The home of Chinese dissident Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyan was ransacked by Beijing police on Jan. 11, according to a fellow activist who provided updates through her Twitter account.
From 8:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. officers rifled through the couple’s belongings and left with two computers, Miao Jue wrote.
The reason provided by Miao Jue in her Tweet was that Hu Jia had violated the regime’s “dictatorial policies.” Specifically, Hu Jia had published his opinions online, “participated in public activities,” and called for the release of Gao Zhisheng, the Nobel Prize nominated human rights lawyer who has not been seen since April 2010 and was recently sentenced to three years in prison in remote Xinjiang Province.
Hu Jia himself has been in prison for his activism on behalf of AIDS victims, and for other human rights work. In 2008, he was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power.” After he was released on June 26, 2011, he went right back to his activism.