Police Arrest Activists Heading to Biden's University Speech

By Helena Zhu
August 21, 2011

When U.S. Vice President Joe Biden stood at the podium and spoke about human rights at one of China’s best universities on Sunday, he probably had no idea how relevant and timely his remarks were.

The American Embassy in China had told the Chinese public that everyone was welcome to “get up close” with Biden—but Chinese police arrested and disappeared residents in Chengdu with different political views who were trying to attend, and erected a phalanx of restrictions to stop everybody else.

Li Zhaoxiu, for example, came under the authorities’ watch when she complained about a government-forced eviction. She wanted to make a short trip with a few friends from nearby Shuangliu County to Sichuan University on Friday, where Biden was speaking, but was blocked on the way by a dozen regime personnel, and then stuffed into a police car and driven away, according to a friend interviewed by Sound of Hope Radio Network.

It was a bitter example of what Biden told an audience of around 400, including about 100 Peace Corps volunteers: that “the “biggest difference” between the United States and China is “what we refer to as human rights.”

Other human rights activists in Chengdu, including Wang Binru, Liu Qiong, and Ren Hengquan, were also planning to attend Biden’s speech, but were arrested at a tea house on Friday. They were slapped with the creative charge of “collective gambling” and will spend two weeks in detention.

Huang Qi, who runs the Tianwang Human Rights Center from his Chengdu home, said in a typed interview on Skype with The Epoch Times that he and his staff members have been receiving hundreds of calls a day recently, most of them regarding Biden’s Chengdu visit.

“It was quite a disaster for rights activists and petitioners who merely wanted to go to Sichuan University to listen to Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi Jinping discuss human rights, democracy, and legal issues,” said Huang, who himself is not long out of jail on political charges.

“But instead of learning democracy, they learned the opposite, which is tyrannical autocracy. Petitioners were imprisoned, relocated, or just disappeared. As for the ordinary residents, they had to deal with a lot of hassle. Many residents couldn’t stay in town, walk in the streets as usual, even the traffic was quite a problem,” he said.

An elderly woman surnamed Feng, who graduated from Sichuan University and has lived there in a residence hall for more than five decades, said that even though Biden was just speaking in a nearby lecture hall, she did not even bother to go.

“Even if I went, I wouldn’t be able to get in,” Feng said in a phone interview. “There were many regulations over who could attend and who couldn’t. The security was very tight.”

In a speech on China-U.S. relations that lasted nearly an hour, Biden told his Chinese hosts, including the next anointed leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, that they should ease trade restrictions, continue to invest in U.S. Treasury bonds, and respect human rights.

“In the long run, greater openness is a source of stability and a sign of strength, that prosperity peaks when governments foster both free enterprise and free exchange of ideas, that liberty unlocks a people’s full potential, and in its absence, unrest festers,” Biden said.

Source: The Epoch Times.
Link: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/police-arrest-activists-heading-to-bidens-university-speech-60620.html.