Human Rights: May 2009 Archives

By Wu'er Kaixi | CNN
May 31, 2009

Editor's note: Wu'er Kaixi was a student leader in 1989, and since then has been living in exile outside of China.

On June 4 this year, it will have been 20 years since I have seen Beijing, the city in which I spent much of my youth and attended university. It will have been 20 years since I saw my parents. My parents are older. I hear their health is not what it was, but it is something they take pains not to trouble me with. I hear Beijing is much changed. I hear China is much changed.

One thing has not changed. Many of us are still in exile and cannot go home. This is an odd thing, if you really think about it.

Last year, amid much pomp and ceremony, China held the 2008 Olympics. In the same year, China conducted its first space walk. In the same year, it overhauled its property laws, allowing far greater rights of ownership than China has seen since the communist revolution.

This year, amid a financial crisis of the kind the world has not seen since the Great Depression of 1929, the world looks to China as the motor of possible economic revival. Yet China -- unlike other nations that aspire to international recognition and respect -- still imprisons and exiles those with dissenting views.

The pity of this for me is that dissenting opinions have been behind every step of China's long journey to the place it now prides itself on occupying. Sacrifices were made to bring about the end of the Qing imperial dynasty and usher in a nationalist government in 1911. The student movement of May 4, 1919, against the Treaty of Versailles, which ceded German rights to Shandong province to Japan, initiated the nationalist, populist movement that arguably led to the rise of the Communist Party and the liberation of China from foreign control. Equally, it was internal pressure within China that compelled the ruling Chinese Communist Party to move from a position of insularity to what it is today - a voice that has authority in the international arena.

China has seen enormous changes since May and June of 1989, when the students of Beijing stood up and called on the Beijing government to make changes. The movement emerged largely out of a sense of frustration with a system amid unique circumstances - the death of a politician who was seen as more sympathetic to reform than most and ahead of a historic visit by then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a movement that was born out of a yearning for an end to official corruption and a stifling system that provided no opportunities to the country's best educated. But it became a wider call for change, when workers' unions and common people joined it.

Five months after the Tiananmen student movement was put down with live ammunition in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Early the following year -- in 1992 -- Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping embarked on what is now known as the Southern Tour. In the relatively freewheeling Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, he reiterated a dormant catchphrase of the 1980s, "To get rich is glorious," and effectively initiated a new era for China.

This new China is the only China that most foreigners who do business with the world's potentially biggest market know. But the only China I truly know is the one I was exiled from - and it was a China where you could not buy Nike or have a quiet drink in a bar, it was a China of empty department stores and streets thronging with people in drab Mao suits. To this day, I believe that the people who sacrificed their lives in Beijing in June 1989 had a huge role in transforming the China of my youth into the place it is today, the place that today the world recognizes as China - and hopes will help revive the global economy.

I am proud of what China has achieved. I simply wish it had achieved more. It is a personal tragedy for me that, after 20 years, I cannot see my parents or my homeland. But I think it is a far greater tragedy for China that, after 20 years, it cannot openly discuss its recent history, and let its people decide for themselves how and why the world's most populous nation has come to occupy the place it rightfully deserves. To me this says that China may have appeared to have stood up, but in reality it is still sitting down.

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By Agence France Presse (AFP) | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
May 26, 2009

Exiled Chinese dissidents who survived the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstration said on Tuesday that, after 20 years, China should be held to account for the bloodshed.

Speaking at a Paris news conference organised by late designer Yves Saint Laurent's businessman partner Pierre Berge, former protester Zhou Qing said: "The government owes us the truth, and owes it to Chinese society."

The call came as Chinese dissidents prepared to mark the 20th anniversary of the Beijing protest, during which hundreds, possibly thousands, of students and workers at a pro-democracy rally were killed by security forces.

China's Communist government defends the June 4, 1989 crackdown, saying it had been necessary to quash a "counter-revolutionary" rebellion, and the state has so far released no official death toll for the repression.

Berge, a wealthy investor, has been a long-standing critic of China and most recently clashed with Beijing over the sale of two antique bronzes from Saint Laurent's collection, which the regime said were stolen goods.

Zhou was among the protesters who mounted a peaceful six-week protest in the square, a major landmark in the heart of Beijing, before government tanks and troops rolled in and launched a broad crackdown on dissident groups.

"The events of June 4 are a wound on the body of China," said Zhou, who now lives in Germany. "We must recognise the truth. If we hide this wound, the situation will only get worse.

"We the survivors must speak for those who died in Tiananmen Square, and also for those who were jailed," he said. "There were minors aged less than 17 who were locked up with me who were raped by common law criminals."

"After 20 years, the events continue to weigh heavily on Chinese society. I saw 11 students crushed under tanks," said his French-based comrade, Cai Chongguo, author of "I was in Tiananmen", published for the anniversary.

Former protest organiser Zhang Jian, 39, said he had been shot in the leg when soldiers stormed the square, adding: "For as long as I live I will bear witness so that the young Chinese know what happened."

Zhang will appear in a new Tiananmen documentary to air June 4.

Berge said the international community should do more to pressure Beijing over its human rights record, and noted that he had personally broken off business ties in China following the crackdown.

>> Original source

By RADIO FREE ASIA
May 19, 2009

Two men jailed for a high-profile act of vandalism in 1989 get U.S. asylum and treatment for trauma suffered in prison.

HONG KONG--Two protesters who helped splatter Mao Zedong's portrait with red paint during the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement 20 years ago have been granted political asylum in the United States, informed sources said.

Former journalist and art critic Yu Dongyue was the last of three protesters jailed by Chinese authorities for defacing Mao's portrait to be freed. He was released in February 2006 after serving 17 years behind bars.
His family says he still suffers from severe mental impairment following repeated beatings in Chishan Prison, Yuanjiang city, in the central province of Hunan.

Yu Dongyue, his sister Yu Rixia, fellow portrait protester Yu Zhijian, and his wife are currently in Thailand after fleeing China secretly. All have been granted asylum.

An official who answered the phone at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok declined to comment on the matter.

Treatment sought

Yu Dongyue's brother Yu Xiyue said his mental state had shown little improvement since his release.

"We have taken him to the [mental] hospital many times but he has not recovered," Yu Xiyue said."The situation is still the same ... We don't think he can recover here."

Yu Xiyue was deliberately vague about his brother's whereabouts, but confirmed that he had long since left home.
"My parents are missing him very much since he left," he said. "But if it is good for his health, that is OK."
"My father has high blood pressure and is currently in the hospital," he added.
Yu Xiyue said the main purpose of Yu's departure was to get better treatment for the mental illness he has suffered since his incarceration.

The third portrait protester, former bus driver Lu Decheng, escaped China illegally in 2004, spending several months in a Bangkok jail before finally arriving in Canada, but without his wife and child.

He declined to comment on the granting of asylum to Yu Dongyue and Yu Zhijian, saying it was "inconvenient" to speak about their case.

"It's 20 years already," Lu said, adding that he was overjoyed to be reunited with his old friends. "It is a kind of sadness."

International pressure

After Lu and Yu Zhijiang were released in parole in 1998 and 2000, respectively, they visited Yu Dongyue in 2001 in prison. They reported that he was unable to recognize them, and spoke incoherently to himself.

"Without international pressure on China, Yu Dongyue would have died in prison," Lu said.

All three men are expected to attend a memorial service held by the Washington-based Laogai Foundation on June 4, 2009, to mark the 20th anniversary of the armed crackdown, in which up to 1,000 people may have died.

Yu Dongyue was freed on Feb. 22, 2006, Lu Decheng in 1999 after 10 years in jail, while Yu Zhijian was freed in 2000 after serving 11 years.

Before they defaced the Mao portrait on May 23, 1989, all three had been active in the pro-democracy movement in the provincial capital Changsha, traveling to Beijing in mid-May that year to join thousands of demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.

Yu Dongyue, Lu, and Yu Zhijian were handed over to national security police after prolonged negotiations with the student command on the Square, a decision Lu and Yu Zhijian regard as having been made with the broader interests of the student movement in mind.

But U.S.-based former student activist Wang Dan has since said he deeply regrets what happened to the three men.

Original reporting in Cantonese by Lillian Cheung. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

>> Original source

By Erik Eckholm | THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 15, 2009

In May 1989, as he feuded with hard-line party rivals over how to handle the students occupying Tiananmen Square, China's Communist Party chief requested a personal audience with Deng Xiaoping, the patriarch behind the scenes.

The party chief, Zhao Ziyang, was told to go to Mr. Deng's home on the afternoon of May 17 for what he thought would be a private talk. To his dismay, he arrived to find that Mr. Deng had assembled several key members of the Politburo, including Mr. Zhao's bitter foes.

"I realized that things had already taken a bad turn," Mr. Zhao recalls in a secretly recorded memoir only now coming to light -- a rare first-person account of crisis politics at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.

From Mr. Deng's impatient body language and the scathing attacks he received from his rivals, Mr. Zhao says in the memoir, which is now being published in book form, it was obvious that Mr. Deng had already decided to overrule Mr. Zhao's proposal for dialogue with the students and impose martial law.

"It seems my mission in history has already ended," Mr. Zhao recalls telling a party elder later that day. "I told myself that no matter what, I would not be the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students."

As Mr. Zhao anticipated, he was immediately sidelined and soon vilified for "splitting the party." He was purged and placed under house arrest until his death in 2005.

But in this long, enforced retirement, it turns out, Mr. Zhao secretly recorded his own account, on 30 musical cassette tapes that were spirited out of the country by former aides and supporters, of his rise to national power in the 1980s, his battles with the old guard, and his alliance and tussles with Mr. Deng as he loosened Soviet-style controls and helped put China on a path to the dynamic economic power it has become today.

Mr. Zhao also tells how he was outmaneuvered during the lengthy student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in the spring of 1989, setting up his ouster shortly before the military crackdown on June 4 of that year.

One striking claim in the memoir, scholars who have seen it said, is that Mr. Zhao presses the case that he pioneered the opening of China's economy to the world and the initial introduction of market forces in agriculture and industry -- steps he says were fiercely opposed by hard-liners and not always fully supported by Mr. Deng, the paramount leader, who is often credited with championing market-oriented policies.

In the late 1970s, as the party chief in Sichuan Province, Mr. Zhao had started dismantling Maoist-style collective farms. Mr. Deng, who had just consolidated power after Mao's death, brought him to Beijing in 1980 as prime minister with a mandate for change. Mr. Zhao, who like other Chinese leaders had little training in or experience of market economics, describes his political battles and missteps as he tried to give more rein to free enterprise.

Roderick MacFarquhar, a China expert at Harvard who wrote an introduction to the new book, said it had given him a new appreciation of Mr. Zhao's central role in devising economic strategies, including some, like promoting foreign trade in coastal provinces, that he had urged on Mr. Deng, rather than the other way around.

"Deng Xiaoping was the godfather, but on a day-to-day basis Zhao was the actual architect of the reforms," Mr. MacFarquhar said in an interview.

Recording over children's songs and Beijing Opera performances on the cassettes in his guarded compound just north of Tiananmen Square, Mr. Zhao describes in generally modest terms his tenure as prime minister and then party secretary.

Mr. Zhao had initially made written notes and then in around 2000 decided to tape them, spreading the cassettes among four visitors who were present during the recordings, said Bao Tong, a former close adviser to Mr. Zhao who remains under tight surveillance in Beijing.

Mr. Bao said in an interview this week that he learned about the tapes in 2007 and had helped assemble the complete set, calling the memoir "very rare historical material" that "belongs to all the people of China and to the world." He said the voice was unmistakably that of Mr. Zhao and that, given the presence of others at the tapings, their authenticity was not in doubt.

Nearly 20 years after the crackdown and Mr. Zhao's fall, the edited transcripts are being published in a book, "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang" (Simon and Schuster) that will be formally released in the United States on May 19. A Chinese-language edition is being published in Hong Kong.

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By AFP - Agence France Presse - via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
May 13, 2009

The United States voiced concern Wednesday over China's reported arrest of a student leader of the 1989 democracy protests.

"We are disturbed by reports that prominent Chinese human rights activist Zhou Yongjun has been charged with fraud after months of detention in China," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

"It is our understanding that contrary to Chinese legal procedure, Mr Zhou's family was not officially informed until May 13," Kelly added.

"The embassy in Beijing has raised our concerns with the ministry of foreign affairs."

"We are calling on the government to ensure that all legal and administrative decisions against him are conducted in a manner that is both transparent and consistent with Chinese law and international human rights norms," Kelly said.

Zhou's family was told of the charges against him Wednesday by police in southwestern China, more than seven months after he was reportedly seized trying to return after years in the United States, his brother Zhou Lin said.

Zhou was a leader of the Beijing Students' Autonomous Union, one of the most visible groups in the protests at Tiananmen Square, which ended on June 4, 1989 in an army crackdown that killed hundreds, possibly thousands.

"They told us the charges concerned fraud. But we are still unclear on the situation. We are waiting for more information," Zhou Lin told AFP by telephone.

Zhou was charged in the family's home city of Suining in Sichuan province.

He said Zhou had a US "green card" denoting permanent residence status there -- a fact likely to make his arrest a touchy issue with Washington.

A spokeswoman at the US embassy in Beijing said earlier it had raised Zhou's case with China's foreign ministry but she had no further comment.

>> Original source

By David W. Chen | The New York Times
Sunday, May 10, 2009

Gao Zhisheng, one of China's most irrepressible dissidents, began the day of Jan. 9 the same way as most days since security officials had begun watching him around the clock. He and his wife, Geng He, ate a breakfast of soy milk, fried eggs and peanuts. Mr. Gao left the apartment to run some errands.

By the time he returned, his wife and two children were gone. With only the clothes they were wearing, roughly $60 in cash and, out of habit, their keys, the three embarked upon a harrowing odyssey orchestrated by human rights activists that began in the bitter cold of northern Beijing and ended, seven days and some 2,000 miles later, in the humid safety of Thailand.

"I had no time to think," Ms. Geng, whose children are 16 and 5, said. "I didn't have a watch. I had no concept of time. All I knew was that we had to move forward. We couldn't go back." She spoke during an interview late last month in New York, where she and her children settled after arriving in the United States in March.

Ms. Geng's tale stands out not just because it involves a cinematic escape, with elements like stalled motorcycles and nonstop travel with little food or sleep. It is remarkable, human rights activists say, because it reveals how China uses family members of dissidents as leverage against them. And it shows the extreme measures a small number of political opponents will take to deny the authorities that leverage. Ms. Geng insists, though, that her husband knew nothing of her plans.

Mr. Gao said in earlier interviews that security officials used threats against his children to extract a humiliating public confession from him in 2006. So the departure of his family gave him greater leeway to challenge the leadership, though at a high cost: he has not been seen or heard from since Feb. 4, when the security forces hauled him away.

His family's escape upended the way security officials managed the provocative Mr. Gao, a human rights lawyer who has embraced causes including the outlawed spiritual group Falun Gong, displaced urban residents and the Christian underground church. He issued angry manifestos calling for the end of Communist Party rule.

Since his release from prison in 2006, Mr. Gao had been allowed to live a superficially normal life in Beijing. But he was shadowed by plainclothes guards, and he said he felt constrained by the threat of retribution against his family if he violated the terms of his parole.

Though he has not been charged with a new crime, he has vanished altogether since three months ago.

Mr. Gao's disappearance has become a delicate diplomatic issue ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement on June 4. Laura Tischler, a State Department spokeswoman, said that American diplomats had not yet met with Ms. Geng. But she said that a senior American official discussed the case on March 31 with high-ranking Chinese officials in Beijing, and that State Department officials had raised the case, most recently on April 15, with the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

"The United States is deeply concerned about the safety and well-being of well-known human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng," Ms. Tischler said. "We have raised our concerns about Mr. Gao's whereabouts and well-being repeatedly, both in Washington and in Beijing."

Congress is watching, too. With Ms. Geng in the gallery, Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, saluted her courage during a Senate floor speech on April 23 and warned that Mr. Gao, a "devout Christian," had been thrust into an "extremely grave" situation.

"There are many today that languish in dark cells, dark cells of Chinese prisons, just because they spoke out to defend the rights of others," said Mr. Dorgan, who is the chairman of a Congressional commission responsible for monitoring China's human rights record. "None have done so more than Mr. Gao."

Beijing officials, however, say that nothing untoward has happened to the Gaos.

"There's no political persecution or limits on the freedom of the family," Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said at a briefing in Beijing in March. "We've handled the case in strict accordance with the law." In response to inquiries about Mr. Gao's whereabouts, the Chinese authorities have not furnished further information and have not acknowledged that he was taken into custody.

Mr. Gao, 45, was once a populist litigator battling corruption and land seizures, and he was recognized by the Ministry of Justice in 2001 as one of China's 10 best lawyers. But he became more active handling cases of police abuse and religious freedom for Christian churches and the Falun Gong. In 2006, he rallied grass-roots organizers around China to go on a hunger strike to protest the way security forces treated another activist. He was later arrested and convicted of sedition. In December 2006, he was given a suspended sentence because, the authorities said, he confessed to his crimes and provided information about other dissidents.

The next year, Mr. Gao said his confession had been coerced. Interrogators threatened to punish his children and deny them an education unless he cooperated, he said in April 2007. "In the end I decided I could not haggle about my children's future," he said. He was tortured, Ms. Geng and human rights watchdogs say, with electric prods, bamboo sticks lancing his genitals, and cigarette burns to his eyelids.

Mr. Gao continues to suffer from ailments that Ms. Geng attributed to his "zhemo," or torment, a word she used repeatedly during the interview, which was conducted in Mandarin at the offices of Human Rights in China, a watchdog group. "My husband may be in his 40s, but he's got the body of someone in his 60s," she said.

For Ms. Geng, the turning point came last September, when her daughter, Geng Gege, now 16, stopped going to school. The teenager felt ostracized by her peers; they felt that her father's status was the reason everyone's cellphone had been confiscated, and why the police shadowed her to and from class.

"Her classmates would bully her and say, 'Your father is involved in organized crime,' " Ms. Geng recalled, her voice trembling. "She could not handle it anymore and she tried to kill herself."

Because of her daughter and her 5-year-old son, Gao Tianyu, Ms. Geng decided to flee. And on Jan. 9, when she got the signal from activists that it was time, she hurriedly scribbled a brief note for her husband and left it on the dining table. It read, "I am taking Gege to school," she said.

"I did not tell my husband because I didn't think he could take it," she said.

The journey was fraught with danger and paranoid moments. The family was always moving, usually at night, via overnight trains, overnight tour buses and motorcycles, and on foot. Only once did they stop overnight at someone's house.

The most trying moment, Ms. Geng said, came when, for security reasons, the guides separated her from her son for several hours. Their motorcycles could not make it up a slippery hill, Ms. Geng said, and she got into an argument with her daughter.

"She said, 'I'll go to jail, I don't care! I can't do this anymore,' " Ms. Geng recalled, continuing, "I begged her not to give up, because we had to be reunited with Tianyu. I was worried that I would be separated from my child forever."

Ultimately, the three made it to Thailand, where they were granted refugee status, facilitated by international rights groups including China Aid, a Christian organization based in Midland, Tex., which has sought to promote Christianity and protect underground church leaders in China.

Ms. Geng says she is still adjusting to her new life, settling in an apartment in Fresh Meadows, Queens, with the assistance of the American government. Her children are taking English classes but are worried about when they will see their father again.

One night last month, Ms. Geng woke at 3 a.m.; the light was still on. Her daughter was staring at a computer, donated by a friend. The screensaver image was Mr. Gao.

"She said, 'I just want to say a few things to my dad,' " Ms. Geng recalled, sobbing. " 'Go back to sleep, Mom.' "

>> Original source

By Michael Bristow | BBC World News
May 08, 2009

China says it has found no evidence that human negligence caused schools to collapse during last year's earthquake.

Thousands of schools were damaged while buildings nearby remained intact in the massive quake in Sichuan Province.

Many parents of dead and injured pupils blamed poor construction. They demanded an investigation.

The government has looked into the issue, but has now rejected the accusation that anyone was responsible for the schools' collapse.

According to official figures released on Thursday, a total of 5,335 schoolchildren died when their classrooms collapsed.

In some cases, schools were the only buildings to fall down during the magnitude-8 earthquake.

That led some parents to claim that they had been badly built by local governments eager to cut costs.

Beijing officials investigated the accusations, and initially suggested they could be true.

'Cover-up'

But Tang Kai, a senior planning official, said there was no evidence that human negligence led to the collapse of any school - or any other building.

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By Jill Drew - Washington Post Foreign Service | THE WASHINGTON POST
May 03, 2009

JUYUAN, China -- After last May's massive earthquake buried her son under tons of shattered concrete at his collapsed school, Han Xuehua, numb and disbelieving, boiled spicy water every Friday for weeks to prepare hot pot, his favorite dish. "I didn't want to accept that my child wasn't coming home," she said softly. "I still cannot accept it."

Han and dozens of other parents have pressed their town government to acknowledge that the school was shoddily built, to prosecute those responsible for its construction and to allow families to grieve at the site. Their demands have been rejected. Officials and local police have warned them against speaking openly or petitioning at higher levels. The parents are under constant surveillance, their phone calls monitored and their movements restricted.

Xiong Yonghao, a wiry man with close-cropped hair and a quick, nervous laugh, also was consumed by grief and fury after his 11-year-old daughter died in a school collapse several miles away, in the city of Mianzhu. He led a parents' protest campaign in the months after the quake, but he decided in October to move on and began bidding for contracts to rebuild destroyed houses.

"I have to accept reality," Xiong said. "I cannot live just waiting to die."

These are the faces of the survivors of the Sichuan earthquake, which ripped through this mountainous province in southwestern China on May 12, killing about 80,000 people and leaving millions homeless. Although the central government is eager to rebuild and has spent huge amounts erecting new, soundly constructed neighborhoods throughout the quake zone, it has also flattened dissent. Thousands of police and public security officials from all over China have poured in to suppress any signs of anger and protest.

President Hu Jintao has praised the rebuilding efforts as proof of the superiority of China's socialist system, with its central command structure and enforced national unity. Indeed, money, materials and government volunteers from all over the country deluged Sichuan after the quake, and officials here say most projects can be completed within two years, much less time than they originally estimated it would take to restore normalcy to the 46 million people in the province affected by the disaster.

But normalcy seems a long way off, perhaps impossible, for people such as 37-year-old Han. On a recent day, her eyes, set in a round, sun-baked face, had a mournful, lost look. She tried to have another baby, she said, after China relaxed its one-child policy for parents who had lost a child in the earthquake. But she miscarried at five months.

"It's hopeless. I'm just getting older and older," she said, standing in front of the tarp-covered shack where she spent the winter. "What will happen to me?"

Enforcing Calm

On April 4, a holiday known in China as tomb-sweeping day, when people pay tribute to the dead, the tensions in Juyuan erupted into the open.

One parent, Li Shanfu, set out at 8:30 a.m. for the Juyuan Middle School grounds to publicly mourn his daughter, a 16-year-old student who had been pulled from the building's ruins and later died of her injuries.

Li, a 44-year-old construction worker who used to sell his blood plasma to raise money for his daughter's school fees, said nearly 2,000 special police officers had surrounded the site, now just a fenced-in field of weeds with four rusty basketball hoops. Before he reached the cordon, Wang Zhen, a town vice governor, approached him and asked him to stay calm. If Li would go home, Wang said, he would be given 1,000 yuan, or about $145. If he kept quiet until after the May 12 anniversary, he would get another thousand yuan.

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By Michael Wines | THE NEW YORK TIMES
01 May 2009

Behind the west Beijing apartment building where Liu Xia keeps a fifth-floor flat, the police have built a guardhouse. Its purpose is not to protect Ms. Liu, who seeks no safeguarding. The house is for the guards who watch her.

Inside, they take notes to record her comings and goings. When she ventures out, a guard picks up the phone. Soon, a sedan with darkened windows carrying a man with a telephoto-lens camera is trailing her.

During a recent chat in a nearby teahouse, Ms. Liu wondered aloud why she unnerves China's rulers enough to merit her own guardhouse. She is not active in politics, she said, and does not even use a computer. "I take photos, paint paintings, write poems, read books, cook food," she said with a mirthless laugh. "And drink."

But, of course, she knows why. She is married to Liu Xiaobo, a writer, philosopher and democracy advocate. On Dec. 10, Mr. Liu and 302 others issued a manifesto, called Charter 08, that urged China's Communist Party to abandon monopoly rule and establish a multiparty system of government.

The police seized Mr. Liu two days before Charter 08 was released. He has been locked ever since in a windowless room about an hour's drive north of central Beijing. He is denied access to lawyers, to pen and paper and, except for two brief visits, to his wife.

He is allowed to ask for books. His latest request was for the works of Kafka.

Perhaps Mr. Liu sees himself in Gregor Samsa, the Kafka protagonist who, transformed into a giant pest, is locked in a room in the hope that "out of sight" will become "out of mind."

But his captors' plight is also surreal. Signed by leading intellectuals, including some with links to the Communist Party, Charter 08 has been called the most important political statement since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Increasingly, Liu Xiaobo is no ordinary dissident, but an international cause. And the crackdown on him and his wife shows signs of becoming a public-relations dilemma for Chinese leaders.

"If they don't suppress this matter, its influence will keep growing," said Zhang Zuhua, a political theorist who helped Mr. Liu and others draft the charter. "But the more they suppress it, the more its influence will grow."

Mr. Zhang also has a police guard, and a sedan that follows him. He has been warned that he is under investigation and should not make political waves.

Charter 08 concerns party rulers, some contend, because it posits an alternative to their monopoly just as China is integrating with an overwhelmingly democratic world.

Among the 20 largest economies, China is alone in enshrining single-party rule in its Constitution. Russia and China both persecute political opponents. But only China is visibly agitated by Charter 08's premises: that people should elect their leaders, divide power among government's branches and make the military answerable to civilians.

"Freedom is at the core of universal human values," the charter states. "The government exists for the protection of the human rights of its citizens." And, it states, "The most fundamental principles of democracy are that the people are sovereign, and the people select their government."

Mr. Liu and Mr. Zhang first drafted those phrases more than three years ago with about eight other friends. Their inspirations, Mr. Zhang said in an interview, were the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, France's 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and Taiwan's 1980s democracy movement.

Mr. Zhang says their goals are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Most of the signers witnessed the destruction of China's last pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989; some, including Mr. Liu, were participants in that movement. "Twenty years later," Mr. Zhang said, "we all think that China will head toward liberal democracy eventually. But the problem is that we cannot use such sacrificial means again. So how to find a better way toward democratization that's more suitable to China's situation?

"People must come up with a constructive view. That's the main idea behind Charter 08," he said.

Such manifestos are hardly new. In December 1978, the Fifth Modernization, a proposed liberalization of the political system to go with China's other moves toward modernity, was posted on Beijing's Democracy Wall -- and its author was handed a 15-year prison sentence. Evidence of the document was wiped from Chinese history.

Whether Charter 08 and Mr. Liu will meet similar fates remains unclear. Thirty years later, party leaders appear equally determined to retain power, but more cautious about how.

Censors have deleted Charter 08 from Chinese-language Internet pages and chat rooms, and some Web sites publishing pro-charter bloggers have been shut down. Without mentioning the charter, party leaders have railed against multiparty democracy and separation of powers as Western-imposed "erroneous ideological interferences."

Many of the charter's original signers have been interrogated; some have lost prominent positions or, in one case, been transferred from Beijing to remotest western China.

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