Family and friends of Chinese NGO activist, Hu Jia (胡佳), who went missing on February 16 while under house arrest and close surveillance by officers of the Public Security Bureau’s National Security (国家保卫) Department, have appealed to the authorities to investigate the case, which is also being taken up by international human rights organisations and media.

Hu’s wife, Zeng Jinyan (曾金燕), who with him set up an unofficial NGO, Loving Source (爱源汇), to highlight the plight of AIDS orphans, told a hastily convened press conference in Beijing on March 21 that she and Hu’s parents have reported Hu’s disappearance to local police departments. The police, she said, claimed to know nothing of his whereabouts and did not treat the case seriously, neglecting to file a formal record of her report. Zeng was left in no doubt that Hu is in fact in police custody.

China’s best-known AIDS prevention and care NGO, Beijing Zhi’Aixing, has collected several dozen signatures, mainly from HIV positive people, for a letter appealing to the authorities to respect China’s laws and regulations in dealing with Hu’s case.

Overseas campaigners, including Amnesty International, the Student Global AIDS Campaign and ACT UP, are planning to stage a day of symbolic protests outside Chinese embassies and consulates across the United States on March 22.

Human rights organisations reported a security crackdown early this month, ahead of China’s two major political assemblies—the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the China People's Political Consultative Conference. Heightened security and pre-emptive house arrest or detention of activists is relatively routine in the build-up to prestige events in China.

This year, according to reports by human rights organisations, police attention embraced AIDS activists in a bid to prevent a group of HIV positive people from arriving in Beijing to lobby the National People's Congress. Zeng Jinyan’s remarks to the press appeared to confirm that a group of women from Henan Province had indeed planned such an action.

Also in the run-up to the NPC meeting, Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), an independent lawyer who earned some notoriety in China by serving as legal counsel to members of the outlawed, quasi-Buddhist Falun Gong sect, led a series of symbolic hunger strikes to protest China’s treatment of dissidents. Hu Jia joined this action.

Hu, 32, is a veteran activist of several causes. A vegetarian, he devoted himself in the late 1990s to environmental issues, organising student summer camps, running a web-based Tibetan Antelope Network, and serving for a while as a representative of Friends of the Earth Hong Kong. From 2001, he transferred his energies to AIDS, working for Zhi’Aixing (then known as Aizhixing) at a time when it was pressuring central authorities to acknowledge the epidemic caused by blood selling in Henan Province. He later left to set up his own organisation, Loving Source.

Hu has also participated in anti-Japanese protests asserting Chinese sovereignty over the contested Diaoyu islands.

Although deploring his presumed, unlawful detention, some of Hu’s former associates regard the range and relative militancy of his activism as too provocative, overstepping the undefined line between constructive engagement and dissidence.

Report by Nick Young, March 21 2006