Official Discloses Use of Mass Roundups During NPC, CPPCC Sessions

A senior Ministry of Public Security (MPS) official disclosed the use of mass roundup measures to maintain social order during the early March annual plenary sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), according to official sources. The CPPCC plenary session began on March 3, and the NPC plenary convened on March 5. Xu Hu, Deputy Director of the MPS's Department for the Management of Public Order, said at a March 2 press conference that public security officials will round up those "people without proper professions, fixed places of residence, or stable incomes who have been hanging around Beijing for a long time" and encourage them to leave the capital, according to a Chinese-language transcript posted on the China Internet Information Center's (CIIC) Web site. The CIIC Web site operates under the auspices of the State Council. (For a translation of Deputy Director Xu's relevant remarks from the transcript, see below.)

Xu's comments as transcribed by the CIIC contradict news media reports. Articles dated March 3 in Xinhua (reprinted on the CIIC Web site), Ta Kung Bao, and the South China Morning Post reported that Xu said that public security officials would not interfere with the efforts of ordinary Chinese petitioners to present their grievances to officials, and that only those petitioners who violate relevant regulations would be rounded up and encouraged to leave Beijing. Neither statement, however, appears in the transcript of the press conference posted on the CIIC Web site, or in the full transcript carried on the China Central Television Web site.

Public security officials have expelled petitioners from Beijing before prior annual NPC, CPPCC, and Communist Party Central Committee plenary meetings. For more information, see section V(e), on Access To Justice, of the Commission's 2004 Annual Report. Articles 3 and 46 of the National Regulations on Letters and Visits prohibit retaliation against citizens who seek to petition the government, but Chinese officials frequently abuse petitioners who come to Beijing to do so. Abuse includes local officials' dispatch of plainclothes security officers called "retrievers" to Beijing to abduct or detain petitioners, forcing them to return to their home provinces, as detailed in a December 2005 Human Rights Watch report.

Human rights groups and news media sources have reported that Chinese officials have detained or harassed large numbers of petitioners seeking to present their grievances to officials during the NPC and CPPCC plenary sessions. Police raided an area near the south Beijing train station on February 28 and detained more than 400 petitioners, according to a March 2 Agence France-Presse news report reprinted on the South China Morning Post Web site. In the days before the early March plenaries, officials also acted against human rights defenders participating in a hunger strike protesting government repression. In addition, Chinese authorities have warned 10 AIDS victims who were infected with the virus as the result of a blood-buying scandal to stay away from the capital, according to Wan Yanhai, a Beijing public health activist quoted in a March 3 article in the Guardian of London.

The Guardian article and a February 27 Human Rights in China report also noted the following detentions or controls placed on petitioners and activists:

• Liu Xinjuan: Authorities deported Liu, an activist who has complained about residential homes being demolished without proper compensation, from Beijing to Shanghai on February 24, where she was forced into a mental hospital.
• Ji Wenpai: Public security officers have blocked Ji, a Beijing woman who claims her home was demolished without compensation, from entering the city during the NPC and CPPCC plenary sessions.
• Zhang Jianping: Police are stationed outside the home of Zhang, who was paralyzed after he was hit by a car owned by a forestry official, to prevent him from going to Beijing.
• Mao Hengfeng: Shanghai authorities placed Mao, an activist who has protested China's population control policies, under residential surveillance on February 13.

Translation

South China Morning Post Journalist:
My second question is related to the rounding-up operations that relevant public security authorities conduct during the period of the "two conferences" [the NPC and CPPCC conferences]. What standards are used to determine who is rounded up? Roughly how many people will be rounded up? Will it increase or decrease?

Xu Hu:
Your second question was on the round-up operations during the period of the two conferences. We have not directed this operation at specific people. It is primarily aimed at managing public order by using mass operations to encourage the departure of some people without proper professions, fixed places of residence, or stable incomes who have been hanging around Beijing for a long time. This reduces some factors that threaten social stability. We don't have any set demands for specific numerical limits or standards [for these operations].