July 2015
Beijing
British news outlet
I was detained by security agents while trying to interview a house church leader at his home in Beijing.
Police have erected a small shed at the entrance to this guy’s compound (apparently to keep an eye on him with CCTV cameras etc). If they didn’t know we were going to meet him before, they did as soon as we arrived since he was obviously being monitored around the clock
We were held in the shed by three men — one a uniformed cop, the other two in civilian clothes — with a large stick on the table beside us. It was unpleasant. We were released after calling MOFA, probably around 45 minutes after we were detained.
We were effectively prevented from meeting with the pastor. We were told we didn’t have permission from local danwei and had therefore broken reporting rules. The man in police uniform at one point grinned at me and said: you know as well as I do what is going on here.
This happened in the days after the launch of crackdown on lawyers and was, I suspect, related to that although I couldn’t say for sure.