Beijing Olympics Security Chief Calls Mass Protests Biggest Security Threat

Government must keep promise to the International Olympics Committee to respect human rights

(Chinese Human Rights Defenders, May 10, 2007) – In an internal speech, an Olympics security chief urged swift and harsh repression to forestall mass protests as he saw these as “posing the most serious security threat” in the coming two years.  CHRD is deeply concerned that such a view may indicate that further deterioration in human rights conditions is to come, and that the main aim of “security” for the Olympics will be the suppression of freedom of expression and association of Chinese people.  The speech highlights the rationale behind the intensified repression recently suffered by human rights defenders and other activists, documented in a report from CHRD released last week, indicating that this repression is being systematically orchestrated by the national security apparatus.

“The suppression of petitioners gathered new force in March.  This turned out to be no random act! We must be prepared for a new wave of harsh repression,” says an unnamed activist in Beijing in response to the speech.

Yu Hongyuan, the Beijing Olympics Security Protection Center’s commander-in-chief overseeing “collective incidents” (qunti shijian, a code-word for mass protests) and the deputy bureau-chief of Beijing Public Security Bureau, issued a stern call for intensified surveillance of activists in Beijing and forced repatriation or detention of petitioners, and he vowed to “strike hard” including using “legal punishment” against those who “organize incitement” and “plot behind the scenes,” in a speech on March 12 at a joint meeting of various units assigned to protect security during the Summer 2008 Beijing Olympics. The speech was published in a newsletter titled Beijing Xinfang (Supplementary No.1 (16) 2007) circulated by the Beijing Office of Letters and Visits, which receives complaints from petitioners, people who travel to the nation’s capital to lodge grievances. Many petitioners never receive a hearing and some stay on to try to get someone to listen to their cases.

Yu Hongyuan’s speech is titled “Working Measures for Implementing Ordinances from the Central Joint Meeting and the Municipal Party Committee’s Standing Committee, Seriously Implementing Laws Regulating Orders in Petitioning.”  (“Central” [zhong yang] is an abbreviation for “Central Committee of the Communist Party.”)  Yu Hongyuan delivered the speech on behalf of a “Special Project Working Group Focused on Persuading Repatriation [of petitioners]” under the umbrella of the Olympics Security Commander’s Office at a meeting where various security units made plans and coordinated actions.

The security chief saw the security threats posed by mass protests as spreading beyond the Olympics – to the seventeenth Party Congress before the Olympics and the 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the republic in 2009. “The once-and-for-all solution and settlement of collective incidents have reached a moment of extraordinary urgency,” which creates “the biggest pressure on security,” said Yu.   

The Beijing Olympics security commander laid out a system of plans for action:

•           Tightening surveillance: Increasing information collection, systematically uncovering, verifying and ranking various types of threats to stability, and taking all measures to closely control “inciting information” and action-oriented information; building up a “data bank of [persons with] bad behaviors,” tracing their acts and action patterns, including those persons who used “petitioning” to create trouble.

•           Swift action at the scene: Security officers must take “swift and resolute” actions to forestall influential “collective petition incidents,” control order at the scene, and ensure security in the nation’s Capital; in sensitive spots such as Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai (the top leadership compound) and other government offices where petitioners congregate, security forces must “swiftly uncover, control, and take away” anyone acting “abnormally” to prevent any crowds from gathering; all government facilities frequented by petitioners must be equipped with surveillance devices, guarded by security forces, and ready for rapid reaction against agitators.

•           Severe legal punishment: Severely punish repeat offenders and organizers behind the scenes “through law enforcement,” “harshly penalizing one person in order to teach many a lesson and frighten many more into submission”; for those who “top the rankings on the city’s surveillance focus list,” collecting evidence on them and keeping files on them now, so that they can be punished according to the law before the Seventeenth Party Congress and the Olympics. This must be done in order to “eliminate hidden dangers.” Send those from the provinces back with their local Public Security Bureaus, with the evidence against them so they can be punished by law locally.

CHRD urges the human rights community and the International Olympics Committee to monitor the Chinese authorities’ “security” measures for the Olympics, holding the government accountable for breaking its promises to improve human rights, a promise that it had made in its bid for hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics.    

The text of the speech by the Beijing Olympics security chief (in Chinese) can be viewed at CHRD website: /Article/ShowArticle.asp?ArticleID=4270         

See also CHRD’s recent report on the repression suffered by human rights defenders in China at: /Article/ShowArticle.asp?ArticleID=4196

For more information, contact:

Renée Xia

International spokesperson

Chinese Human Rights Defenders

+33611331693