Red China: Crackdown lays bare harder stance

By Jamil Anderlini and Kathrin Hille
January 2 2009

China celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights last month by detaining prominent dissidents across the country.

Their apparent transgression was signing their names on “Charter 08”, a manifesto published on the internet on December 10 calling for all Chinese citizens inside and outside the government to embrace the “rapid establishment of a free, democratic and constitutional country” and the end of one-party authoritarian rule by the Communist party.

Many of the signatories are prominent establishment intellectuals not known for their radical views or political activism. In private, Chinese intellectuals are calling Charter 08 the most significant document of its kind for at least a decade and probably since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Beijing clearly sees it as a serious challenge to its authority at a time when rising unemployment and a cooling economy are heightening social tensions. The country’s efficient repression apparatus has swung into action, with at least 70 of the 303 people who initially signed the charter summoned or interrogated.

While the government has recently tried hard to portray itself as more open to dissent, it has now clearly shifted to a tougher stance.

Beijing moved on Friday to silence parents of victims of the poisoned milk scandal, underscoring the determination to quell unauthorised action in response to social and economic problems.

Zhao Lianhai, the organiser of a network of parents whose children fell ill after consuming baby formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, was detained as his group prepared to lobby the government jointly for continued free treatment for their children and other victims.

Mr Zhao said he was being held by police at a compound outside Beijing where police formerly held people who were to be sent to labour camps.

“There are more than 20 police watching me here, and they are not letting me go,” Mr Zhao said when contacted by the Financial Times on his mobile phone. “I protest [at] this illegal treatment.”

In a separate case, parents of children killed when their schools collapsed in the May 12 Sichuan earthquake told the FT this week they had been warned that continuing to pursue compensation and talking to foreign journalists were illegal activities that would land them in jail.

China has no such laws, according to rights groups and lawyers.

Charter organisers say it is these sorts of case they are trying to tackle.

“As these conflicts and crises grow ever more intense . . . the decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional,” according to Charter 08.

All mention of the charter in Chinese is blocked from websites, search engines and even e-mails. Propaganda officials have banned domestic media from interviewing any signatories or publishing any of their work.

According to Amnesty International, the authorities now consider the charter a “counter-revolutionary platform”, a likely sign that signatories will be dealt with more harshly.

Liu Xiaobo, a prominent literary critic and dissident who helped organise the charter, has been held in an undisclosed location for nearly a month without contact with family or a lawyer.

His detention, which apparently violates China’s laws, prompted a long list of academics, legal experts, writers and Nobel prize winners, including Salman Rushdie, Seamus Heaney and Umberto Eco, to send an open letter to Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, last week.

Some other signatories to the charter have come under more subtle pressure. Xu Youyu, professor of philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank, was asked by a senior academy official at his academy for details of the charter, and then told the document was illegal and ordered to retract his signature.

“In fact the charter is consistent with China’s own constitution and in line with the United Nations human rights conventions that China has already signed and I absolutely refuse to retract my support for this document,” Prof Xu told the FT. “I’m not scared, even if they take away my job.”

The intimidation and threats have done nothing to damp enthusiasm for the charter among Chinese intellectuals at home and abroad, and the number of signatories has risen to about 7,000.