Washington (CNSNews.com) - The number of people imprisoned by the government of the People’s Republic of China has continued to increase in the weeks leading up to the start of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a trend that members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee are attempting to stop with a bill that calls for China to release its political prisoners.
“With the Olympics coming up, the Executive Branch, and President Bush in particular, needs to raise the cases of these individuals so that they can find freedom and be let out of the horrific Lao Gai prison system where many have been tortured and beaten,” said Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J), a member of the committee.
The legislation, sponsored by committee chair Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), passed unanimously in committee and should be debated on the House floor this week.
According to a staffer at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), the number of persons in the CECC’s political prisoner database who are known or believed to be currently detained or imprisoned reached 800 on Friday. On June 26, the number was 734.
The commission was established in 2000 by Congress to monitor human rights in China.
Sophie Richardson, the advocacy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, said based on the increasing numbers of people imprisoned for political and religious reasons in the weeks and months preceding the Olympics, the politically motivated imprisonments will continue up to and through the Olympic Games, which run from Aug. 8 through Aug. 24.
“We will not be surprised if the numbers increase and if it continues to be some pretty high-profile people,” Richardson told CNSNews.com.
An alarming trend, she said, is that more people are being arrested for “inciting state subversion.”
“The common characteristic is that these people are talking about subjects the government really doesn’t want them talking about right now, and part of the right now is because a lot of the rest of the world is watching and listening in a way it doesn’t normally,” Richardson said. “And so, there are certain subjects that the government doesn’t want discussed in the run-up to the Olympics, and probably doesn’t want discussed at other times as well, but I think the penalties wouldn’t have been so severe if China weren’t hosting the Olympics in a couple of weeks.”
Who are the political prisoners?
Human Rights Watch profiles several of those detained or imprisoned for political reasons on its Web site. One such person is Hu Jia, a human rights activist from Beijing.
Hu served as the executive director of the Beijing Aizhixing Institute of Health Education and publicly criticized China’s human rights record last year, testifying in November at a European Parliament hearing about his desire for China to address human rights concerns.
Hu was detained in December 2007, and arrested in January. In April, he was found guilty of “inciting subversion of state power” and was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison. His wife and young daughter are under house arrest in Beijing.
The House resolution specifically mentions the imprisonment of Hu Jia in its call for the Chinese government to “immediately release all those imprisoned or detained for nonviolently exercising their political and religious rights and their right to free expression.”
Another activist, Yang Chunlin, was sentenced to five years in prison, again for “inciting subversion of state power,” after he collected signatures for his petition entitled, “We want human rights, not the Olympics.”
The CECC database contains hundreds of other cases of people who are now political prisoners, in many cases for speech violations.
The House resolution calls for President Bush to make a statement critical of China’s human rights situation before he departs for the Olympic Games, and to repeat his statement while in Beijing. He’s also urged to try to visit Tibet and Xinjiang while he is in China.
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) accompanied Smith to China earlier this month and joined him in presenting the CECC’s political prisoners database to the Chinese government. He criticized Bush’s decision to attend the Beijing games, but called on him to give a speech on human rights while he is there.
“The people of China, and the dissidents who sit in their jail cells day after day, week after week, year after year, should know that the president of the United States of America and leader of the free world stands with them in their quest for freedom, and not with the repressive Communist regime of China,” Wolf said.