Newkerala.com

BEIJING: Chinese police have detained a civil rights campaigner to prevent him from staging a hunger strike outside Beijing's tightly guarded leadership compound, two men close to the activist said today.

Yang Maodong's activism set him on a collision course with the Communist Party, which has intensified crackdowns on rights campaigners, lawyers, journalists and academics in the past year.

Yang was taken into policy custody yesterday after he said in an e- mail he planned to stage a hunger strike outside the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, said Qi Zhiyong, a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen army crackdown, and AIDS activist Hu Jia.

Security is tight around Zhongnanhai -- China's political heart -- with uniformed soldiers standing guard at the entrance, plainclothes patrols, police vans parked on the sidewalk and surveillance cameras perched on its muddy red walls.

Qi, whose left leg was amputated after he was hit by a soldier's bullet during the crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests, told Reuters that a uniformed policeman questioning him outside Zhongnanhai yesterday said Yang had been taken from the scene.

Qi was detained for two hours when he went to Zhongnanhai to look for Yang, whose cell phones were turned off on Thursday.

Hu, the AIDS activist, said Yang was being held at the Fuyou Street Police Station near Zhongnanhai.The police station's duty officer, reached by telephone, declined to comment.

Hu scuffled with plainclothes police who stopped him from leaving his home.

''They're worried I would go to Xinhua Gate,'' Hu said by telephone, referring to Zhongnanhai's front door.

Yang, who goes by the pen name of Guo Feixiong, was held for more than three months late last year for trying to help residents of Taishi village in the southern province of Guangdong vote out their elected chief in a land dispute.

His supporters say government-hired thugs beat him up outside a police station in Guangdong's provincial capital Guangzhou on Sunday after he slipped back into Taishi.

About 100 activists are on hunger strike to protest against the beating, said rights activist Zhao Xin.

Back to EARI in the News