HONG KONG--As the city gears up to host the Olympic Games in 2008, authorities in Beijing have detained a prominent civil rights activist on charges of "incitement to subvert state power" and have demolished the last of a shanty town housing people lodging complaints against the government.
Chinese rights activist Hu Jia, best known for his advocacy work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS, has been detained by national security police in Beijing on charges of "incitement to subvert state power," a fellow activist said.
Hu was detained while in the middle of an exchange of instant messages via Skype with another rights activist, Qi Zhiyong, Qi told RFA's Cantonese service.
"I was chatting on Skype with Hu Jia, and it was right in the middle of that conversation that he was detained. The charge was incitement to subvert state power," Qi said.
"Hu's wife Zeng Jinyan, and their child and his mother-in-law are now under surveillance."

Shanty town cleared

"They have cut off all their means of communication with the outside world, and confiscated all their communications devices," Qi said.
Meanwhile, bulldozers cleared away the last shacks in "Petitioner village" near the southern railway station in the capital, petitioners say.
Beijing-based petitioner Zhao Shuling said: "It's because of the Olympic Games. The area around the southern railway station will become an international railway terminus, which will be huge, with three levels underground."
"Around the time of the Olympics, a lot of foreigners will come to Beijing, and the petitioner village will spoil the look of the city. That's why the authorities have demolished it."
Asked where the petitioners were going to live, Zhao replied, "Of course there's nowhere for them to go."
"I hope you will be able to tell people, because I am a petitioner too, and I really understand what these people are going through. Only great hardship, grief and injustice could prompt them to leave their homes and villages to suffer hunger and cold here in Beijing."
RFA's Mandarin service spoke to a duty officer at the Xuanwu district police station, but he said he didn't know what the situation was.
In the southern city of Shenzhen, which neighbours Hong Kong, where equestrian events will be held, hundreds of police used water cannon and tear gas to move residents of "nail houses", or hold-outs, who refused to leave their homes to make way for a local subway line.
Elsewhere in Guangdong province, three reporters whose video equipment carried China Central Television logo were reported missing after they interviewed villagers in Heping county about how thousands of hectares of farmland came to be expropriated for commercial use.

Reporters disappear

After the three wrapped up their interviews on Dec. 26, officials from the local county government took them away, saying they were being treated to a meal.
Local public security told the villagers that the three were “fake reporters.”
Local villagers told Mandarin service reporter Yan Xiu they saw the CCTV logo on the reporters’ equipment. One journalist was identified as Xu Jinfeng, a CCTV editor. But a CCTV spokeperson said no such person worked at the state-run station.
Also in Guangdong, tensions continued to simmer in Baima village near the southern industrial city of Dongguan, where plainclothes police had been sent to watch residents following clashes involving hundreds of villagers and police over a land dispute.
"The government is behaving like the Mafia," a Baima resident surnamed Li told RFA's Cantonese service.
"The villagers show no signs of agitation, and yet they sent riot police here to our villagers to beat people up. The government could have used peaceful means to settle this; there was no need to use violence," Li said.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Yan Xiu and Xin Yu, and in Cantonese by Lee Kin-kwan and Grace Kei Lai-see. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.