China is hardening against dissent, rights groups say as they mark International Human Rights Day

LONDON: When her husband fled China in 2019 to escape a police crackdown on dissidents, Lu Lina thought she and their young son could soon join him in safety abroad.

She did not know that she would be forced to move house, that her 8-year-old son would be effectively kicked out of school and that border police would block her from leaving the country over the next three years. In the end, the couple had to resort to filing for divorce in China to get around the exit ban.

“After my husband left, police gave our lives so much trouble,” Lu said from Los Angeles, where the family eventually reunited and settled late last year. “Every time the border guards would stop me, take away my phone, my wallet and all my things. They gave no explanation.”

Lu’s husband, Liu Sifang, a musician and former teacher, was among a number of Chinese activists and rights lawyers who were either arrested, forced into hiding or self-exiled after attending an informal get-together in 2019 to discuss human rights.

Rights groups say the punishment of Liu’s family highlights Beijing’s increasingly harsh crackdown on dissent both within China and beyond. As the groups mark the 75th anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Sunday, they fear that the situation in the world’s second most populous country is getting worse, not better.

Western governments are failing to press China hard enough, the rights groups say, and a more powerful China under President Xi Jinping has become more impervious to international pressure.

“If you look at independent activism around the time that Xi came to power, relative to what you can see now, what’s disturbingly clear is that Xi’s leadership sought to obliterate civil society and to silence dissent, not just inside the country but globally, to ensure that anybody who criticizes him and the regime has to think twice,” said Sophie Richardson, a longtime China observer and former China director at Human Rights Watch.

A new report by the Rome-based rights group Safeguard Defenders, published Sunday to mark International Human Rights Day, alleges that China’s government has stepped up its use of “collective punishment” against the loved ones of human rights advocates in recent years.

“Under Xi Jinping, China is increasingly unwilling to allow political targets to leave the country, slapping them and their families with exit bans, and using transnational repression methods to control the ones who make it out,” according to the report.