China's Brutal Crackdown on Dissidents

Andreas Lorenz
SPIEGEL Magazine
Jun. 27, 2006

China's Communist Party officials are employing brutal methods in dealing with difficult citizens. The most recent victim of what appears to be government-sanctioned brutality was a farmer who suffered a broken cervical vertebra when he was attacked by thugs.

Fu Xiancai, 47, is a far cry from an enemy of the state, as evidenced by the many portraits of Mao Zedong he displays in his house. However, the mustache-wearing farmer became a difficult citizen when he was forced to leave his village, Maoping, on the banks of the Yangtze River. Fu, like 1.2 million other Chinese, was in the way of a giant project, the construction of China's Three Gorges Dam. The budding superpower hopes to derive much-needed energy by damming the Yangtze.

"We have nothing against the project," Fu has said. "This is a good dam." But he did object to the fact that the relocation compensation he received was substantially lower than the amount he had been promised by the state. Instead of about 20,000 Yuan (€2,000), Fu received only 7,000 (€700). Many other residents of Maoping had the same experience.

Fu traveled to Beijing 15 times to complain. Despite having had only three years of formal education, he wrote 50 written complaints to local authorities, but all were denied. After his efforts failed, on May 19, he voiced his opinion on the €20 billion dam in a story produced by German public television broadcaster ARD. That was when his troubles began. The local police chief, Wang Qiankui, had Fu brought in to the station and warned him against making any further contacts with the Western press. As he was walking home from the station, Fu was attacked by thugs who beat him so brutally that he broke a cervical vertebra and has since been paralyzed. Although there is no evidence that the attack had anything to do with Fu's brief television appearance, some suspect that he was attacked because party leaders wanted to give the troublemaker a lesson. Fu had already been attacked and seriously injured one year earlier.

Severe government responses

Acts of violence against difficult citizens is par for the course in China. As in the Yangtze dam case, money and justice are often at issue. Hundreds of thousands find themselves having to make way for dams, factories and roads, all in the name of the Chinese economic miracle. But instead of benefiting residents, a sizeable share of government compensation ends up in the hands of greedy party officials, prompting angry protests against this form of official corruption.

The government response to the protests has been severe. At least three people were killed in December when security forces fired on villagers objecting to the confiscation of their fields in Dongzhou in the southern province of Guangdong. In Taishi, also in Guangdong Province, thugs seriously injured civil rights activist Lu Banglie following a dispute over village elections in October. The police almost always look the other way.

In Dingzhou, southwest of Beijing, the local party leader hired gangsters in June 2005 to kill six farmers who refused to turn over their land for the construction of a power plant. In February, a journalist was killed in Taizhou, not far from Shanghai, when he was severely beaten by police officers in retribution for his reporting on arbitrary criminal sentences for traffic offenders.

Two years ahead of the Beijing Olympics, the face China presents to the world is that of a country that gives its citizens free rein to enrich themselves while dealing mercilessly with its critics. "Torture is part of everyday practice in police stations," says American law professor and attorney Jerome Cohen, who represents civil rights activists in China. Thirty-two journalists are currently in prison, and attorneys who are too forceful in defending their clients' rights are often jailed or become victims of beatings themselves.

The police in Shandong Province, for example, arrested blind civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng, 35, after months of harassment. He had documented illegal forced abortions in a country that continues to enforce a one child per family rule. Chen's family, including a three-year-old child, was abducted from the apartment of an attorney last week when it attempted to discuss his fate with journalists.

Despotism at all levels

Despotism and infringements of the law also take place at the highest levels of government in Beijing. After the New York Times ran an exclusive story in September 2004 on the head of the military commission Jiang Zemin's plans to leave his position, officials arrested an assistant in the paper's Chinese office, Zhao Yan, 44, and charged him with "revealing state secrets to foreigners." Zhao's ensuing treatment was nothing short of a legal farce. Contrary to all regulations and time periods stipulated by law, the police and government prosecutors detained Zhao for months. It was finally revealed that the government was unable to prove its charges against him. The New York Times, for its part, has denied that it received the information for its story from the assistant.

Zhao is still in detention. When he stood trial on June 16 before the Second Beijing Central People's Court, not a single witness was heard. Now he is waiting for a sentence that could put him behind bars for years.

Meanwhile, 1,300 kilometers south of the capital, farmer Fu Xiancai is fighting for his life. In another display of the face of modern China, doctors at the First People's Hospital in Yichang refused to perform surgery on Fu until German diplomats agreed to pay the 60,000 Yuan (€6,000) cost of the operation.

In room number 7 in the hospital's surgery ward, Fu's wife and his eldest son, a law student in Beijing, are waiting for the patient, fresh out of surgery to the trachea, to be brought from the ICU to the fourth floor. Two plain-clothes guards sit in the corridor slurping bowls of instant noodles. A doctor tells Fu's wife and son: "There is no hope that he will ever stand up again."