All You Chinese Are Belong to Us

Via Matt Drudge comes a story of how a human rights activist barely escaped detention while in China.

An American human rights activist said she was interrogated by Chinese state security and narrowly escaped detention in Beijing last month, the latest indication of a tightening climate for media and intellectuals.

Sharon Hom, executive director for the New York-based Human Rights in China, told Reuters late on Sunday night that security agents surrounded her outside her hotel room in Beijing, where she was attending the annual EU-China human rights dialogue.

"I said I would speak to them, but only in the lobby. They kept insisting we go somewhere else," Hom said by telephone from New York.

"They became increasingly less friendly. One of them really grabbed me and said, 'don't leave'. I started walking back up to the banquet hall where people were," she said, adding she was eventually surrounded by eight agents.

Good move for someone who went to China in the first place!

This is alarming, but not terribly surprising. Far more interesting to me is the following.

Hom, who was born in Hong Kong, believes she may have been targeted because her group deals specifically with China and because she is ethnic Chinese.

Her interrogators implied that because of her ethnicity she was accountable under Chinese law, [emphasis added], which prohibits participation in organizations which are not state-sanctioned, Hom said.

Shocking at first until you recall the Chi-Comms' designs on Taiwan and the 30 million Chinese who died in famines caused by that government's "Great Leap Forward."

This is indeed a regime that regards an entire ethnicity as its property.

-- CAV

Updates

7-5-05: Corrected wording of last sentence (HT: Adrian Hester), a typo (Hell, I'll just give the damned hat to Adrian Hester), and dropped a redundant phrase in the first.