BEIJING—China has prevented a second activist from leaving the country in as many days, her husband said on Monday, as the government seeks to keep a lid on political dissent.
Zeng Jinyan, an AIDS and human rights campaigner recently named by TIME magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people, was stopped at the airport, where she was intending to travel to Switzerland to attend a human rights training course.
"The reason was that the State Council, the State Security Ministry and the Ministry of Public Security, the three organs issued this order that Jinyan was endangering national security," her husband, fellow activist Hu Jia, said in a text message.
On Sunday, Yao Lifa, a campaigner known for mobilising activists to run in local elections, said he was prevented from leaving to attend the same conference and attributed the move to a desire for stability before the 17th Communist Party Congress.
The five-yearly party meeting, at which key leadership decisions are made, will be held later this year.
Hu said Zeng's experience showed the Chinese authorities were fearful of the impact the couple, who have faced continual harassment from authorities and prolonged periods of house arrest, might have at the conference.
"The Chinese government's so-called 'endangering national security' really is to say that the things we understand and our own experiences can completely prove that, in so many ways, the Chinese government is violating rights," Hu said by telephone.
China was particularly sensitive to exposures of human rights violations in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and averse to screenings of their short film, which shows the couple under surveillance by plainclothes police, he said.
Hu said Zeng, who is four months' pregnant, was briefly detained at the airport, and that authorities had confiscated her passport.
The couple were barred from leaving the country in May, where they had been en route to Europe, using the same charge of endangering national security.
