China tightens net on activist community
Authorities keep beady eye on pro-democracy groups post-Tiananmen
Thirty years after the crackdown on Tiananmen protesters, the tanks that lined Beijing’s central avenue have been replaced by countless surveillance cameras perched like hawks on lampposts to keep the population in check.
The Chinese Communist Party has gone to great lengths to prevent another pro-democracy movement, clamping down on student activists, labour movements and lawyers with the help of high-tech surveillance.
But the party has also pushed economic reforms that have made millions of people wealthier and less interested in rebelling like the students whose protest ended with hundreds killed on June 4 1989 at Tiananmen Square.
Over the past decade, small police booths have been set up block by block across the country to monitor neighbourhood disputes, prevent crime, and keep tabs on anyone suspected of disturbing social order.
Now China’s obsession with artificial intelligence and facial recognition adds another layer of sophistication to this intricate surveillance web, allowing police to pound on the door of any perceived troublemaker, several activists said.
Others said the party’s infiltration of universities and a crackdown on “liberal spaces” including independent bookstores has made it difficult for people to even discuss reform.
“Enhanced surveillance technology makes it much more difficult to see any mass demonstrations like the Tiananmen protests in 1989 to happen nowadays,” said Patrick Poon, China researcher at Amnesty International.
Instead, there has been a string of smaller “spontaneous protests” led by labour activists, students or families affected by vaccine or food scandals in recent years, he said.
But even that has become difficult as Beijing tries to “nip them in the bud” and quickly erases any mention of them on social media, Poon said.
“Even now, every time I go out of town I have to report to the community police,” said Yi Wenlong, a businessman from northern China’s Shanxi province, whose daughter developed epilepsy after a faulty vaccination.
“If we can’t talk about a concrete issue like poor-quality vaccines, do you think it’s possible to put out banners calling for bigger changes?” added Yi, who has protested about shoddy vaccines outside the local and provincial government offices. The government has severely reduced the space for civil liberties since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, rounding up rights lawyers in a sweep in 2015 and Marxist students in the past year.
Censors have stepped up their policing of social media, monitoring the activities of millions of people and blocking any politically sensitive material, such as what really happened at Tiananmen in 1989.
All language versions of Wikipedia – whose pages include details about the Tiananmen crackdown – were blocked from the Chinese internet weeks before the anniversary.