China State Security Police officers are hanging out in a backyard wearing T-shirts, shorts and flip flops on a hot summer day.
They play cards, smoke cigarettes, eat and laugh. What seems to be a holiday is actually their daily job — guarding a political prisoner.
Hu Jia, a political, environmental and AIDS activist, was put under house arrest from July 2006 to March 2007 and from May 2007 to December 2007..
Last December he was sent to jail.
His arrest and imprisonment are part of the Chinese government’s “cleansing project” that will keep dissidents from giving China a bad name during the next Olympics celebration in Beijing.
In February 2006, Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyan, also an activist, uploaded Hu’s documentary “Prisoners in Freedom City” to YouTube.
The documentary, in seven chapters, shows the chronology of Jia’s house arrest.
It can be seen at http://www.youtube.com by searching for “Prisoners in Freedom City part 1.”
Police officers stood outside his apartment building in Bo Bo Freedom City 24 hours a day keeping him from getting out. His wife could go outside, but the police followed her everywhere.
For almost 300 days, Jia’s only link to the outside world was the zoom of his video camera and his Internet connection.
Jinyan hasn’t heard a word from her husband since he was sent to jail on charges of subverting state power two months ago.
She remains under house arrest and is denied access to the Internet or a telephone.
She is kept prisoner in her home, along with her 2-year-old daughter Qianci, whom The New York Times refers to as “probably the youngest political prisoner in China”.
“This is very predictable,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a journalism professor at University of Hong Kong, in an interview for The New York Times.
“Hu Jia is not an opponent of the Olympics. He has just been saying: ‘We have problems. Our government needs to address them. As an Olympics host, we need to be treating our people better.’”
Chinese authorities promised the International Olympics Committee improvements of human rights in order to win the 2008 Olympics for Beijing. This promise is far from being accomplished.
About 80 journalists and Internet users are currently imprisoned, some of them since the 1980s, According to a report published by Reporters Without Borders.
About 180 foreign reporters were arrested, attacked or threatened in China last year.
Almost 2,500 Web sites have been blocked or censored including Yahoo! China search engine. In 2002, Yahoo! voluntarily signed the “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry,” agreeing to retrieve only a limited and approved set of results.
“Beijing has given virtually no signs that it intends to keep the promises made to the international community in exchange for hosting the Games,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.
“On the contrary, we have witnessed a systematic effort to silence, suppress and repress Chinese citizens who are trying to push the government into greater respect for fundamental rights.”
However, the Chinese government has made some improvement regarding international media coverage during the Olympics.
Through a special regulation, China promised to permit journalists both free access and free reporting rights without restrictions.
Article 6 of “Regulations on Reporting Activities in China by Foreign Journalists During the Beijing Olympic Games and the Preparatory Period” says that foreign journalists are free to interview any organization or individual in China as long as they obtain their prior consent.
These regulations will be valid from Jan. 1, 2007 to Oct. 17, 2008 according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of People’s Republic of China Web site.
Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, Human Rights in China and other organizations are collecting signatures for petitions to free Hu Jia, his wife and child and dozens of journalists, bloggers, lawyers and activists arrested before the Olympics opening Aug. 8.
If censorship and repression continues during a world event that embraces human values, there is not much left to celebrate.
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