Elderly Women Sentenced To Labor Camp For Seeking Protest Permit

China's announcement just prior to the Olympic Opening Ceremony that it would create three 'protest zones' in Beijing parks is appearing more and more to simply have been a contemporary update of the Hundred Flowers ploy. In 1956 and 1957, using the mantra of "Let one hundred flowers bloom," the Communist Party under Chairman Mao encouraged dissidents to speak out and criticize the status quo. Critics, fearing a trap, were naturally slow to respond, but by 1957 the number of "flowers blooming" in the form of posters, rallies, articles, and letters by the million, often advocating democracy, had grown to such a degree that Mao launched the subsequent Anti-Rightist Movement, during which those intellectuals who had listened to his solicitations and spoken out–around a half million of them–were "arrested, tortured, sent to prison camps for decades or just killed." This era of political repression paved the way for "the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous attempt at rapid industrialization that would leave some 20-30 million Chinese dead from starvation." Either Mao had planned a trap all along or he was under the naive belief that those speaking out would offer praise for his heavy-handed policies. Jeremiah Jenne, one of my favorite bloggers, has written a narrative about the Hundred Flowers era that is worth reading.

Fast forward to 2008. We have now entered an era of economic liberalization and substantially more openness in China. But the Party is providing every indication that it will not relent in its stranglehold on Chinese political discussions. Out of 77 applicants who have applied for a permit to protest in the authorized protest zones, not a single one has been approved. Xinhua News service has reported–in a quite obvious falsehood– that this is because in almost all cases the protesting parties withdrew their application after reaching an amicable settlement with authorities.

The most telling story about what has actually been occurring is the galling news that two women in the late 70's, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying, both of whom had sought a permit to protest inadequate compensation for the demolition of their home by authorities in 2001, have been sentenced to a year in administrative detention, a.k.a. "re-education through labor." This story, and similar ones that have been surfacing, indicate that the protest zone was simply a trap and that authorities never had any intention of allowing any sort of protest against official policies, even at parks located far away from the Olympic venues themselves.

Meanwhile, sporadic groups of foreigners protesting China's occupation of Tibet continue to be arrested. Initially, foreigners who had been arrested were simply being briefly detained and then deported, but the latest group of protesters will be held in jail for up to ten days, according to authorities.