Human Rights Activist Hu Jia Beaten and Detained During Visits by Foreign Officials

September 27, 2005

Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia said that China's state security officers beat him and placed him under house arrest for 14 days during visits by top United Nations and European Union officials, according to an interview he gave Agence France-Presse's Hong Kong Service on September 7. According to Hu, officials held him under house arrest from August 24 through September 6. He said four state security officials beat him on August 29 when he tried to leave his home to go to the hospital. Hu arrived in Beijing on August 24 with a group of AIDS patients from Henan province, according to an August 31 report by Radio Free Asia.

Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia said that China's state security officers beat him and placed him under house arrest for 14 days during visits by top United Nations and European Union officials, according to an interview he gave Agence France-Presse's Hong Kong Service on September 7. According to Hu, officials held him under house arrest from August 24 through September 6. He said four state security officials beat him on August 29 when he tried to leave his home to go to the hospital. Hu arrived in Beijing on August 24 with a group of AIDS patients from Henan province, according to an August 31 report by Radio Free Asia.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour visited China from August 29 to September 2. The eighth European Union-China Summit took place in Beijing from September 5 to September 7. During this period Chinese authorities launched a crackdown on human rights activists in Beijing, placing Liu Xiaobo, Zhang Zuhua, and Liu Di under 24-hour police surveillance, and raiding the offices of Chinese Rights Defenders, an informal grouping of activists and dissidents. Each of the activists, Hu Jia, and Hou Wenzhuo, the head of Chinese Rights Defenders, had signed an open letter to Ms. Arbour dated August 22 that included a list of "public intellectuals, journalists, doctors, and defense lawyers" that China's government has detained and imprisoned. The letter noted, among other things:

[T]he government has also increasingly modernized its control mechanisms and tightened up its information control and censorship on speech and expression. With the Internet, text messaging, and other new technologies, we benefit from unprecedented access to information and online political speech. There is more room for the media due to growing marketization. But to our dismay, the government has invested heavily in deployment of ever more cyberpolice in order to build the world's most comprehensive and sophisticated system of telecommunications surveillance, "firewalls," and electronic monitoring, thereby perfecting its censorship and its control of speech. A long list of vocabulary and topics is prohibited in all public media and on the Internet. Tens of thousands of cyberpolice patrol cybercafes, wiretap phones, intercept cellular phone conversation, and interfere with text-messaging devices. They use the same high-tech methods to monitor and obstruct the speech and expression on the Internet of independent journalists, writers, and rights activists, and to gather evidence surreptitiously to use against these people in court. The Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, which should not have any role in legislation, nevertheless wields tremendous arbitrary power in operating, controlling, and penalizing the mass media, threatening journalists and those in the media profession, and coercing them into practicing self-censorship. All these practices violate Chinese citizens' rights to information, free speech, and free press.