China rounds up activists ahead of Tiananmen anniversary
Chinese activists have been forced to leave their homes and placed under watch by authorities two days before the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, a human rights group said today.
Dissidents have either been moved to hotels or taken out of Beijing by police, said the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.
Two other prominent activists, Liu Xiaobo and Jiang Yanyong, could not longer be contacted by telephone and may also have been taken away, it said.
The mother of Wang Dan, one of the leaders of the 1989 student protests, was warned by authorities that she had to ”be careful”, the centre said.
Activists say Chinese authorities have tightened their surveillance in recent weeks, stepping up round-the-clock monitoring, tapping phones, and forcing departures from the capital city in an effort to prevent public memorials as the anniversary approaches.
Hundreds, if not thousands, died in the attack on June 4, 1989, which the government has branded a counterrevolutionary riot. It has never issued a death toll, and has detained and harassed activists who tried to assemble their own.
Activists Wang Guoqi, Zhang Chunzhu and Yang Jing were all moved into hotels outside Beijing in the past week, the centre said.
Wang, a labour activist who was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 1994, was taken to a hotel in the north-eastern city of Dalian on Monday, it said.
Yang was moved last weekend, although his location was not immediately clear, the centre said.
He was imprisoned for eight years for helping print a reformist magazine during the 1978-1979 Democracy Wall movement, a predecessor of the 1989 protests.
Telephone calls to Beijing’s main police station and Liu’s home were not answered.
Liu is well-known for his essays criticising the government for bringing subversion charges against Internet dissidents.
Jiang, a military surgeon who petitioned the government to admit it made mistakes in crushing the Tiananmen protests, said last week that everything was “fine”. He said then he had not been followed nor had authorities visited him.
