The ruling Chinese Communist Party is stepping up controls on dissidents who speak out against changes to the constitution allowing President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely, as authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong placed a rights activist under house arrest for giving interviews to overseas media on the subject. Guangdong activist Huang Meijuan said she was prevented from leaving home to pick up her child from school on Thursday by state security police.
"They said I had given interviews to the foreign media, and I said 'Why can't I do that?'" Huang told RFA on Friday. "They told me I shouldn't think they wouldn't do anything just because I am a single mother." "So I asked them what I said [and] they said it was the one in which I talked about the constitutional amendments," she said. On Sunday, China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress (NPC), voted to amend the country's constitution to abolish any limits to Xi's term in office.
