BEIJING (AFP) – China is tightening curbs on key dissidents before next week's sensitive 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, activists and their relatives said.
Authorities from the public security ministry took dissident Bao Tong -- a former aide to late Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang, who was purged for sympathising with pro-democracy protesters -- out of Beijing on Monday, his son told AFP.
"He was not forced to go. They (the ministry) were happy he agreed to go," said Bao Pu, speaking by phone from Hong Kong.
Bao Tong, 76, was dragged down with Zhao and has spent the last 20 years in jail, under house arrest or facing major restrictions. He has during that time become one of the most powerful dissident voices against the Communist Party.
China's army eventually crushed the six-week-long protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, killing hundreds, and possibly thousands.
China annually tightens controls ahead of the anniversary to prevent protests or other commemorations.
Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg after being shot during the crackdown, said he was forcibly taken to an area outside Beijing on Monday but was brought back after failing to take along medications he needed.
"Right now, they are strengthening their surveillance over me and are escorting me wherever I go," he said.
Police also were threatening to search his home for Tiananmen-related materials, he added.
Another dissident, Jiang Qisheng, told AFP that police had been stationed at his Beijing home around the clock and were following him everywhere.
Jiang, a philosophy professor, was jailed in 1999 for four years on subversion charges for calling on people to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the crackdown.
Bao Tong told AFP earlier this month that he saw no sign China's leadership would ever offer justice to those killed or jailed over the protests.
"(This) has had a seriously negative impact. It has made China a country with no voice.... a country in which no one can demand fairness," he said.
He also faulted the rest of the world for being too afraid to pressure a rising China to seek reconciliation over Tiananmen.
"A government that is not responsible to its own people cannot be responsible toward the rest of the world," he said.
His son Bao Pu is a Hong Kong-based publisher whose firm is issuing the Chinese version of Zhao's secret memoir, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at the events leading up to the decision to use force against the protesters.
Zhao also called for a transition away from one-party rule and towards multi-party democracy.
Bao Tong had agreed to leave Beijing before the English version of "Prisoner of the State" came out in mid-May, his son said, adding that his father was taken to Huangshan, a scenic mountain region in eastern China's Anhui province.
He was scheduled to return to Beijing on June 7.