2015-02-16
A Chinese netizen uses Weibo, the Twitter-like microblogging service of Sina, in a rural village in southwest China’s Guizhou province, Dec. 15, 2012.
Imaginechina
China’s human rights situation is currently the worst that has been seen in a quarter-century, a Chinese rights group said in an annual report released on Monday.
The Hubei-based Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch group described a “worsening and regressive human rights situation,” and a domestic security regime that is more oppressive than anything seen in the past 25 years.
“The stability maintenance regime is getting stricter and stricter; you could say it’s getting more and more brutal, more and more inhuman,” Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch founder Liu Feiyue told RFA.
“[Last year] was the cruelest we have since since 1989, which is cause for extreme concern,” he said.
During 2014, the nationwide system for keeping track of critics of the ruling Chinese Communist Party was upgraded to the status of a national-level policy, Liu’s report said.
This nationwide surveillance system now actively targets civil society for control and suppression, and has strengthened ‘grid’ surveillance to exert and maintain social control, it
said.
In March 2014, premier Li Keqiang announced a rise in the domestic security, or “stability maintenance,” budget to 205 billion yuan (U.S. $33 billion) at an annual parliamentary session inside the Great Hall of the People.
Across the country, rights lawyers, writers, journalists, academics, NGO activists, political dissidents and rights activists were targeted with often violent measures under the system, according to the report.
It documented 2,270 cases in which the authorities had implemented “stability maintenance” measures against such targets, which can include house arrest, phone tapping, enforced ‘holidays’ and criminal detention by state security police, 2,270 times during 2014, the report said.
Online, media controls
The government also stepped up control over online content and the media, further limiting freedom of expression, it said.
Police commonly used public order offenses like “illegal gathering,” and “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” as catch-all charges for stability maintenance purposes, the report said.
“Police are increasingly abusing their powers of detention to limit the personal freedom of citizens,” the report said, adding that in addition to beatings of those deemed troublemakers, state security police have a number of non-violent means of pressure and coercion in their arsenal of measures.
