Human rights activists in China faced an increase in government pressure last year, a rights group said in its annual report released yesterday.
The Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a loose-knit group organized through the Internet, said more rights campaigners were detained or questioned in China last year than in recent years.
“Two-thousand nine stands out as a particularly repressive year in terms of the Chinese government’s aggressive tactics against human rights activists,” Renee Xia (夏濃), the group’s international director, said in a statement. “One only needs to look at the long list of imprisoned human rights defenders ... who paid heavy tolls for their fight against injustice in the past year.”
The group cited the jailing of veteran dissident and writer Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), 54, in December for 11 years for his role in co-authoring a bold manifesto calling for political reform in China.
The jailing of leading activists Tan Zuoren (譚作人) and Huang Qi (黃琦) after they conducted independent investigations into school collapses in the massive 2008 Sichuan earthquake also revealed a government eager to crackdown on dissent, it said.
Besides jailing dissidents, the Chinese government last year also clamped down on non-governmental organizations, human rights lawyers, online citizen journalists and petitioners, the report said.
“Chinese civil society is facing a serious attack ... More human rights defenders were detained, summoned by police for questioning, or subjected to ‘soft detention’ in 2009 than in recent years,” the group said.
Meanwhile, a Tibetan writer who had signed an open letter critical of the Chinese government’s quake relief efforts in Qinghui Province has been detained by police, a family friend said.
The writer, who publishes under the name Zhogs Dung, but whose real name is Tagyal, was among eight authors and intellectuals who signed a letter dated April 17 that expressed sorrow for the disaster that left more than 2,000 people dead — most of them Tibetan — but also urged wariness of Chinese government relief efforts.
On Friday, a half dozen police officers showed up at the Qinghai Nationalities Publishing House, where Tagyal worked, and escorted him away, a blog post written by a friend said.
They searched his home and library, confiscating his computers.
Afterward, they showed his arrest warrant to his wife, and asked her to bring bedding for him.
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