China ups surveillance on dissidents

writes the Sunday Telegraph. One of the dangerous detainees is a two month old baby.

Bizarrely, among the activists now under house arrest is a two-month-old baby girl, who is believed to be China’s youngest political prisoner.

Her father, Hu Jia, a campaigner for the rights of Aids patients, and a blogger on land and environmental abuses, was charged at the end of January with “inciting subversion of state power”, a catch-all charge frequently used against dissidents. His wife Zeng Jinyan, together with her mother and daughter, are all under house arrest in Beijing.

Mr Hu was a high-profile supporter of Yang Chunlin, a factory worker arrested last July after circulating an online petition calling for “human rights, not the Olympics”.

Mr Hu also helped publicise the cases of Chen Guangcheng, a blind civil rights activist who has been under house arrest in eastern Shandong Province for the past four months for exposing a policy of forced abortions for people who break China’s rigid one-child policy, and fellow blogger Lu Gengsong, who is currently on trial, also for “inciting subversion of state power”.