Elderly women sent to labour camp over homes protest

Two elderly Chinese women who applied during the Olympic Games to protest over the loss of their homes have been ordered to spend a year in a labour camp, a relative said, while police squelched a pro-Tibet demonstration early Thursday.

The women were still at home three days after being officially notified they would have to serve a one year term of re-education through labour, but were under surveillance by a neighbourhood watch group, said Li Xuehui, the son of one of the women.

A rights group said the threat of prison appeared to be an intimidation tactic.

Li said no cause was given for the order to imprison his 79-year-old mother, Wu Dianyuan, and her neighbor Wang Xiuying, 77.

“Wang Xiuy ing is almost blind and disabled. What sort of re-education through labour can she serve?” Li said in a telephone interview. “But they can also be taken away at any time.”

A spokeswoman for the Beijing re-education through labour bureau said, “We have no records of these two names in our system.”

Swarms of plainclothes police took away four foreign activists protesting against Chinese rule over Tibet - the latest in a series of such demonstrations during the Olympics. The four unfurled a Tibetan flag and shouted “Free Tibet” south of the National Stadium, the New York-based Students for a Free Tibet said. It put the number of police at 50; a spokeswoman for the Beijing Public Security Bureau declined comment.

Hua Guofeng, handpicked by a dying Mao Zedong to succeed him as Communist Party chairman but toppled by reformist leader Deng Xiaoping in the cut-throat world of elite Chinese politics, died yesterday. He was 87.

His death marked the passing of one of the last of an old guard of Communist leaders who had lived through the Mao era.

Newsquest

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