A Chinese monk who led a prodemocracy movement during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and sympathized with the victims of the massacre was arrested in central China’s Hubei Province, Chinese human rights scholar Teng Biao said Monday.
Shengguan was criminally detained in Wuhan City on Saturday for allegedly “inciting subversion of state power,” Teng quoted Shengguan’s apprentice as saying.
“(Shengguan) had been meeting with friends in Wuhan for about a week. What he has done could not be seen in any way as subversive,” Teng told Kyodo News by telephone. “It was just a pretext for his arrest.”
Shengguan, who became a Buddhist monk in 2001, is one of some 50 dissidents who have since earlier this month been either arrested, detained or held away from home against their will ahead of the anniversary of the bloody crackdown.
“The timing of this large-scale persecution (against political dissidents) was deliberate, but it is just an opportunity or excuse for the authorities to ‘clear old debt’ since most of the people involved have little to do with the June 4 (movement),” Teng said, adding that the authorities have amassed extensive incriminating evidence against their targets.
Beijing ordered a military crackdown in the late hours of June 3, 1989, on student-led prodemocracy demonstrations held in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters.
The crackdown remains a taboo in China, with a clampdown being imposed every year ahead of the anniversary, more so this year for it being the 25th anniversary.
China has used the country’s political stability and breakneck economic growth in the following decades to justify the necessity for the bloodshed, while maintaining a tight grip over political dissidents and victims of the massacre.
Shengguan, originally named Xu Zhiqiang, took part in the 1989 prodemocracy movement in Xi’an of Shaanxi Province and was imprisoned for a year consequently, according to news reports.
He was harassed by the authorities after performing a ritual in 2006 for those who died in the June 4 massacre and for organizing a memorial in 2009 for the late state leader Hu Yaobang. In 2011, he met in India with exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing vilifies as a separatist.
Among the other detained or monitored dissidents are scholars, religious leaders, and members of Tiananmen Mothers, a group representing some 200 families whose children died in the crackdown, according to Radio France Internationale.
“Some may think that after the (June 4) anniversary, the harassment will end, but I think most of (the dissidents) will continue to be persecuted,” Teng said.
==Kyodo
From http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/140519/chinese-monk-arrested-ahead-tiananmen-massacre-anniver