2014-11-04
A man cycles past a display of the logo for APEC China 2014 in Beijing, Oct. 29, 2014.
ImagineChina
Chinese authorities have cleared the streets of Beijing of petitioners and closed thousands of factories in neighboring Hebei province in a bid to banish smog from the capital city’s skies ahead of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum which opens Wednesday.
Thousands of ordinary Chinese who flock to the capital to pursue complaints against the government are being kept away from the forum venue near the northern suburb of Huairou, petitioners told RFA.
“If petitioners go anywhere near the venue for the leadership summit, even to check into a hotel, they will escort you back to your home province’s representative office in Beijing,” Heilongjiang petitioner Zhang Baozhu said.
“Security is incredibly tight right now, and most petitioners daren’t make a move anywhere,” Zhang said. “There are only three buses a day out there, because it’s quite a long way out of Beijing.”
“They won’t even let us go as tourists to take photos. If they suspect you are a petitioner, they will take you back [to Beijing].”
“Most of the petitioners are keeping a low profile right now,” Zhang added.
He said that a fellow petitioner from Mudanjiang had been detained by police at a relative’s house in Beijing after she posted a complaint online about her forced eviction from her home.
“They probably used her smartphone to track her location,” Zhang said. “She was driven back to Heilongjiang … and she is pretty certain at least to be detained or, at the worst, locked in an asylum.”
Many taken away
Huang Guangyu, a petitioner from the central province of Hunan, said police had raided the southern railway station neighborhood of Beijing in the early hours of Sunday morning, taking large numbers of petitioners away from areas where they typically congregate.
“They detained all the petitioners at about midnight and took them all to Jiujingzhuang, before sending them home,” Huang said in a reference to a large, unofficial detention center on the outskirts of the capital.
Meanwhile, authorities in Shanghai have stepped up security measures aimed at preventing anyone from traveling to Beijing in the first place, petitioners said.
Petitioner Gu Guoping said he had been offered money by officials not to travel to Beijing ahead of a recent top-level political meeting.
“The complaints office offered me 2,000 yuan not to go to Beijing for 10 days; that’s 200 yuan a day,” Gu said.
He said around 20 out of 30 petitioners in his neighborhood had dropped plans to visit Beijing ahead of APEC because of the handouts.
Air pollution concerns
Back in Beijing, authorities are scrambling to minimize the capital’s choking smog levels, which hit world headlines again during the city’s marathon, as runners donned respirators and face masks to compete in hazardous conditions.
China’s environmental protection ministry has 16 teams covering Beijing and Tianjin municipalities, as well as Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, and Shandong provinces, official media reported.
Half of all vehicles will be banned from entering the downtown area during the APEC forum, while work will be halted on all construction sites.
