HONG KONG—Authorities in the Chinese capital are stepping up surveillance of key dissidents and detaining petitioners ahead of two annual parliamentary meetings that begin in Beijing this week.
“They started watching me at 7 this morning,” said Beijing-based artist Yang Licai, who signed the online Charter 08 document, which called for sweeping reforms to China’s political system.
“I am under house arrest until after the parliamentary sessions are over, on around March 17 or 18,” said Yang, who said he had been informed by state security police that the move aimed to aid social stability.
“This is an externalization of prison life, in which they put a little cage over the homes of ordinary people and bring [the prison] into everyday life.”
China’s People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the National People’s Congress (NPC) run from March 3-13, and are billed by official media as a form of representative government.
Critics say that little real debate is tolerated, however, and that delegates to both bodies are usually approved by the ruling Communist Party before being elected.
Petitioners rounded up
Police detained dozens of petitioners outside the parliamentary complaints office in Beijing, taking them away in buses after hundreds crowded around the office with sheaves of documents detailing alleged wrongdoing by officials around the country.
“I saw nearly 1,000 people outside the gates,” said Beijing-based petitioner Yang Qiuyu.
“Some of them were local officials come to take away petitioners and plainclothes police.”
“Most of them were petitioners. The local officials were taking them away as soon as they found them, loading them onto a truck and taking them away. There were several truckloads of petitioners,” Yang said.
“The window they have there to receive petitioners is just a fake,” he added.
China’s “Regulation on Petitions,” issued by the State Council, states that petitioners may voice their grievances to higher-level government offices.
But those trying to do so are frequently held in unofficial detention, or “black jails,” before being taken back to their hometowns.
Sources in Beijing said a large number of petitioners had arrived at the Beijing southern railway station in Fengtai district at the weekend and had beaten off officials trying to detain them through sheer weight of numbers after the officials tried to harass a woman petitioner.
Liu Anjun, founder of the petitioners’ advocacy group Light and Justice, was detained at the station by Fengtai district state security police and was still being held Monday at a guesthouse, his wife said.
“I didn’t hear anything from him after they took him away,” Liu’s wife said Monday.
“Then I got a call from him at midday, saying he had been taken to a hotel room by the state security police.”
“He said they told him to ‘rest.’ He didn’t say anything more; just hung up,” she said, adding that the petitioners had lost contact with their relatives after heading to the public security ministry to apply for a permit to stage a demonstration.
Open letter
The detentions came as Beijing-based petitioner Wu Tianli penned an open letter to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, calling on him to open up a dialogue with China’s army of disaffected petitioners instead of continuing to harass and oppress them.
Wu, who has been petitioning the authorities regarding her forced eviction from her Beijing home for the past seven years with no result, said she had received nothing but harassment by the authorities in return for her trouble.
“We are a group of older petitioners who have been cheated time and again by local officials,” Wu wrote. “We have taken our complaints to a higher level countless times, but no one has taken any notice of us.”
“Why are we are being left out in the cold?”
Many petitioners have spent years pursuing complaints against local officials over disputes including the loss of homes and farmland, unpaid wages and pensions, and alleged mistreatment by the authorities.
Web site on 'tea chats'
Few report getting a satisfactory result, and most say they have become a target of further harassment by the authorities.
Meanwhile, a group of activists has launched a Web site describing abuse by authorities ahead of the CPPCC and NPC meetings in Beijing.
The Web site, www.hechaji.com (or Chronicle of Sipping Tea, in English), describes the intimidation the activists suffered after being summoned for a “chat over tea” by the police.
Zhejiang activist Feng Chuanlin, a dissident recently targeted by local police, called the Web site “a great innovation.”
“If we all write down our experiences on ‘tea chat with police,’ we will understand the details of their methods.”
Beijing activist Yang Licai suggested that all who are summoned should publicize the venue, time, number of police officers present, and conversation held during the “tea chat.”
A high-school student, known by the online nickname Yezi, reported being interviewed by state security police on Friday.
Writing on the microblogging service Twitter, Yezi said police had spent a lot of time during his “tea-time chat” criticizing overseas media coverage of China.
“I am very confused after reading about Yezi’s experience,” wrote one Twitter user.
“Part of me feels happy for such a brave high-school student, and another part of me is angry that controls in our country are so tight that they even haul in high-schoolers for questioning.”
The controls also extend beyond Beijing, activists said.
Sichuan-based civil rights activist Chen Yunfei said he too had been warned against trying to leave his home in the next two weeks.
“They told me not to go out, that this was orders from the top,” Chen said. “Officials are afraid that ordinary people will start competing with them for the booty.”
“They are afraid of having to share their vested interests if people start having opinions about things.”
Original reporting in Mandarin by Xin Yu and in Cantonese by Fung Yat-yiu. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Additional translation by Ping Chen. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.