A prominent Aids activist and pro-democracy campaigner has been placed under house arrest to prevent him from travelling to an 'Aids village' at the same time as a visiting American delegation.
Hu Jia said police started a 24-hour watch on his apartment in Beijing last Friday.
'I left the house and was confronted by about six policemen. They grabbed me by the neck and forced me back into my home,' he said.
Mr Hu said the policemen told him he had been detained because they knew he was planning to give a television interview on the Aids situation in China to a foreign television crew. They also knew he had been planning a trip to Henan , where he had hoped to meet a US delegation that was due to visit Wenlou, one of the villages worst hit by the Aids epidemic.
Mr Hu, 30, had planned some activities with a group of Aids orphans to celebrate Children's Day, which falls on June 1. The police also told him that as the 15th anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown was approaching they wanted to keep him out of the way.
'They wanted to take my mother and me to Anhui . They called it a vacation,' the activist said from his home yesterday.
