Absurdity, Allegory and China

At sunrise this past Wednesday (July 29, 2009) the legal scholar Xu Zhiyong, an elected legislator from Beijing’s Haidian District and founder of the Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng), was taken into custody by uniformed police officer and five plainclothes men. Evan Osnos at The New Yorker tells us why this is a big deal, as indeed it is, in Where is Xu Zhiyong?

On July 17, 2009 Gongmeng was declared illegal and shut down by officials who claim that the organization owes 1.46 million RMB in taxes. So, while the official reason for his detention is nominally tax related, it seems clear enough that in the lead-up to the sixtieth anniversary of Liberation everyone, especially human rights defenders, are targets for random disappearances. Zhuang Lu, a Gongmeng staffer, has also been detained since last Wednesday. This all feels so positively Olympic.