CHINA:A police dragnet of human rights defenders in China as part of a crackdown on dissenting voices ahead of this month's Communist Party congress has seen champions of free speech, campaigning lawyers and dissident writers arrested and even tortured, activists say.
"All of these things are happening because of National Day and the forthcoming congress," said Hu Jia, a prominent human rights defender and Aids activist who has been under house arrest since July last year.
International activists have seized on the Olympics to focus the world's attention on human rights abuses in China.
The Beijing government insists that it needs to improve the economy before it can introduce wider universal suffrage and press freedom, and says human rights are a domestic issue, while pointing out how the situation has improved dramatically in recent years.
In a grim precursor of what human rights defenders can expect before the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008, lawyer Li Heping was abducted at the weekend from near his office by a gang of men he believes were plainclothes security officers.
They put a hood over his head and drove him in a car with no licence plates to a basement, where he was stripped to his underwear and beaten for hours with electric rods.
His captors taunted him, took turns to pull his hair and beat him, mocking him, all the while telling him to leave Beijing.
Previously, he had been warned by Beijing police to leave the city, but he had refused.
Mr Li was driven to the suburbs and released late on Saturday, but when he got home, he found his laptop had been reprogrammed and his lawyer's identification card and other personal belongings were missing, the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group said.
The authorities in Beijing regularly round up activists and petitioners ahead of major events in the capital, such as the annual parliament, the National People's Congress, and other high-profile gatherings.
The prominent human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng was taken away on September 22nd and there has been no information about him, his friends say. He has been in and out of detention for many years.
Meanwhile, Lu Gengsong (41), a writer and activist from Zhejiang province, has been formally arrested for inciting subversion after over a month of detention.
"He has been reporting problems with corruption in the Hangzhou area and the forced sale of property. They arrested him because they wanted to shut him up," his wife, Wang Xue'e Wang, said.
Another Beijing activist was detained by police and threatened with being sent to a psychiatric hospital, a common fate for political dissenters.
The family of Ye Guozhu, who was jailed in December 2004 for trying to organise a march against the forced eviction of families to make way for Olympics construction, has also been persecuted in recent days.
His son, Ye Mingjun, was detained on September 29th, while his brother, Ye Guojiang, has been missing since that morning, too.
Yi Minghua, a cousin, was released after seven hours in police custody and told to back off.
The government is keen to ensure stability ahead of the five-yearly, closed-door meeting which starts on October 15th and at which important leadership and policy decisions are expected.