BEIJING — Even by the standards of the clampdowns that routinely mark politically sensitive dates in China, the approach this year to June 4, the anniversary of the day in 1989 when soldiers brutally ended student-led protests in Tiananmen Square, has been particularly severe.
The days preceding June 4 often mean house arrest for vocal government critics and an Internet scrubbed free of even coded references to the crackdown that dare not speak its name.
But this year, the 25th anniversary of the bloodshed that convulsed the nation and nearly sundered the Communist Party, censors and security forces have waged an aggressive “stability maintenance” campaign that has sent a chill through the ranks of Chinese legal advocates, liberal intellectuals and foreign journalists.
In recent weeks, a dozen prominent scholars and activists have been arrested or criminally detained, and even seemingly harmless gestures, like posting a selfie in Tiananmen Square while flashing a V for victory, have led to detentions.
The police have been warning Western journalists to stay away from the square in the coming days or “face grave consequences,” according to several reporters summoned to meetings with stone-faced public security officials. Amnesty International has compiled a list of nearly 50 people across the country that it says have been jailed, interrogated or placed under house arrest.
“They say it’s springtime in Beijing, but it feels like winter,” said Hu Jia, an AIDS activist and seasoned dissident who has been forcibly confined to his apartment for the past three months.
The growing list of those swept up by China’s expansive security apparatus includes a group of gay rights advocates gathered at a Beijing hotel, several Buddhists arrested as they were meditating in the central Chinese city of Wuhan and an ex-soldier turned artist who staged in a friend’s studio a performance piece that was inspired by the government’s efforts to impose amnesia on an entire nation.
“The response has been harsher and more intense than we’ve ever seen,” said Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong.
To political analysts and rights advocates, the campaign provides further evidence that President Xi Jinping, 15 months into the job, is determined to stamp out dissent amid an ideological assault against liberal ideas that many view as part of a wide-ranging drive to consolidate power. “Until this latest crackdown I was agnostic about Xi, but recent events suggest he would like to be a Mao-style strongman if he could,” said Perry Link, a China scholar at the University of California, Riverside.
Although the red line of permissible public discourse often shifts with the seasons and the whims of those in power, many longtime China watchers say the changes have caught even the most battle-scarred dissidents off guard.
As evidence, they point to the authorities’ forceful response to a seminar, held at a private home in early May, during which more than a dozen people met to discuss the events of 1989. In the days that followed, the participants, including relatives of those killed during the crackdown, were summoned for questioning by the police.
But unlike a similar, much larger event in 2009, five of the attendees were formally arrested. Among them: Hao Jian, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy; Xu Youyu, a philosophy scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; and Pu Zhiqiang, a charismatic rights lawyer. All face charges of “creating a public disturbance.”
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Since then, the police have repeatedly searched Mr. Pu’s law office and home, carting away computers, financial documents and a DVD of a documentary about the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, a former client.
In an interview, one of his lawyers, Zhang Sizhi, described the charges as illogical. “How can you create a public disturbance while meeting in a private residence?” he asked.
Mr. Zhang and others say it seems increasingly unlikely Mr. Pu will be released after June 4, the pattern of previous anniversary-related detentions.
In building a case against him, the authorities have rounded up a number of Mr. Pu’s friends and associates, among them Vivian Wu, an independent journalist, and Xin Jiang, a news assistant with the Japanese newspaper Nikkei. Friends say they are unclear why the authorities detained Ms. Xin, although some thought it might be related to an earlier interview she conducted with Mr. Pu.
On Tuesday, two weeks after her disappearance, Ms. Xin’s husband took to social media, posting a family photo and a frantic cry for help. “It’s a mess at home,” the husband, Wang Haichun, wrote. “Please come back. I can’t bear this alone.”
The anguish is shared by friends of Liu Wei, a young factory worker from southwest China who was detained on criminal charges on May 17 after returning home to Chongqing from a visit to Beijing. According to a friend, Huang Chengcheng, Mr. Liu’s apparent crime was posting online photos of himself in Tiananmen Square, including one in which he flashed a victory sign, a common pose among Chinese tourists that can also be seen as a sly act of subversion.
Gay rights advocates have also been feeling the heat. Over the past few weeks, the authorities have canceled a number of events in Beijing, including a film screening and a panel discussion to mark International Day Against Homophobia. Earlier this month, the police raided a hotel where a group of civil society advocates had gathered for a seminar focused on the obstacles facing gay and AIDS nonprofits.
Yu Fangqiang, one of the event organizers, said the police arrived at 1:30 a.m., confiscated his cellphone and then used it to text about 30 other would-be participants, telling them the event had been canceled. Mr. Yu and eight others were then bundled off for interrogations that, for several detainees, stretched into the following evening.
Sometimes the authorities’ fears of public unrest have led to confounding measures, like the postponement of a restaurant awards ceremony scheduled for Thursday night in the capital.
Other times their efforts were nothing if not creative.
Chen Yongmiao, a political commentator and rights activist in Beijing, said the police gave him the equivalent of $800 to leave town. “They just don’t want people from the opposition in the political center of Beijing,” Mr. Chen said by phone last week as he traveled through northwest China.
In past years, the noose would tighten in mid-April, coinciding with the anniversary of the death of Hu Yaobang, the reformist Communist Party secretary purged for his “bourgeois” liberal leanings in 1989. It was an outpouring of public mourning after his death on April 15 that coalesced into the demonstrations that swept the nation with demands for justice, democracy and an end to official corruption.
This year, however, many activists say restrictions kicked in months earlier. When they placed him under house arrest in late February, Mr. Hu, the AIDS activist, said the police told him this was an “especially sensitive” year and that they were taking no chances. “The authorities want to create an atmosphere of terror, something they’ve largely succeeded in doing,” he said by phone, listing a number of friends who had been compelled by the police to “go on holiday” and leave Beijing for May.
But Mr. Hu said he thought the campaign was ham-handed and ultimately ineffective. Although party leaders have expunged the episode from Chinese history books and the Internet, leaving a younger generation unfamiliar with the events of June 3-4, Mr. Hu estimated that a million or more people were on the streets of Beijing the night soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing hundreds, if not more.
“No matter how hard they try,” he said, “they cannot erase this experience from everyone’s memories.”
