MCLC: watching dissidents

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: watching dissidents
***********************************************************

Source: Huffington Post (5/28/12):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120528/as-china-outsourcing-supp
ression/

Watching dissidents is a booming business in China
By CHARLES HUTZLER

BEIJING ‹ Every workday at 7:20 a.m., colleagues pick up Yao Lifa from
his second-floor apartment and drive him to the elementary school
where he taught for years.

This is no car pool. Yao is a prisoner, part of a China boom in
outsourced police control.

By day, Yao is kept in a room, not allowed to work and watched by fit,
young gym teachers and other school staff. At dinner time or later, he
is sent back to the apartment that he shares with his wife and
3-year-old daughter. A surveillance camera monitors the building
entrance, while police sit in a hut outside.

"At school, if I have to go to the bathroom, someone escorts me. Most
of the time, I'm not allowed to speak with others or answer the
phone," Yao said in a recent late-night Internet phone interview from
his home in Qianjiang city. "When they bring me home, they sign me
over to the next shift."

Like the blind activist Chen Guangcheng until his escape from house
arrest last month, Yao belongs to an untold number of Chinese
activists kept under tight control by authorities, even though in many
cases they have broken no law.

Co-workers, neighbors, government office workers, unemployed young
toughs and gang members are being used to monitor perceived
troublemakers, according to rights groups and people under
surveillance.

Yao has never faced criminal charges. His misdeed is decades of
campaigning for democratic elections.

"They won't let me teach. They're afraid of course that I'll start
talking about democracy to the students," said Yao, a 54-year-old
former school administrator and science lab instructor with wavy black
hair and possessed of a passionate, fiery manner.

While China has long been a police state, controls on these
non-offenders mark a new expansion of police resources at a time the
authoritarian leadership is consumed with keeping its hold over a
fast-changing society.

"Social activists that no one has ever heard of have 10 people
watching them," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher with Human Rights
Watch. "The task is to identify and nip in the bud any destabilizing
factors for the regime."

Mostly unknown outside their communities, the activists are a growing
portion of what's called the "targeted population" ­ a group that also
includes criminal suspects and anyone deemed a threat. They are
singled out for overwhelming surveillance and by one rights group's
count amount to an estimated one in every 1,000 Chinese ­ or well over
a million.

Targeted are growing numbers of people, from typical political
dissidents to labor organizers and, increasingly, ordinary Chinese who
want Beijing to correct local wrongdoing. In method, this new policing
represents a break from recent decades.

In Mao Zedong's radical communist heyday, colleagues, neighbors and
family members snitched on suspected enemies of the revolution.
Free-market reforms broke the totalitarian grip and gave people
incentive to leave farms and state jobs for work in booming cities and
industrial zones. Private lives and private wealth blossomed, creating
less reason for snooping.

Money now fuels the extensive surveillance system. Budgeted spending
for police, courts, prosecutors and other law enforcement has soared
for much of the past decade, surpassing official outlays for the
military for the second year in a row this year, to nearly 702 billion
yuan, or $110 billion.

Allocated by Beijing to the provinces and on down, the money sometimes
is called "stability preservation funds" for the overriding priority
the government now puts on control. As long as trouble is quelled,
Beijing doesn't seem to mind how this money is spent. It's proving a
growth opportunity for cash-strapped local governments and small-time
enforcers.

Along with the police, Yao counts the city education bureau as
benefiting from the funds available for his surveillance. His minders
are mainly drawn from the bureau, his Qianjiang Experimental Primary
School and the ranks of physical education teachers throughout the
city school system.

Anywhere from 14 to 50 people a day are on the local government
payroll for his round-the-clock surveillance ­ what he calls the "Yao
Lifa special squad." They get 50 yuan, $8, for a day shift and twice
that for night work. Often, he said, hotel rooms, transport, meals and
cigarettes are thrown in.

The sums add up in Qianjiang, a city of struggling factories and one
million people set in the center of the country. Basic pay runs about
1,000 yuan, or $160, a month for an entry-level teacher and goes to
three times that amount for a veteran, Yao said.

"This isn't bad for teachers," said Yao. "An English teacher probably
wouldn't take it. They can earn extra money giving private tutoring.
But gym teachers can't do the tutoring. Besides, their superiors have
told them to do this. They can't not do it."

In the deep south farming county of Yun'an, more than a quarter of its
6,700 officials are on the "stability" payroll, the magazine Caijing
reported last year. Township "stability" offices spent money on vans,
motorcycles and computers, and also allocated reward money ­ 20,000
yuan or $3,100 in 2010 ­ for stopping any disgruntled local from going
to Beijing to complain about conditions, the report said.

For blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng, the shock troops of his
persecution were his neighbors. After the daring escape from his rural
village outside Linyi city that eventually took him to New York, Chen
detailed the two years of brutal house arrest in a video, saying over
100 police and other officials were involved. He, his wife and mother
were beaten and his young daughter searched and harassed.

Family planning officials bore him a particular grudge for exposing
forced abortions and sterilization under the government's one-child
policy. But it was local farmers who guarded his house and the
entrances to the village and plundered the family farm for food. They
received 100 yuan, or $16, a day, and though they had to kick back a
tenth to the head of the surveillance squad, Chen said it is still a
good deal.

"Those people, if they work other jobs, they only make 50 to 60 yuan a
day. But doing this, they don't have to do anything, and they have
three free meals a day and they are safe. Of course they love to do
it," Chen said in the video. He said he was told 30 million yuan, $4.3
million, was spent on his captivity in 2008 and by last year that
amount had doubled.

The Public Security Ministry, the national police agency, did not
respond to requests for comment about the outsourcing policy.
Authorities in Linyi and Qianjiang either did not answer queries or
declined comment on Chen and Yao.

Cases like Chen and Yao "are the tip of the iceberg," said John Kamm,
a veteran human rights lobbyist. Research by Kamm's Dui Hua Foundation
found that since the mid-1980s Beijing has tasked police throughout
China with controlling the "targeted population." An initial quota for
police to target 2 in every 1,000 people proved unattainable, Kamm
said. He said 1 in 1,000 is a more accurate estimate, or 1.3 million
people.

Included are recently released convicts, parolees, suspects on bail
and anyone police see as a threat ­ from activist lawyers to
evangelical Christians. Overtly political cases are a small, expanding
subset. But once marked, the status is hard to shake.

"Joining the 'targeted population' is the last stop on the road to
oblivion for political prisoners," said Kamm.

Yao's forays into politics started 25 years ago when he sought to use
a new electoral law to get himself elected to Qianjiang's legislature
as an independent. After more than a decade of trying, Yao succeeded
in 1998. He made a name for himself as an activist trying to change
the Communist Party-dominated system. He championed the rights of
farmers rebelling against high taxes and fees.

The party fought back. Yao and 31 teachers and others inspired by him
to run for legislatures in 2003 all lost in an election he complained
was rigged. Afterward, Yao's short-term detentions began. But he also
at times slipped away to meet like-minded activists around the
country.

Soon after returning from a trip to Shanghai and Beijing early last
year, the controls tightened. Yao said school Vice Principal Wang
Qian, police and others kidnapped him and drove him 500 kilometers
(300 miles) to a hotel. He got free by throwing a note out the window
while his captors slept. During another hotel captivity in July, he
jumped from a second story window at 3 a.m., injuring his back and an
arm in a failed escape.

By September, the "Yao Lifa special squad" settled into the current
pattern ­ picking him up in the morning and sending him home at night.

"Usually there are eight people with me at school, and those eight
people have a duty: to speak and lecture me without interruption,"
said Yao. "One goal is to keep me from resting. A second is to see my
reaction. One person is tasked with taking notes."

Some nights, Yao said shady-looking men sleep in a car by his
building's entrance, in addition to the police in a hut. He said he
heard the school and education bureau were arguing over $48,000 for
his surveillance.

"I have many acquaintances. Some of them work in police stations," Yao
said. "They tell me 'Really we could use a Yao Lifa. If we had one, we
could make more money.'"