As Olympics heat up, China clamps down on dissent

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But in a different part of Beijing, prominent human rights activist Hu Jia is again living in another kind of bubble: what he says is a house arrest imposed by authorities who want him out of public view during the Games.

“They said Winter Olympics is a very important political event and no ‘disharmonious voice’ will be allowed — like any criticism of the Winter Olympics, or any talk related to human rights,” said Hu, who spoke to CNN during what he describes as a weeks-long restriction to his home.

“In China, people like me are called ‘domestic hostile forces’… that’s why they have to cut me off from the outside world,” said Hu, who gained international prominence as a champion of human rights in the early 2000s and was a friend to late Nobel Peace Prize winner and dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Hu says he has been restricted to his residence, with the exception of trips to care for his ailing mother, since January 15. It’s an escalation of the round-the-clock state surveillance Hu says he has been under for nearly two decades. It’s also treatment he has become used to during sensitive political events in China. Hu said he was originally told to leave Beijing altogether and relocate to Guangdong during the Olympic period but an outbreak of Covid-19 prevented him from going.

But Hu is far from the only dissident facing restrictions in the months leading up the Winter Games.

William Nee, research and advocacy coordinator at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a non-profit network supporting rights advocates in China, said before the Winter Games there had been an uptick in reports of state security wanting to know people’s whereabouts, house arrests and the detention of high profile activists and lawyers.

“The Olympics has given China an opportunity to showcase its international clout and it doesn’t want pesky activists disrupting that and talking about its human rights abuses,” he said, adding that many prominent rights defenders are “surveilled by state security all the…

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Source : cnn