COMMENT This week I tried to visit Zeng Jinyan, Chinese blogger, wife of the detained dissident Hu Jia and mother of an infant daughter. I did not get far.
Near the door of Ms Zeng’s apartment block in the paradoxically named Bobo Freedom City compound near Beijing, I was stopped by a police officer and half a dozen plain-clothes security agents. The officer politely explained that I could not meet Ms Zeng without her prior permission. He was unmoved by my objection that authorities had made such permission difficult to obtain by cutting off Ms Zeng’s home telephone line and her access to the internet.
