Beijing - A Chinese legal activist on Thursday said he had been freed from police custody after being held for nearly two weeks to prevent him from advising candidates and voters in local elections. Yao Lifa said police in the central province of Hubei released him on Wednesday night because his wife had become seriously ill during his what he called his "illegal detention".
The activist said he said he was "kidnapped" and taken to a detention centre at a remote state farm to prevent him from carrying out his plan to advise people in Hubei and the provinces of Jiangxi and Shanxi on local elections, which were mainly for village heads.
The elections in Yao's home city of Qianjiang end on November 20, while some in other areas last until the end of the month, Yao said by telephone.
Rights groups condemned the latest detention of Yao, 50, who has been arrested several times previously and was kept under heavy surveillance in the run-up to the Olympic Games in August to prevent him from travelling to Beijing.
Yao is a teacher who is best known for supporting farmers in village elections and has exposed a series of fraudulent ballots.
He won a seat as an independent candidate on the Qianjiang city People's Congress but argued that local authorities cheated him of his seat by several illegal practices during the next election.
"Today when in the United States people have had the right to elect the president for 230 years, in India the people have had the right to elect the president for 60 years, and in Taiwan the people have had the right to elect the highest leader for 13 years, the Chinese people don't even have the true right to elect a village head," Yao said.
Chinese leaders claim that their commitment to grassroot elections, greater openness in governance, and more democracy within the ruling Communist Party show that the nation is making progress.
They have suggested several times in recent months that the "socialist modernisation" stage - and therefore the absence of multi-party democracy - would last about 100 years.
The government has promised to improve its system of direct elections for village heads, with a possible extension to township and even provincial level in the future.
Wang Jinhua of the Ministry of Civil Affairs in August said that problems of corruption and vote buying affected a "small number" of elections, estimating the number skewed by vote buying at 3 per cent or less.
Communist Party members occupy 56 per cent of the seats on village committees and 48 per cent of those on the urban committees, Wang said.
About 73 million of China's 1.3 billion people are Communist Party members.
