BEIJING - Police Beijing arrested Sunday, dozens of followers of the non-approved Christian Church who tried to hold services in a public space after they were expelled from their usual place of worship, a parishioner said.
The leaders of the Church of unregistered Shouwang had said members to gather in a place in open air in Beijing Sunday morning services, but police, apparently alerted to their plans, registered off the coast of the region and swept people who applied to take part.
Chinese authorities have been on high alert for large public gatherings following anonymous online calls for anti-Government demonstrations modeled on events in the Middle East and North Africa.
No major events took place in China after the appeals, but the Suppression of security that they generated resulted in the arrest or the detention of dozens of lawyers in the public interest, writers, intellectuals and activists.
The Chinese Communist Government permits worship only in churches approved by the State, but many Christians belong to unregistered congregations. These "house churches" are subject to varying degrees of harassment by the authorities.
More than 60 million Christians are supposed to worship in independent churches in China, compared to about 20 million who worship in the State Church, according to researchers and activists of the churches.
A church member who went to the cash meeting services and managed to escape the police said Associated Press that about 200 people were taken and were being held in a local school. Their cellular phones were confiscated, said the man, which would give only his English name, Kane, for fear of police reprisals.
An AP videographer saw about a dozen people escorted by the police on an empty city bus and driven out.
By telephone, Shouwang Pasteur Yuan Ling said that he was unable to go to the room because the police had already placed under house arrest Saturday night. Yuan said that he knew less than six other members of the Church who were also under house arrest.
Yuan said parishioners colleagues also told him that many believers were held in a school in the district of Haidian in Beijing, although it was not certain that the exact number.
Shouwang had been holding services in a restaurant in Beijing until they were expelled last week.
Ai Weiwei, an avant-garde artist internationally known, who is also an outspoken government critic, has become more focused in the repression of dissent, when he was detained in an airport in Beijing a week ago. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said he is under investigation for alleged economic crimes, while Beijing police have not yet confirmed that he is in custody.
I was the last time being led by the police at the airport after be prevented from boarding a flight to Hong Kong.
About 50 demonstrators in Hong Kong pro-democracy Sunday demanded release of AI, peacefully chanting "no to political persecution" outside of the Chinese central Government liaison office. Opposition legislator Lee Cheuk-yan casts an image of artificial intelligence in the reasons of this compound.
Former British colony of Hong Kong enjoys civil liberties of Western style in its special status as a semi-autonomous under Chinese domination.
Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for release of AI and criticized China for what it said was a deterioration in the situation of human rights in the first part of 2011.
Clinton made the remarks while announcing the release of the annual assessment of the US Department of State of the rights of man in the world. He said that China reinforced restrictions on criticism and the tightening of control of civil society in 2010 by limiting freedom of expression and access to the Internet.
As it does every year, China fired with its own report, accusing Washington of hypocrisy and criticize the United States on his own record of human rights, citing figures showing crime is high, homelessness, racial discrimination and murders of civilians and other abuses by U.S. forces overseas.
The report emphasized the enormous sum of money paid in elections to the Congress last year mid-term as a perversion of democracy and accused Washington in advocating freedom of the Internet to increase its influence on other countriesWhile pursuing legal challenges on secret spill site WikiLeaks.
"Notify us hereby the Government of the United States to take concrete steps to improve its human rights conditions, to verify and to correct his actions in the field of human rights and stop the hegemonic acts of the use of human rights issues to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries," said the report.
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