The 2008 Beijing Olympics was a turning point for China’s tyrannical dictators just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics was for Hitler’s Germany.
Before and during the Olympics, I was closely monitored by the Chinese authorities. State security officers talked to me, telling me that I must not go to any Olympic competition venuesand that I must get into their car if I decided to go out. On the other hand, they were quite flexible: I could have visitors, and I could move around freely within my residential area. Many Western journalists who came to visit me were not stopped or turned away. I was even interviewed by journalists from more than 20 media agencies at a small bookshop in my residential area. My home phone and Internet were also undisturbed. The state security officers who were monitoring me outside of the building where I lived with my family did not want to be seen by my neighbors. They hid behind thickets, appearing rather shy. From the bottom of their heart, they probably felt that what they were doing was not quite in keeping with the “harmonious” atmosphere of the Olympics.
But after Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, Chinese Communist authorities didn’t even try to save “face” any more. For more than two months, I was put under illegal house arrest, where I was not allowed to step outside my apartment, totally isolating me and my wife from the outside world. Our home phone, cell phones, and Internet were all cut off. Our guards, who took around-the-clock shifts, blocked our apartment door with a large table placed outside. By now, they were no longer afraid of my neighbors discovering their identity and what they were doing. Those monitors and cameras outside my building became a special “scene” in my residential area. After this, in December, I was kidnapped with a black hood put over my head, tortured, and beaten until I lost consciousness.
The Jasmine strolling protests made China’s spring feel even colder than the winter. In the spring of 2011, nearly 100 writers, lawyers, and human rights activists were “disappeared.” Human rights conditions in China significantly deteriorated to a point worse than in the period after the crackdown on the student movement in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Since maintaining the one-party dictatorship has become the Party’s “core interest” to protect, they, once again, do not hesitate to shoot and kill, just as they did during June 4th. To them, it doesn’t make much difference whether they kill in Beijing or in Tibet and Xinjiang.
Article 83 of the Criminal Procedure Law, known as the Gestapo term, was passed with a high number of votes at the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference held in Beijing in 2012. From now on, secret police can arbitrarily arrest people who are suspected of “harming state security” and detain them at secret locations without notifying their family members. Even the Stasi of former East Germany never had this kind of lawless prerogative. My prediction of a few years ago has now materialized: the Chinese Communist Party is taking a big step forward into the Nazi era.