Arrest of Chinese dissident threatens to cast shadow over Beijing Olympics
Six months before 30,000 foreign journalists descend on Beijing for the Olympics, Chinese state security forces have arrested the dissident who was most likely to reveal the darker side of the country's development.
Hu Jia -- who used blogs, webcasts and video to expose human rights abuses -- is expected to face charges of inciting subversion of state power.
His formal arrest comes after he was seized by police from an apartment in east Beijing on December 27. Since then, his wife, Zeng Jinyan, and their two-month-old daughter have been prevented from leaving their home.
The case looks likely to cast a cloud over Beijing's Olympic preparations. The EU and the US government have protested against Hu's detention, and human rights groups have vowed to make him a symbol of China's abuses.
Because the case has been classified as a "state secret," the authorities can deny Hu's right to consult a lawyer and his trial -- which could be up to seven months away -- is likely to be held in private.
Fellow dissidents deplored the arrest. Yuan Weijing, who stayed with Hu for a month while she was trying to raise the case of her imprisoned husband -- the blind civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng -- said the action was illegal.
"He was only sending out information about what happened in China by phone or internet," she said. "That was not illegal because all he revealed was the facts. I think this arrest is related to the Beijing Olympics. If they did not detain him, he might reveal more scandals."
Human rights organizations concurred. The San Francisco-based Duihua Foundation said: "From the perspective of the authorities, the opportunity to take this high-profile rights activist out of action in the final months before the Olympics may have been too good to pass up."
Hu's lawyer, Li Jinsong, said he believed the case was connected to the Games, but he could not confirm this until he had been allowed to see the charge documents. He had not given up hope of seeing the suspect before the spring festival, which starts next week.
An environmental campaigner and Aids activist, Hu has become one of the most outspoken critics of China's human rights violations. Last year, he and his then pregnant wife were under house arrest for 214 days in their residential complex -- BOBO Freedom City.
However, he used the internet to publicize the cases of petitioners, peasants who lost their land, arrested dissidents and other victims of injustice.
He kept a daily blog, joined a human rights debate in the European parliament via a webcast, went on hunger strike and made a short film of his life in detention, named Prisoner in Freedom City. The video, almost entirely shot from the window of the apartment where Hu was under house arrest, is a testament to the dreariness of his captors' lives. It shows security officials falling asleep, killing time by playing cards, waiting for their shift to change and following his wife on her way to work each morning. In a rare dramatic scene, Zeng confronts her pursuers by standing in front of their car in a busy street with a sign "Shame to insult a woman."
Several other critical voices have been silenced in the pre-Olympic crackdown. Last year Liu Jie was sent to a re-education through labor camp after complaining about demolitions aimed at clearing up the city ahead of the Games. Yang Chunlin, who campaigns against land seizures, was jailed after launching a "We want human rights not the Olympics" campaign.
The foreign ministry has rebutted overseas criticism of Hu's detention. "No country is spotless when it comes to human rights. No one country has the qualification to make unwarranted remarks about the human rights situation in another," spokeswoman Jiang Yu said earlier this month. "Chinese people know best about China's human rights situation."
When the Guardian met Hu late last year he was hopeful that the Olympics would help to improve the human rights situation in China. Supporters have launched an online campaign for Hu's release.