2015-03-03
Zhao Ziyang (C) addresses the Tiananmen Square student hunger strikers in Beijing, May 19, 1989.
AFP
Authorities in the Chinese capital have detained a political activist who called publicly for the rehabilitation of late ousted reform-minded premier Zhao Ziyang, fellow activists said on Tuesday.
Veteran Beijing-based activist Li Jinping, who has campaigned on behalf of Zhao’s name for more than a decade, was taken away on Monday by police.
“He wants them to clear Zhao Ziyang’s name, and also to reappraise the verdict on the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown,” retired Shandong University professor Sun Wenguang, a close friend of Li’s, told RFA.
“He usually carries out some activities during the parliamentary sessions, such as putting up a banner on Tiananmen Square,” Sun said, adding that Li was incommunicado on Tuesday.
“The biggest likelihood is that he has been detained by the authorities,” he said.
China’s ruling Communist Party has continued to ignore growing calls in China and from overseas for a reappraisal of the 1989 student protests, which it once styled a “counterrevolutionary rebellion.”
Fall from power
Zhao Ziyang fell from power in the wake of the military crackdown on the protests amid accusations that he took too conciliatory a line with the students.
Zhao, who died 10 years ago on Jan. 17, is rarely mentioned in public, and his name and image have been removed from many official publications.
Meanwhile, thousands of people with complaints against the government have converged on Beijing ahead of China’s annual parliamentary sessions this week, rights activists said.
The authorities have deployed hundreds of officials from regional representative offices in Beijing, known as interceptors, to detain anyone from their region who seeks to lodge a formal complaint, the Sichuan-based rights website Tianwang reported.
A Gansu petitioner surnamed Chang said petitioners find it increasingly hard to evade the interceptors ahead of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) sessions this week.
“Parliament is in session, and they are afraid of any incidents of any kind,” Chang said. “All government departments will be involved in interception work.”
