BEIJING: Authorities have ramped up security in Beijing ahead of China's upcoming parliamentary session, and amid ongoing calls for anti-government protests, state media and rights groups said Wednesday. Extra police have been deployed to maintain order during the annual session of the National People's Congress, starting Saturday. A parliamentary advisory body opens its own week long meeting on Thursday.
At the so called "two meetings", thousands of delegates place their rubber stamp of approval on the policies of the ruling Communist Party. Nearly 180,000 police, firefighters, security personnel and traffic police will patrol Beijing during the sessions, while the city has recruited 560,000 citizen volunteers to monitor the capital's streets, the Beijing News said.
Checks at subway, bus and train stations have been stepped up, while vehicles coming from outside the city will be banned and the airspace over the capital restricted, the China Daily said.
Police in China have in the past few weeks staged a security clampdown to quell calls for weekly anti-government "Jasmine rallies" a reference to the "Jasmine revolution" in Tunisia that sparked unrest across the Arab world. On February 27, hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes police blanketed Beijing's popular Wangfujing shopping street for the second Sunday running, after anonymous online calls urged people to rally against the government.
No overt public protests were seen on either Sunday, but hundreds of activists and rights campaigners have complained of stepped up police harassment, rights groups said. "Since February 25, police in Beijing have been systematically rounding up petitioners to prevent any disturbances during the 'two meetings'," said the Hong Kong-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders. "CHRD learned that close to 200 individuals. had been seized by police and taken to (Beijing's) Jiujingzhuang, a central black jail." "Black jails" refer to illegal detention centres set up by police to handle petitioners that come to Beijing to seek official redress for alleged injustices at the local level.
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