by EMILY-ANNE OWENS
BEIJING, Dec 5, 2011 (IPS) – China is experiencing the worst crackdown since 1989 with a rising number of enforced disappearances of activists, a prominent Chinese dissident now living in exile has stated.
Liao Yiwu, a former Chinese political prisoner and eminent author most well known for his Tiananmen Square poem Massacre, fled China overland via Vietnam this July to live in exile abroad.
“It’s the worst crackdowns since 1989,” Liao told IPS over the phone from the United States, where he was on a book tour for ‘God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China’, a documentation of illegal house churches regularly raided by the government.
“First (the government) started to toughen their control over the Internet. Then they started to use the mafia method to treat intellectuals or dissidents to make them disappear,” said Liao. The writer believes that a softening Western stance towards human rights accounts for the increased abuses.
“After Jun. 4 in 1989 (the government) were at least sometimes worried about the pressure from Western countries. But now they have taken a hardened stance – they refuse to bow down to pressure because they feel like the West relies on them economically.
“Western countries compromise their principles in order to curry favour with China so they no longer talk about human rights. So the government is becoming more bold in the way that they crack down on dissidents,” he added.
Human rights organisations have raised concern over the increasing number of “enforced disappearances” in the country – a term coined to describe Chinese activists secretly detained by the state.
Ai Weiwei, the world-renowned artist whose work ‘Sunflower Seeds’ has been displayed at London’s Tate Modern, is the most high profile activist to have fallen victim to a vanishing act by the government. He was detained on Apr. 3, to emerge on Jun. 22 following an international outcry for his release.
But Ai Weiwei is only the most famous of dozens who have vanished into detention centres this year without recourse to lawyers or disclosure of their whereabouts to relatives.
Since mid-February, amid Party fears that the so-called Arab Spring might spread to China, at least 26 artists, writers, bloggers and human rights defenders have been subject to enforced disappearances.
Thousands more petitioners are kept in so-called “black jails” across the country, according to a 2009 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report titled ‘An Alleyway in Hell: China’s Abusive Black Jails’.
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