Dissidents held during Clinton Beijing visit

More than a dozen Chinese dissidents have been questioned, followed or detained during U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's weekend visit to Beijing, fellow activists said Saturday. The stepped-up controls come as international human rights groups expressed outrage over a statement by Clinton ahead of her Friday arrival that issues such as climate change, the world financial crisis and North Korea would likely take precedence over traditional U.S. concerns about human rights in her discussions. Amnesty International said Clinton's remarks had damaged future U.S. initiatives to protect human rights in China. New York-based Human Rights Watch said progress on issues cited by Clinton could only be achieved through greater legal protections and press freedom. "Secretary Clinton's remarks point to a diplomatic strategy that has worked well for the Chinese government–segregating human rights issues into a dead-end 'dialogue of the deaf,'" Human Rights Watch's Asia advocacy director Sophie Richardson said in an e-mailed statement. Blacklisted author Yu Jie said Saturday a pair of plainclothes policemen visited him on Friday and said he would have to report all his movements to them in advance. Yu said officers had demanded that he ride in a police car while traveling around the city, a form of monitoring that he was forced to endure for more than a month during the Beijing Olympics in August. Yu said he refused and they agreed to merely follow him while he drove his own vehicle. "They said I was to receive heightened monitoring throughout Clinton's visit, but that it would end once she left," Yu said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. Zeng Jinyan, the wife of imprisoned activist Hu Jia, said she was barred by police from leaving her home on Saturday morning to meet with visiting AIDS activist Gao Yaojie. Police offered no explanation, but Zeng said she was certain the confinement was tied to Clinton's visit. Yu and Zeng said they knew of more than one dozen activists who had been detained or subjected to tighter restrictions. Yu said constitutional scholar Zhang Zuhua was told by police stationed outside his home since Friday that he would not be able to leave or meet visitors for several days. Yu said some activists had been taken to police guesthouses outside the city, among them Qi Zhiyong, an activist whose leg was amputated during the June 3-4 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy demonstrations centered on Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Several of those Yu listed as being under heightened restrictions were signatories to "Charter 08," an unusually open call for civil rights and political reforms that has garnered considerable attention since its release last December. China's communist authorities routinely ratchet-up harassment of dissidents when important visitors are in town. The atmosphere is especially tense this year ahead of a series of sensitive dates, including the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and the 50th of an uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet. Tightened controls are apparently intended to prevent them meeting with foreign visitors or staging demonstrations. Clinton hasn't said whether she would meet with individual dissidents while in Beijing. If she were to do so, Gao, the AIDS activist, would be among the most likely to receive an invitation. Two years ago, Clinton successfully appealed to Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao to lift a ban on the elderly Gao going to the United States to receive an award from a group supported by the then New York senator. While declining to criticize Clinton, Zeng, whose husband was sentenced last year to a 3 1/2-year prison sentence for sedition, said international attention to China's human rights abuses remained an important driver of change. "International concern is important if China really wants to evolve into a nation that truly respects human rights," Zeng said by phone. "However, it's even more important that Chinese citizens themselves demand those rights."