Three Steps Back

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One Saturday in October, several dozen of China's most outspoken men and women converged on an artists' colony in the mountains outside Beijing at a meeting of the unofficial Chinese branch of the global writers' association PEN International. The occasion: the awarding of a literary prize to author Zhang Yihe for her account of the traumatic anti-intellectual purges of the late 1950s. Such a gathering shows how far contemporary Chinese cultural life has come from the brutal days described in Zhang's book, when participants in similar events were sent to prison.

But last week, three of the PEN attendees were detained by Beijing police, including the branch's two founders: Yu Jie, a prolific essayist and frequent critic of Chinese political culture, and social commentator Liu Xiaobo. The police questioned the three about their writings and copied material from their computers. Yu's wife Liu Min says police told her that her husband was suspected of "endangering state security," and that she should "tell her old man to quit writing." All three men were later released, but as of Thursday night, Yu said police were still stationed outside his door and following him when he went out. Yu's lawyer said it was unclear whether the detention was "a prelude to an arrest or merely a warning."

Since President Hu Jintao assumed full control of the government in September, there have been several signs of a widening crackdown on freedom of expression: the shutdown of A Complete Mess, a politically pluralistic university chat site; the firing of several prominent journalists; and the canceling of classes taught by a Peking University professor who openly criticized China's propaganda system in essays, interviews and lectures. Last month when a Guangdong newsweekly published a list of 50 "public intellectuals," the state-run People's Daily responded with a sharply worded editorial attacking the concept: "What is meant by 'public intellectual' is actually a person who sows discord between intellectuals and the Party."