MORE THAN 100 university students staged protests outside a Beijing district police station at the weekend to demand the release of one of their lecturers, who was a former leader of 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations and who his students believe is being held illegally by authorities.
On Saturday and Sunday, students protested outside the public security bureau in Beijing’s western Haidian district to call on police to release Ding Xiaoping, a lecturer at several universities.
Mr Ding was part of a group of Peking University student leaders involved in pro-democracy demonstrations focused on Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, and he was later jailed for nearly three years for his involvement.
Students said they believed their teacher was locked up to muzzle him ahead of the forthcoming 60th anniversary of Communist rule in China, a highly sensitive event.
An ex-student of Mr Ding’s, who gave his surname as Yu, said he believed the incident was politically motivated because Mr Ding had been involved in the pro-democracy movement.
The preparations for the anniversary parade are reaching fever pitch. On Friday, large parts of the city were shut down to make way for tanks and rocket launchers rumbling through the streets, and yesterday saw squadrons of jets and helicopters shooting through the skies trailing smoke as part of rehearsals for the event.
The 60th anniversary is a politically fraught time, during which nothing can be left to chance, as it is the Communist Party’s main platform for its achievements over 60 years. Activists and petitioners are being rounded up, just as they were before the Olympics last year and are before the meeting of the annual parliament, the National People’s Congress.
On Thursday last week, Mr Ding became involved in an argument with some street vendors after his car caused some damage to a stall. He was surrounded by the stall-holders and things came to blows. Mr Ding went to the school after the incident, then told the police about what had happened afterwards. The following Saturday he was arrested.
“We students have not heard from him since then. So on September 12th, over 100 students went to the police bureau in Haidian District to protest. Some of our students were taken into the police station and were beaten,” said Mr Yu. “Ding Xiaoping is a good teacher. He is very responsible, very concerned about young people,” he added.
Another of Mr Ding’s graduates, surnamed Liu, said that this should have been a simple civil dispute, but instead the teacher was being kept incommunicado.
“Since our teacher was detained, they do not allow us to meet or talk to him. On Sunday, our teacher called one of our students, and said he had been beaten by officials of the Public Security Bureau. Since then we have not heard anything from him. We can only wait to see what will happen next,” she said.