Ahead of the Games, Beijing Steps Up Pressure on Dissidents

BEIJING — Liu Qingzhen lives in constant fear of strangers.

Since first traveling to Beijing in 1999 to petition the government about corruption in neighboring Henan province, she has been forced out of the city dozens of times by police and bounty hunters.

The last time she was caught, several men pushed her into a car, locked her in a room for two weeks and drove her hundreds of miles, dropping her several hours from her family home, she said.

As China prepares to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the government views thousands of activists and dissidents living in Beijing as a potential threat to the harmonious image it hopes to project to the world, petitioners and human rights advocates said.

The tradition of petitioning national authorities to address misrule at local levels has existed since China's imperial era. And Beijing had promised to improve freedoms ahead of the 2008 Games.

Yet the Olympics is "apparently acting as a catalyst to extend the use of administrative detention" including house arrest, according to an April report by Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group.

Beijing has also carried out "a continued crackdown on human rights defenders," including lawyers defending Chinese against government officials, the report stated.

Efforts to keep petitioners out of Beijing have been particularly evident.

Partly, China's national leaders have tasked local governments with stopping petitioners from traveling to Beijing. Some local officials send police officers and paid bounty hunters to the capital to bring activists home.

"The government knows which people are likely to petition (in Beijing) since they've petitioned the local government first and the problem wasn't solved," said Wu Youming, a former police officer in Hubei province. "They have the legal right to petition, but we are told to bring them home."

Wu was fired in March for publicly criticizing the practice of forcing petitioners to leave Beijing.

At the same time, Beijing has raised pressure on petitioners during important events.

In March, hundreds of petitioners were rounded up before the opening of the National People's Congress, an annual meeting of top Chinese leaders. The wave of arrests appeared to be a trial run ahead of the Olympics, experts said.

The Chinese Rights Defenders, a group of Chinese activists and dissidents, estimated that several thousand Chinese were detained during the first week of the meeting.

Such actions and official statements "have made it clear that petitioners will be increasingly targeted in efforts to maintain order before and during the Olympics," said Sharon Hom, director of Human Rights in China, a New York-based nonprofit advocacy group.

Officials at a Beijing office responsible for handling petitions and at Beijing's public security bureau declined interview requests.

But officials have argued that the Olympics is not an appropriate venue for political statements and that a January regulation allowing foreign journalists to interview without government approval is evidence that Beijing is increasing freedoms ahead of the Games.

If people want to demonstrate during the Olympics, "(the protests) will have to fall within the Chinese laws," including receiving prior government approval, said Sun Weide, a spokesperson for Beijing's Olympic committee.

The government is unlikely to approve demonstrations, however.

A Beijing academic who asked to remain anonymous because he feared punishment for speaking with a journalist, said authorities had increased pressure on petitioners over the last year to minimize the chance of protests during the Olympics.

"They see the petitioners as a threat and a potential loss of face," he said.

In a dingy Beijing neighborhood known informally as Petitioners Village, a dozen petitioners from across China sat in a small room plastered with old newspapers and lit with a single flickering light bulb. They told their stories as trains rumbled by outside.

Typical of the group was Wen Shuiping. A 50-year-old from China's southern Hunan province, Wen moved to Beijing in 2004 to report local corruption and seek compensation for an injury her husband suffered in the military.

Despite filing paperwork several years ago with a Beijing office tasked with investigating complaints, she has only been referred back to local authorities, she said.

When she returned to Hunan, "the city government wouldn't even let me in the front gate," she said. "They didn't want to deal with it."

After Wen returned to Beijing in 2005, undercover police forced her to return home, and told her to stay put. When she slipped out again, authorities pressured a local company to fire her son, she said.

"The local leaders don't want me to come to Beijing because they are afraid they'll be found out," she said.

Like most of the petitioners, Wen's account could not be independently verified.

An official in an office that manages petitions in Hunan province could find no records about Wen and said the forms were probably sent to officials in Wen's home city of Changsha.

According to the Beijing professor, only a tiny fraction of several hundred thousand petitions filed in China each year are brought to court. A 2004 study by a group of government-funded scientists found that fewer than one in 500 complaints were addressed.

The inaction has frustrated petitioners and led to open protests. In May, a petitioner defaced a portrait of Mao Zedong hanging near Tiananmen Square by throwing a burning object at it, the South China Morning Post reported.

Last month, a petitioner from central China lit himself on fire near a government office tasked with helping petitioners, the latest in a string of self-immolations in the city.

Meanwhile, activists have realized the value of media attention to pressing their cases. In Petitioners Village, several frustrated residents said they would seek out foreign journalists at the Olympics.

"We'd like to demonstrate during the Olympics at the National Stadium," the chief Games venue, said Liu Qingzhen. "We need to get the media's attention."

But it is doubtful they will get the chance.

During the National People's Congress meeting, petitioners were held in detention centers while others were forced out of Beijing and put under surveillance, a lawyer who works with petitioners said.

To stop petitioners and other potential protesters from approaching Beijing's Great Hall of the People, the massive government building beside Tiananmen Square, the government deployed thousands of police and soldiers, many of them in street clothing.

"People will want to protest during the Olympics, but they won't have any chance," he said.