Crackdown Betrays Breadth of Beijing’s Challenges

Mar 18, 2014
Crackdown Betrays Breadth of Beijing’s Challenges
By Stanley Lubman
The severity of China’s current crackdown on outspoken activists is an expression of the anxiety that has taken hold of the Party-state. Two recent criminal proceedings involving public protests illustrate the depth, but also the breadth, of that anxiety.

In one case in Beijing, Hu Jia, a long-time citizen rights activist, was subjected to a lengthy interrogation by police about his more than 200 Twitter comments, all of which expressed views they deemed to threaten “stability maintenance.” In the other case, in Guangdong, Wu Guijun, an elected “worker’s representative,” stands accused of organizing a protest by factory workers.
These two cases involve different kinds of protests and illustrate the severe limitations on freedom of expression. In addition, use of social media to organize, and protests over environmental issues and unlawful land seizures continue to grow. At the same time, the Party-state struggles to contain them.
In the Beijing case, the police are holding in house arrest Hu Jia, a 40-year old activist since the late 1990s who had been imprisoned for three and a half years in 2008-2011 for “inciting subversion of state power and the socialist system.” Most recently Hu was interrogated by police who reportedly said that Hu had been “provoking and stirring up trouble” by posting comments on Twitter.
Last month, according to the South China Morning Post, police aggressively questioned Hu about comments he posted that included a call for a rally in Tiananmen to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the June 4th crackdown, an expression of support for the Dalai Lama, a reference to his link to a house-church, and his support for Xu Zhiyong — a veritable checklist of issues and conduct sure to arouse the interest of Party-state censors concerned about threats to “stability maintenance.” His trial should take place soon.
Hu’s support for Xu Zhiyong, who was convicted in January for “gathering crowds to disturb public order” and sentenced to four years in prison, likely causes Hu to be viewed as more of a threat than an ordinary offender against public order. Xu founded the New Citizens Movement, which was the target of an internal notice issued in June by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate that warned prosecutors “to beware of people who assembled and disturbed public order with the aim of subverting state power.”
The Guangdong case involved workers’ demonstrations in Shenzhen against refusal by a factory to pay “adequate and legally mandated” compensation for eliminating their jobs by relocating to a cheaper location. In May 2013 the workers, including Wu Guijun, marched toward a government office. As a result, Wu was been charged with “disturbing public order.” At the trial’s opening session in February, according to media reports, the judge announced that it had been cancelled because the prosecutor was unavailable. Fellow workers in the courtroom who had been waiting for three hours along with Wu and “dozens of labor activists” angrily marched to the court’s administrative office. The judge ultimately located the prosecutor and scheduled the first hearing in a larger courtroom.
When the hearing did open a week later, the prosecution argued that Wu had led the marching workers in singing patriotic songs, which proved that he had organized the May march.
The defendants in the two cases noted here embody some of challenges facing the Party-state.
The conduct of the workers and activists at the trial in Shenzhen illustrates the aggressiveness of the labor activists who work outside the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Party-controlled union that is the only one permitted to exist in China. The union is usually passive or invisible when workers take to the streets.
The labor activists’ prominent presence at both the May 2013 protest and the hearing that followed last month signal rising intensity in the concerns of some workers. According to the “China Labor Bulletin,” many worker protests last year were caused by “the closure, merger or relocation of factories in Guangdong.” At the same time, workers are increasingly able to organize protests thanks to the availability of cheap smartphones and rapid development of social media.
Recent notable labor disputes were a strike by more than 5,000 workers that “derailed” a proposed merger of a joint venture partially owned by Cooper Tire & Rubber Co., anda strike earlier this month by workers at an IBM plant in Shenzhen who protested a proposed transfer of a computer-server factory to Lenovo Group.
The Party-state’s struggle to quiet Chinese society will continue as forcefully as before, whether it is responding to human rights activists, environmental or workers’ demonstrations, or others using social media to organize protests. Each attempt to silence protest, however, may escalate the very behavior it is trying to suppress.
Stanley Lubman, a long-time specialist on Chinese law, is a Distinguished Lecturer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He is the author of “Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao” (Stanford University Press, 1999) and editor of “The Evolution of Law Reform in China: An Uncertain Path” (Elgar, 2012).