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Gay and lesbian activists in China fear the government is cracking down on dissidents before the Beijing Olympics in August this year, after the country’s most prominent HIV/AIDS activist, Hu Jia, was sentenced to three and a half years jail last week for ‘inciting subversion of state power’ in online articles he had written and via interviews with foreign media.
Wan Yanhai, one of China’s most outspoken AIDS activists, recently issued an update of current police actions against the GLBTIQ community, in which he notes that three gay bathhouses have been closed down and two gay nightclubs raided.
In addition, Beijing’s popular cruising site, Dongdan Park, was also raided, with 40 men taken in for questioning.
The park is now monitored nightly.
Yanhai said that queer activists have also been visited at their homes and questioned.
“Evidence shows that this time crackdowns are being carried out at a national level within the space of one month,” Yanhai told the online forum Shanghaiist.com.
Meanwhile GLBTIQ activists in China are hoping to focus international attention on their situation in the lead-up to the Olympic Games.
Advocacy group Common Language has installed an exhibition at a new gay community centre in Beijing. The centerpiece displays 10,000 signatures from people supporting same-sex marriage in China.
“These signatures visibly demonstrate that love and commitment are values we all share, and it is our hope the government will legally recognise same-sex couples,” the head of Common Language, Bin Xu, was quoted as saying in The Washington Blade.
On the local front, Australian lobby group Community Action Against Homophobia (CAAH) said while it was not planning any particular protests around the Olympics, it would be highlighting the injustices suffered by GLBTIQ people in China through its work with queer refugees.
“There’s a lesbian in Villawood [Detention Centre] who we’ve been working with so we’ve done a lot of research into what queer people in China face,” spokesperson Rachel Evans told SX.
“We’re doing some actions with Refugee Action Coalition around refugees and looking at the Chinese situation within those actions and getting the government to recognise the horrible conditions [queer Chinese people] face.”
The first of these actions will take place on May 1, 12.30pm-1.30pm outside the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 26 Lee St, Sydney.
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