.Nervous China puts security apparatus into overdrive
Sitting last week in his cramped Beijing flat just beyond the city’s fifth ring road, Teng Biao talked about a joke he used to share with Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned activist who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Mr Liu would tease him about his ability to continue working as a human rights lawyer without being sent to jail.
“Doing this type of work, we can never be afraid of being jailed,” said Mr Teng. “But if you are in prison, you cannot do things.”
The joke is not looking so funny now. On Saturday, Mr Teng was called in to talk to the local police and as of Wednesday evening, he had still not reappeared, swallowed up somewhere in the city’s labyrinthine security bureaucracy. The police came later to his flat and took the two laptops that he spent his days crouched in front of.
“Why don’t you come in for a cup of tea?” is the euphemism that often accompanies such a police summons. Some young wits have even invented a new character that combines the symbol for tea with the similar character for interrogation. The normal routine is a few hours of questioning over, yes, some tea, followed by a rap on the knuckles.
Yet in the past few days, after an online call to bring a “Jasmine Revolution” from the Middle East to China began circulating, the system has gone into overdrive. According to human rights groups, more than 100 activists have had their movements restricted since last Friday. Among them, five lawyers, including Mr Teng, have been detained.
As it happened, no real protest met the first call for action on Sunday. A large crowd assembled outside a McDonald’s in central Beijing, but most were passers-by who thought the foreign television cameras meant celebrity sightings. There were no chants, no slogans, no banners. Yet that has not stopped the security forces from launching a sweeping crackdown.
Watching the tragicomic ranting of Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi or the scenes from Cairo, the near-universal view among China-watchers is there is little chance of something similar in Beijing, if nothing else because of China’s far superior record for competence. So why does the government look so nervous? And why are lawyers bearing the brunt of the backlash?
One explanation is that beneath the surface of China’s non-stop economy, there is much more unrest than meets the eye. There have certainly been some powerful warnings. Yu Jianrong, an influential scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, last year warned of an upsurge in “venting incidents”, unauthorised outbursts of public rage, often about land disputes.
Such perceptions have empowered the state security apparatus, which has seen large increases in budget and personnel. In truth, this crackdown is only the latest in a series that stretches back to the March 2008 Tibet riots, taking in the Olympics, the 60th anniversary of Communist China in 2009 and last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Beijing’s political activists have grown wearily used to the constant harassment.
Activist lawyers have been targeted precisely because they have started to channel some of these resentments. Teng Biao described last week the gradual narrowing of space that he and his colleagues enjoy. He used to help run the now-shut non-profit Open Constitution Initiative, an organisation that did work on forced abortions and illegal land seizures. Last year, he founded a new group to campaign on death penalty cases, an area where the government has signalled it is keen to push reform. But his wife watched at the weekend as police took away case files for this organisation too.
There is an ideological element too to the move against lawyers, a post-Lehmans drift away from western ideas of rule of law. Legal experts say there is renewed support for civil cases to go to mediation, a process conducted by a Communist party official, rather than to court – party wisdom trumping the law.
Yet if Mr Yu’s research has helped raise anxieties, the official response has been the opposite of what he preaches. The real risk for China was not unrest, but the “rigid stability” of an unbending political system, which was bottling up social tensions.
FT
Just keep buying "made in china"
“Doing this type of work, we can never be afraid of being jailed,” said Mr Teng. “But if you are in prison, you cannot do things.”
The joke is not looking so funny now. On Saturday, Mr Teng was called in to talk to the local police and as of Wednesday evening, he had still not reappeared, swallowed up somewhere in the city’s labyrinthine security bureaucracy. The police came later to his flat and took the two laptops that he spent his days crouched in front of.
“Why don’t you come in for a cup of tea?” is the euphemism that often accompanies such a police summons. Some young wits have even invented a new character that combines the symbol for tea with the similar character for interrogation. The normal routine is a few hours of questioning over, yes, some tea, followed by a rap on the knuckles.
Yet in the past few days, after an online call to bring a “Jasmine Revolution” from the Middle East to China began circulating, the system has gone into overdrive. According to human rights groups, more than 100 activists have had their movements restricted since last Friday. Among them, five lawyers, including Mr Teng, have been detained.
As it happened, no real protest met the first call for action on Sunday. A large crowd assembled outside a McDonald’s in central Beijing, but most were passers-by who thought the foreign television cameras meant celebrity sightings. There were no chants, no slogans, no banners. Yet that has not stopped the security forces from launching a sweeping crackdown.
Watching the tragicomic ranting of Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi or the scenes from Cairo, the near-universal view among China-watchers is there is little chance of something similar in Beijing, if nothing else because of China’s far superior record for competence. So why does the government look so nervous? And why are lawyers bearing the brunt of the backlash?
One explanation is that beneath the surface of China’s non-stop economy, there is much more unrest than meets the eye. There have certainly been some powerful warnings. Yu Jianrong, an influential scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, last year warned of an upsurge in “venting incidents”, unauthorised outbursts of public rage, often about land disputes.
Such perceptions have empowered the state security apparatus, which has seen large increases in budget and personnel. In truth, this crackdown is only the latest in a series that stretches back to the March 2008 Tibet riots, taking in the Olympics, the 60th anniversary of Communist China in 2009 and last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Beijing’s political activists have grown wearily used to the constant harassment.
Activist lawyers have been targeted precisely because they have started to channel some of these resentments. Teng Biao described last week the gradual narrowing of space that he and his colleagues enjoy. He used to help run the now-shut non-profit Open Constitution Initiative, an organisation that did work on forced abortions and illegal land seizures. Last year, he founded a new group to campaign on death penalty cases, an area where the government has signalled it is keen to push reform. But his wife watched at the weekend as police took away case files for this organisation too.
There is an ideological element too to the move against lawyers, a post-Lehmans drift away from western ideas of rule of law. Legal experts say there is renewed support for civil cases to go to mediation, a process conducted by a Communist party official, rather than to court – party wisdom trumping the law.
Yet if Mr Yu’s research has helped raise anxieties, the official response has been the opposite of what he preaches. The real risk for China was not unrest, but the “rigid stability” of an unbending political system, which was bottling up social tensions.
FT
Just keep buying "made in china"
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