Chinese Activist Beaten Amid Crackdown

BEIJING — A housing activist and member of Beijing's underground Christian church was beaten again Wednesday while under house arrest, his wife said, amid a police crackdown on dissent during a politically sensitive Communist Party congress.

Hua Huiqi, 45, had been hospitalized for the past week after a beating Oct. 11 by police from his neighborhood in southwestern Beijing.

Early Wednesday, he tried to leave his house to go to a nearby public bathroom but was stopped by plainclothes police and beaten on the head and body, said his wife, Wei Jumei.

"About five or six men beat him with their fists. ... His sister came out and yelled at them, and they hit her and pushed her back inside as well," Wei said.

A uniformed Chongwen District police officer named Deng Changyuan supervised the attack, Wei said.

"They are doing this because of the 17th Party Congress but also because police asked him to cooperate by providing a list of petitioners and Christians he knows, but he refused" so they keep beating him up, Wei said.

A woman with the Chongwen District Police Station said she was unaware of the case and referred calls to the Beijing Public Security Bureau, where an official asked for a list of faxed questions. There was no immediate response to the fax and neither official would give their name.

Chinese authorities have been on high alert for the past few weeks, detaining dissidents, warning them not to make trouble, or keeping them under house arrest.

The crackdown aims to ensure that protests don't disrupt this week's Communist Party Congress. The meeting, which ends Sunday, will extend the term of President Hu Jintao and approve the promotion of several top leaders.

Hua's neighbor, Li Xiuyun, said she has also faced increased surveillance and harassment since the first of the month. Uniformed police standing guard outside her gate told her they would leave once the congress was over, she said.

Li and her recently deceased husband have been fighting for years with the same developer that Hua has been protesting. Li's partially demolished single-story home sits surrounded by a vacant lot but the family refuses to leave until their lease is recognized by the developer, New World China Land, and they are compensated.

Hua has been arrested and beaten several times in recent years because of his religious activities, and earlier this year he spent six months in jail for "obstructing official business," according to the monitoring group Human Rights in China.

That charge stemmed from an incident where Hua and his mother scuffled with police in January as they prepared to deliver a petition to the central government over the demolition of their home in 2001.

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