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Chinese Dissident Monitoring
Human Rights Abuses Detained

BEIJING (AP) — Police interrogated a dissident who set up a human rights monitoring group and confiscated his fax machine, articles and telephone books, a Hong Kong-based human rights group reported Thursday.

Police took Qin Yongmin from the central city of Wuhan to a police station Wednesday, held him for 24 hours and searched his house, the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said in a statement.

Police said they were confiscating everything related to Qin's group because it was illegal, the statement said. All organizations in China must obtain permission from authorities by registering.

Qin's monitoring group had issued 86 reports since March, the Hong Kong group said.

Another member of Qin's group, Chen Zonghe, said police detained him for seven hours and told him to stop taking part in the group's work.

Qin, who recently has issued appeals for reforms, including the abolition of labor camps, has been detained repeatedly in his years as a dissident. He served several years in prison in the 1980s after participating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late '70s, and was confined to a labor camp in 1994-95.

China's persistent dissident community has faced relentless police harassment, often making it impossible for them to hold jobs or lead normal lives.

Liao Yiwu, a dissident writer, wrote the Security Bureau, the secret police, in southwestern Chengdu city last week to complain that its tactics kept him from working steadily since leaving prison four years ago, the New York-based Human Rights in China reported.

Police threats forced a newspaper and magazine to fire him and investigators closed a book store that he had borrowed more than $2,400 to open, the group said. Liao, 39, was finding it hard to support a young daughter and marry his girlfriend of four years.

Meanwhile, police prevented the wife of an exiled dissident from traveling to the Portuguese colony of Macau on China's southern coast to meet him, the Information Center said.

Police stopped the bus carrying Su Jiang to the Macau border and drove her back to the southern city of Guangzhou, where she lives, the group said. Police held her for four hours before releasing her, it added.

Su's husband, veteran dissident Wang Xizhe, fled China for the United States in October 1996 after co-writing a letter criticizing China's Communist authorities and calling for the impeachment of President Jiang Zemin.

Wang arrived in Macau on Tuesday to attend a conference about the colony's return to Chinese rule on Dec. 20, 1999.


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