The anniversary is being taken very seriously in Beijing, where security will allegedly be tighter than it was for the Olympic Games last year.

Yesterday, it emerged that yet another leading intellectual, Mo Zhixu, has been put under house arrest. Mo is an author and the recently elected head of China’s PEN centre, a charity that defends the right to free speech. He is also one of the founders of Bullog.cn, one of China’s most influential websites.

Mo joins a host of prominent Chinese thinkers, charity workers and lawyers who have been rounded up this year and locked away. We’ve put together a list to record them all.

Liu Xiaobo is one of China’s most important intellectuals. After six months in a hidden jail, he was formally charged with “inciting subversion of state power” on June 23. Liu helped to draft Charter 08, a manifesto signed by more than 8,000 people calling for modernization and reform.

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A number of other lawyers, bloggers and activists have been detained for specific offenses.

Liu Ruiping, Wang Yonghang and Wang Ping, all lawyers in North East China, were detained between July 2 and 8 for defending Falun Gong practitioners.

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Every indication is that there is worse to come. On July 9, the Beijing Justice department issued a statement saying it would cancel the licenses of 53 lawyers who had taken on controversial cases. The statement implied that further cancellations were imminent.

Last Sunday, two more public-spirited NGOs, Yirenping and Aizhixing, received unannounced inspections from the State Administration of Industry and Commerce.

The question is whether the current round of da ya will relent after the anniversary passes in October, or whether it is the beginning of a longer period of repressive measures by the Communist Party.

If it is the former, then Europe and the US, while pressing the cases of the individuals above, can afford to be relatively relaxed.

If it is the latter, foreign governments should start putting pressure on the Chinese as soon as possible to behave in the responsible way a superpower should.

Personally, I think it’s optimistic to think that the tightening is related to the anniversary. Beijing seems to be struggling to impose its control over the provinces at the moment, and articles condemning the behaviour of local governments across China are emerging on a regular basis in the People’s Daily.

The fact that so many people are now being arrested for merely probing at the borders of the system makes me feel that China’s leaders are more worried about the country that they are letting on.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/malcolmmoore/100007137/china-moves-into-beat-and-compress-mode/