Dirty Hands Upon Women and Children

I posted my second blog entry in Chinese the day before yesterday, which is about the Beijing government's dirty hand in dealing with the family members of civil activists.

The words came out most strikingly by Zeng Jinyan's blog , whose husband, Hu Jia, is a veteran AIDS activist. And the most chilling cases are against family members of the blind peasant activist Chen Guangcheng, whom I wrote about earlier, and the activist lawyer Gao Zhisheng, about whom I would like to write sometime maybe next week.

Zeng Jinyan is a young woman in her early twenties. When she got married with Hu Jia a couple years earlier she was as compassionate and interested in helping AIDS affected poor people just as she is today. However, at that time, according to Hu Jia's account, she and her family were not very content with Hu Jia about his activist "approach." The evidence? He had been followed around and harassed by the State Security's secret police all the time. Why weren't all the other people? There must be something wrong with him, something *he* himself to be blamed for bringing inconvenience to his wife and their family.

Now she is thinking so no more. The secret police have taught her a good lesson how coercive, arbitrarily bullying they are and how impossible to communicate with them based on some most basic sense of decency, politeness and moral justice. One can act based on these principles. But in China, the secret police would not listen to your reasoning of these. No way.

When her husband was kidnapped - yes, kidnapped in its full sense, with no document or evidence shown - and kept away, incommunicado for more than a month last March, Zeng Jinyan finally realized how futile to appeal to or argue with the police with reason. When she saw this through in the government, that it does not recognize her and her husband as dignified citizens, she took it to herself to speak out as a respectable individual, a self-recognized citizen, and a dignified human being.

Since then, she has herself been followed around the clock by groups of secret police. When she was harassed, she rang the public emergency number, with no avail. Police would follow her to her company, her English class, sit in the same bus and have a car following the bus where she's on board. Her vivid account of living under police survelliance can be found at the International Herald Tribute's website. Or, go to her blog you'll find the English version there.

Luckily for her, she's - at least so far - still able to move around town in Beijing. Not so for her husband. And not so for some other women and children, who have never breached any Chinese laws. Some of them are so young that it's impossible to speak of any crime of them.

Chen Guangcheng, the blind peasant activist who's been sentenced to four years and three months in prison for a "crime" at a place and time that he did not have the access to commit. Now being locked away, he probably does not know his family members have been under the worst house arrest taking place in China since the Cultural Revolution years (1966-1976), when the then President of the People's Republic of China, Mr. Liu Shaoqi, was tortured to death in secret; and Mr. Deng Xiaoping, who would be credited as the architect of China's economic reform in the past quarter of a century, was sent to a small town in a remote mountainous area, using a code name to disguise his true identity, to work in a badly equipped factory.

Chen Guangcheng's wife has been confined to their family house for the past weeks, together with Chen's mother and an infant boy. Both the old lady and the baby have fallen ill at one point or another. However, no matter how high a fever they might have got, no hospital visit has been permitted.

In Beijing, a similar drama has been played out in the apartment of Lawyer Gao Zhisheng's home. Gao himself has been taken, again in strictly kidnapping fashion by a group of secret police from his sister's home in the east Shandong Province, more than two weeks ago. At about the same time, his home in Beijing was forced open by another group, probably as many as a few dozen members.

These intruders moved into the apartment, confiscated all the money and records of bank account they could find, together with computers, discs, notebooks and many documents. Since then, Gao's wife and their two children have to wait for meal being brought back to them by the police.

The police are divided into groups, taking turns by group, they are eating and sleeping in the Gao's apartment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Telephone line has been cut off and cell phone sets being taken away.

The Gaos' have two children. A two-year-old boy, like the baby boy of Chen and his wife, fell ill with high fever but was denied hospital visit.

Their elder child is a 12-year-old girl. At this time when schools throughout the country just started their new term, she needs to go to school and was indeed allowed to go, including her music lesson, except that she's followed by police wherever she went. They even sat next to her in her classroom. These adults, are they enjoying the surprised looks from other children, the girl's classmates? Do they know this is a crime of deliberately tramatizing a minor's existence? - All sanctioned by the State, with tax-payers' money!

The girl ran away once successfully. She was with her cell phone at the time and able to contact some of her father's friends. However, as her news was spreading on the Internet, her mother got tremendous pressure from the police and by the end she had to "voluntarily" go back to that occupied apartment.

"Occupied," "voluntary" and "involuntary" movement of individuals, somehow these days words like these always bring me images in the Middle East and in the plan the Bush administration has in regard to army reserves. As for China, attention in the West has been dominated by economic interest: trade, currency, manufacturing, financial sector, and so forth.

I am seriously worried.

Where the rule of law is supposedly being perfected for better business and greater economic growth, the laws have been abused in the name of national interest, against the socially vulnerable - women and children, who themselves have no formal legal liability in any crime.

Is the world watching, or have people learned to habitually shut their eyes in front of such inconvenience?