The current Chinese Government has traditionally been against activism, especially for human rights or anti-government campaigns. Over the past couple of years, the government has become increasingly hard on rights activist groups.
The latest incident occurred a few days ago when officials raided the office of the Beijing Yirenping Center. This office promotes gender equality and helps pay for the legal fees of those discriminated on for having disabilities and diseases. Recently, they have been advocating for five imprisoned women who were passing out fliers talking about the danger women face while riding public transportation. They have been advocating for the release of these women, who have reportedly been mistreated in prison and during interrogations. The leader of the group believes that the advocacy for these women prompted the raids.
An increasing amount of social activists have been jailed since the current president, Xi Jinping, came to power. Despite urgings from the UN and United States, it appears that this crackdown on activism will continue for the foreseeable future.
Paraphrased throughout. [you don’t need to note that – it’s presumed to be the case on blogs]
Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/world/asia/china-raids-offices-of-rights-group-as-crackdown-on-activism-continues.html?ref=topics&_r=0
According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders group, 2014 was the worst year for human rights advocacy since the mid 1990s. The report said “2014 also saw even more stringent state control over media and more sophisticated surveillance on the Internet.” It is mainly due to the rise to the strict style of national leader Xi Jinping, who also has been behind high-profile movements to prosecute corruption, drug use, and televised depiction of immorality. However, many types of imprisoned activists are fairly politically moderate including advocates for public health, anti-discrimination, equal education, migrants, and women’s rights.
Xi Jinping’s dislike for activist groups is due to the weakening of the communist party in China. Jinping perceives these groups as having the goals of promoting anti-communistic ideas. Now more than ever, China’s population is becoming more progressive. As the popularity for China’s national government continues to fall, I believe we will see more government oppression in the future.
Zach has put the right question forward: why now? (Jay implicitly but not explicitly asks the same thing.) Part may be better information on what the government is doing. However, this is not just one set of reports but a variety of things, so it’s likely real. Is it that the government is finding it harder to control the internet? Are they more paranoid? To me the latter sounds right, trying to forestall uncomfortable discussions out of political weakness…..but how to test that hypothesis?