Beijing strikes at dissidents

China has launched a tough countrywide crackdown on a new network of political activists, writers and lawyers who have supported a bold new manifesto that presses for the end of one-party rule.

The group of 300 or so people had all signed Charter 08, which called for democracy and the rule of law in China and was named after the famous Charter 77 dissident group formed in cold war Czechoslovakia.

Charter 08 has been hailed as the most significant act of public dissent against China’s Communist party since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests were brutally crushed in 1989. It was posted online on 10 December, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It condemned recent economic modernisation efforts as having “stripped people of their rights”, and called for political reform and a new liberal, democratic constitution.

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However, Beijing has reacted by jailing some of Charter 08′s public supporters. At least 70 of the original signatories have been summoned or interrogated by the police. Prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo has been put under house arrest. The writer Wen Kejian has been detained in the resort city of Hangzhou, close to Shanghai. Police have also ransacked the Beijing home of Zhang Zuhua, one of the main authors of the charter, confiscating his passport as well as his computers, books and notebooks.

Professor Xu Youyu, a leading philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been told by police to retract his signature.

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