Security stepped up in Beijing for opening of legislative advisory body’s annual session

Beijing on alert as annual political session opens

BEIJING — Black-clad SWAT teams patrolled downtown Beijing on Wednesday and an AIDS group was ordered to cancel a seminar as part of China’s security clampdown ahead of this week’s opening of the national legislature’s annual session.

Officers on motorcycles and in armored vans circled Tiananmen Square in the heart of the capital, adjacent to the Great Hall of the People where members of the legislature’s advisory body begin meeting Wednesday.

The actual legislature, a largely ceremonial body known as the National People’s Congress, begins its nearly two-week session Friday.

Foot patrols were stepped up around the square, and retirees mobilized by neighborhood committees to watch for trouble were stationed every few yards (meters) along Chang’an Boulevard, which runs along the vast plaza’s northern edge.

Police were also cracking down on people visiting Beijing to petition for government assistance over various grievances. A group of about half a dozen women who approached the Great Hall carrying shopping bags and wads of documents was forced into a police van and driven away.

As is routine during the session, the highlight of China’s political calendar, dissidents and groups working on sensitive social issues were coming under increased pressure.

AIDS activist Wan Yanhai, founder of the Beijing-based Aizhixing Institute, said police had ordered him to cancel a seminar Wednesday marking International Sex Worker Rights Day.

“The seminar is a perfectly normal activity; we’re not opposing anything,” Wan said in a telephone interview. “It’s a meeting of the people’s government, so they should let the people express themselves.”

The legislative advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, opened with a speech broadly outlining issues of national concern delivered by its chairman, the Communist Party’s No. 4 ranking leader, Jia Qinglin.

Jia praised China’s economic policies, saying, “the response to the impact of the global financial crisis was a significant test for the party and the government’s ability to rule and administer the country.”

He also made reference to riots last July in the far-western Xinjiang region, where clashes between minority Turkic-speaking Uighurs and majority Han residents in Urumqi left nearly 200 people dead and 1,600 wounded, according to the government, in China’s worst ethnic unrest in decades.

“We strongly supported the party and the government in dealing with the destructive, disruptive, violent, and criminal incidents in Urumqi in accordance with the law,” he said.

In China’s other troubled minority area, Tibet, Jia said China planned to push “leapfrog development and lasting stability.” The comments follow a high-level Communist Party conference in January that emphasized raising rural livelihoods in Tibet, an apparent acknowledgment that decades of investment in industry and infrastructure have failed to endear the region’s herders and farmers to Chinese rule.

This year’s legislative session is expected to focus on economic policy, while also giving a full airing to hot-button issues such as soaring real estate prices in many Chinese cities.

The government, which releases a budget and work plan for the year, is expected to boost spending on education, pensions and medical care, continuing a push begun over the past decade to strengthen a tattered social safety net.

The congress is also expected to pass legislation on safeguarding state secrets and amend a law on how deputies are selected, correcting a disparity that gave urban Chinese greater representation than their more numerous rural neighbors.

Along the sidelines, the congress will focus attention on an upcoming national leadership transition that begins with a key Communist Party congress in 2012.

Many of the aspirants for top jobs will be seeking to network among congress participants and maximize the opportunity for national media exposure.

Particular attention is being paid this year to Bo Xilai, party boss of the western city of Chongqing, who is riding a wave of popularity for an anti-gang crusade in which dozens of law enforcement officials have been arrested for collusion.

(This version CORRECTS UPDATES with quotes from Jia’s speech; corrects day in lead to Wednesday.)