "China wants to show its political strength to the world, not improve the human rights or the political situation," he says. Chine Chan, with Amnesty International in Hong Kong, says China's domestic human-rights record "is an obstacle to its international-image building."
China's leaders see the Olympic Games as an opportunity to dazzle the world and to demonstrate that they have a mandate to continue to rule China. Beijing's harshest critics, though, draw comparisons to the 1936 Olympics, when the Nazis used the athletic event as a showcase for a new Germany and to mark its return to the world community following its isolation after its defeat in World War I.
Many Chinese thought that with the world's eyes turned to China for this year's Olympic Games, whose slogan is "One World, One Dream," they had a rare chance to pressure the government. Disgruntled Chinese—dissidents, farmers, factory workers, the displaced—saw a moment when authorities might hesitate to use their usual practices to silence them. They were wrong. A spate of detentions and arrests related to the Olympics over the past two years has been met with near silence from foreign countries.
Hu Jia is one of those who paid a price for miscalculating. Charged with subverting state security, which allegedly involves state secrets, he has been denied access to his lawyers. Police have attempted to strong-arm Zeng into making statements about her husband, reportedly threatening to take their baby away from her during parts of the day. Zeng, a prominent blogger and human-rights activist in her own right, has refused to cooperate.
Countless other Chinese have also found themselves at odds with the government over the Olympics. Hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents have been displaced as large swaths of the city—many historically significant neighborhoods—have been razed to make way for Olympic venues and related development projects. Liu Jie, a well-known petitioner, was sentenced to a Re-education Through Labor Camp last year after protesting the destruction of houses. Yang Chunlin, who fought against illegal seizures of land, was also arrested after starting a campaign dubbed, "We want human rights, not the Olympics."
The most vulnerable victims are the "undesirables," members of the lower rungs of society, who are nameless and faceless to the outside world, and so least protected. Li Xiaorong, professor of political philosophy at the University of Maryland, describes a systematic rounding up of petitioners, the homeless, street vendors, and beggars from the streets of the capital. These people risk being forcibly sent home to rural areas, sentenced to re-education camps and detention centers, and even being confined to mental hospitals and psychiatric wards. "The government doesn't want these poor and downtrodden coming onto the streets of Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics," says Li. "It wouldn't look good for the image of China as a powerful and wealthy country."
Beatings. The small number of brave lawyers who dare to accept sensitive cases face beatings, detentions, imprisonment, and the loss of their licenses to practice law. Some have been brutally attacked by hei shehui, or black society, thugs used by the police to hand out extralegal punishments. Li Heping, a lawyer who has defended environmental activists, Christians, and other lawyers, was attacked last year in his office park by 10 men. Li told associates that the unidentified men threw a bag over his head, pushed him into the back seat of a car, and took him to the basement of a house, where he was beaten and shocked with electric batons for four hours. He was later driven into the woods and thrown out of the car.
One of the most prominent cases is that of Chen Guangcheng, a blind, self-trained lawyer and activist, who helped farmers in Shandong province fight forced sterilization and late-term abortions. Chen was sentenced in late 2006 to four years and three months in prison on what many say were trumped-up charges, after a trial marked by harassment of witnesses and detention of his lawyers, who were prevented from appearing in court.
Chinese leaders show no sign of letting up. And human-rights activists complain that there has been little meaningful pressure from the International Olympic Committee or participating countries. For its part, the U.S. State Department says it is "following closely" the "disturbing" detention of Hu and has raised his case with Chinese authorities. And the European Parliament last month passed a resolution calling for Hu's release and urging China "not to use the Olympic Games as a pretext to arrest and illegally detain and imprison dissidents, journalists, and human-rights activists."
"Futile." Beijing's official stance on its human-rights record has been to slap away any public criticisms as attempts to politicize the Olympics. On January 31, the state-run People's Daily defiantly stated: "Those who want to use the Olympics to discredit China, and those who think the Olympics will promote China to change in the way they 'hope', are doomed to be disappointed. Their efforts will be futile."
To the contrary, critics say that pressure can work, pointing to recent instances of China being influenced to get involved in diplomatic efforts concerning North Korea's nuclear programs and the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region. Earlier this month, U.S. film director Steven Spielberg quit as an artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympics, responding to criticism from activists such as actress Mia Farrow over China's continuing support for the government of Sudan. Farrow has called for an Olympics boycott and has said that Spielberg's promotion of the games in Beijing could make him a latter-day Leni Riefenstahl, who became known as Hitler's filmmaker for her glowing depiction of the 1936 Berlin games.
Just a few months before police burst into his home to take him away, Hu Jia predicted that the Communist Party would succeed in wiping out all dissent before the August 8 opening ceremony for the Beijing games. "By the time that day comes," he said, "there will be no sound at all." No sound, that is, other than the cheering crowds of Olympics spectators.
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