Chinese Sweep Targets Activists Before Meeting

BEIJING, March 3 -- China has launched a tough crackdown on political activity ahead of this month's session of the national parliament, with at least two dozen participants in a nationwide hunger strike against government abuses confirmed missing or detained in the past two weeks, according to friends and relatives.

Hundreds of petitioners who had traveled to Beijing with grievances against local officials have also been forced to leave the capital in recent days, several of them said in interviews, and others have been blocked from entering the city.

The Communist Party routinely tightens security before the annual meeting of the rubber-stamp National People's Congress, but it appears to be taking special precautions ahead of this year's session, which begins Sunday, in response to rising social unrest in the countryside and an increasingly assertive campaign by civil rights activists in several cities.

The crackdown began in mid-February after a prominent Beijing lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, staged a two-day hunger strike to draw attention to the beating of a fellow human rights activist, Yang Maodong, by thugs who appeared to have been hired by police. Gao said he stopped eating to protest the government's growing use of "Mafia tactics" to suppress efforts by citizens to protect their legal rights.

News of Gao's hunger strike spread quickly on the Internet, and supporters in as many as 15 provinces soon agreed to take turns fasting in solidarity with him. It is unclear how many joined the relay hunger strikes, but Gao said he received phone calls and electronic messages indicating that at least 450 people had volunteered to fast for at least 24 hours.

The scale of the protest and the speed with which it was organized appeared to alarm the Chinese security ministries, which in the following weeks mobilized officers in cities across the country to question, harass and detain participants.

The government is sensitive about hunger strikes because college students used them to rally the public and escalate the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Those protests ended when troops opened fire, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands.

Several individuals who participated in the hunger strike last month remain missing, including Hu Jia, 31, a Beijing-based AIDS activist who played a leading role in exposing the HIV epidemic in central China caused by government-backed blood dealers who used unsanitary collection methods.

Hu's wife, Zeng Jinyan, declined to be interviewed but wrote on her blog that Hu was being held under house arrest when she left for work on Feb. 16 and that when she returned home, he was gone.

Since then, Zeng has used her blog to record her efforts to find him. On Feb. 27, she described one encounter with police officials who denied her husband was in custody and refused to deliver medicine that he needs to treat a liver condition.

"Their cold and detached attitude left me sad and speechless," she wrote. "I still don't feel well. After eating lunch, I vomited."

Also missing since Feb. 16 are Qi Zhiyong, 49, a former construction worker whose legs were amputated after he was shot during the Tiananmen massacre, and Ouyang Xiaorong, a software engineer from southwest China who traveled to Beijing to help Gao coordinate the hunger strike, several friends said.