China's post-Nobel crackdown "worst since Olympics" (News Feature)

By Bill Smith Oct 28, 2010, 9:02 GMT

Beijing - China's crackdown on rights activists following the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident writer Liu Xiaobo appears to be the toughest since the 2008 Olympic Games, rights groups and activists said on Thursday.

Dozens of prominent activists have been questioned, placed under house arrest or disappeared since Liu was awarded the prize on October 8.

Police have also kept Liu's wife, Liu Xia, under house arrest, cut off her two mobile phone numbers and apparently prevented her from using the internet for the past week.

'I have heard some activists say that the current controls and harassment have got worse than those during the Olympics and after the release of Charter '08,' Renee Xia, the international director of Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), told the German Press Agency dpa.

The Charter '08 for democratic reform was signed by 303 leading Chinese intellectuals, lawyers and rights activists.

Police arrested Liu Xiaobo in December 2008, two days before the release of the charter. He was later sentenced to 11 years in prison for subversion for his role in organizing it.

Many of those kept under house arrest since October 8 are Charter '08 signatories, including dissident writer and Christian activist Yu Jie.

'I have been confined to my home for 11 days and cannot go outside ... What crime have I committed?' Yu said on his Twitter account on Thursday, adding that he planned to write an open letter of complaint to China's top leaders.

The only reason the police gave for his house arrest was that they were instructed to do so by 'higher authorities.'

Yu's mobile phone number was cut off by the service provider, he said.

'Cutting off phone lines and taking away cell phones is not new,' Xia said, 'but it seems to be used against a broader range of activists, reflecting the government's fear of more international press interviews with these people and more bad publicity for this government.'

CHRD said it was compiling an 'ever-growing list' of rights activists subject to police action since October 8.

It issued a statement on Thursday condemning the Chinese government's 'growing crackdown on civil society.'

Among the cases reported by the group was the 'kidnapping' on October 21 of scholar and bookstore owner Liu Suli outside his Beijing home.

'We have since learned that Liu sustained a fractured vertebra in his lower back after being roughly handled by police and has been hospitalized for treatment,' CHRD said.

In another sign of the authorities' nervousness, police detained Mou Yanxi, an activist in the south-western city of Chongqing, after she apparently light-heartedly said on Twitter that she planned to honour Liu during an anti-Japanese march in the city on Tuesday.

The police then questioned another Chongqing-based activist, Zhang Shijie, who had reported Mou's detention on Twitter.

Police had already summoned Zhang last week to demand the telephone numbers of all the people who had attended a dinner with him and Mou on October 8 to celebrate Liu's Nobel award.

'I refused at that time,'Zhang told dpa by telephone. 'He threatened that if I would not tell him the telephone numbers, their people would take them (the other activists) away,' Zhang said.

Among those who have disappeared since October 8 are Ding Zilin and Jiang Peikun, retired professors who founded the Tiananmen Mothers group, which has appealed repeatedly to the Communist Party to hold a public inquiry into the brutal 1989 crackdown on democracy protestors in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Ding and Jiang, whose 17-year-old son was killed in the 1989 crackdown, are close friends of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia.

Hong Kong-based Bao Pu, the son of purged Communist Party official Bao Tong, told dpa he had been unable to contact his Beijing-based father by telephone for three weeks, the longest period since the 2008 Olympics.

Xia and other overseas human rights observers expect the government's post-Nobel crackdown on dissidents to continue at least until after the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony on December 10.

One observer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the police action appeared to be a continuation of a pre-Olympic crackdown that began in 2006.

He said it reflected the willingness of China's leaders to use 'increasingly tough measures against those it sees as destabilizing figures.'

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