From Radio Free Asia:
Key rights advocates and social activists across China will spend the Olympics confined to their homes under round the clock surveillance. Some have been warned off talking to the media, while others cannot be reached by phone.
Qi Zhiyong, a Beijing-based rights activist who lost a leg during the armed crackdown in the capital in 1989, said he had been ordered to leave the city for the duration of the Olympic Games.
“There are people watching me now. They arrived on July 22. They came to have a chat with me in mid-July, and they came again yesterday. The national security bureau told me that they were going to ‘organize’ me, so I asked them what they meant by ‘organizing.’ They didn’t give the exact details of what they had in mind. But then it became clear that they wanted me to go away, to leave Beijing and go to a place far away from the Olympics venues. I said really that they should be ashamed of themselves, to say such a thing. I asked them on what basis they were saying this. They said that because I was connected to the June 4, 1989 incident, and because I was very active, and that I was implicated in Hu Jia’s case, and so on, and so on. That I had never cooperated with the authorities to find a harmonious path.”
