Beijing police shut down a Gay and Lesbian Culture Festival, planned for December 16-18 at a former factory complex that has become an artists’ colony in the northeast of the city, and then ordered the closure of a bar to which a smaller gathering had retreated.

Police began to put pressure on organisers several days before the festival, but took no drastic action, one of the organisers revealed to China Development Brief. According to regulations issued by China’s Ministry of Public Security in 1999, any cultural or sporting activity with more than 200 participants should obtain advance permission from the district Public Security Bureau.

The Festival was to have been the first of its kind in China. Films, plays, dance performances, exhibitions and seminars were planned, as well as an opening cocktail party. Some 200 people turned out for the opening events, including students, academics and journalists.

On December 17, the Organising Committee widely circulated an open letter to report the situation. It stressed that “The Festival, as a purely civil, cultural activity, did not infringe any laws in China.”

“The action of the government reflects their political discrimination against homosexuality” said AIDS activist, Mr. Wan Yanhai. “It also indicates that some of them can’t accept homosexuality from a moral perspective.” Wan was one of five Organising Committee members, responsible for fundraising. Another member, Mr. Cui Zi’En, an artist and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, declined to comment.

Some of the planned activities, rescheduled to happen in the same bar on New Years Eve, had again to be abandoned after the Hong Kong newspaper Dagongbao made the date public.

In letters to Chinese President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, the Ministry of Public Security and the State Council Committee on HIV/AIDS, Human Rights Watch and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network complained that “in shutting down Beijing’s first-ever gay and lesbian cultural festival, the Chinese government violated basic freedoms and persecuted activists who are addressing the country’s burgeoning AIDS crisis.”

Funding for the Festival was provided by the Open Society Institute and the Monica Fund, both based in the United States.

A Festival website, www.bglcf.org, continues to operate.

Report by Tina Qian, January 6 2006