2015-07-01
Members of China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee vote during their closing meeting in Beijing, July 1, 2015.
Xinhua
China’s parliament adopted stringent new laws on Wednesday that broaden the definition of “national security” to include sovereignty over the country’s tightly controlled Internet, strategic industries and domestic unrest, official media reported.
The law claims sovereignty over Chinese “activities and assets” in outer space, in the depths of the ocean and in sensitive polar regions, and sets up a national “security review and regulatory system … to censor items that have or may have an impact on national security,” the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The new law was passed in response to what National People’s Congress (NPC) standing committee member Zheng Shuna described as growing pressure from within and without, the agency said.
“We are under dual pressures,” Zheng told a news conference in Beijing.
“Externally speaking, the country must defend its sovereignty, security and development interests, and internally speaking, it must also maintain political security and social stability,” Zheng said.
The new law defines as a national security matter anything that threatens China’s government, territorial sovereignty, unity, as well as its economy and the “well-being” of its people, Xinhua said.
National security means that all of the interests of the country, defined as the People’s Republic of China under the ruling Chinese Communist Party, are “comparatively in a state of being in no danger and free of any threat from both within and without, and that the aforementioned state can be constantly guaranteed.”
As the law passed in the NPC, police detained dozens of people on Tiananmen Square who arrived in a bid to complain about the government.
They were among thousands of petitioners who converged on state and party complaints offices in Beijing to seek redress over alleged official wrongdoing on the 94th anniversary of the party’s founding, according to Sichuan-based petitioner Li Min.
“There are at least 10,000 petitioners here today,” Li said. “First we went to the organization department of the party, to complain about the party secretary back home in Shuangliu county where we live.”
“There were more than 1,000 people lining up there by 10:40 a.m., all of them to make complaints about local officials,” she said.
“In the afternoon, we went to Tiananmen Square, and a few dozen of us petitioners were taken to the Tiananmen Square police station. We are all in [the] police station right now,” Li said.
“There are about 30 people here, six of them are with our group,” she said.
According to Li, there were also crowds of some 3,000 petitioners lining up outside the complaints office of China’s cabinet, the State Council.
Retired People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldier Gao Hongyi said July 1 is a red letter day in the calendar for many with complaints about official corruption and mistreatment by police, loss of land and forced eviction from their homes.
“I come here every year on July 1,” Gao said. “There were a lot of people outside the organization department today, and there were buses lined up outside [party graft-busting body] the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.”
Authorities detained busloads of petitioners and hauled them off to unofficial detention centers on the outskirts of Beijing, to await escort back to their hometowns, Gao said.
“They put people on these buses and took them off to Jiujingzhuang; a lot of people were taken to Jiujingzhuang,” he said.
