During the Olympics, China quashed all applications from people hoping to demonstrate in officially sanctioned “protest pens.” Police also stopped protests by foreigners sympathetic to the pro-Tibet movement.

But one Chinese man succeeded at breaking through the security dragnet, protesting briefly in Ritan Park with his young son and a sign that read, “Shandong Huimin County government illegally sold my grandmother’s house and took away the money!”

Now, the family says, the man’s 73-year-old mother is being harassed by the police in retaliation. Their story is a slice of Beijing life that largely escaped view during the Olympic Games and a reminder of the surveillance that continues through the Paralympic Games, which begin Saturday.

“I really didn’t know my son was going to protest in Ritan Park,” Yang Guiying said in an interview last week in her modest apartment in Daxing, a Beijing suburb, as a uniformed policeman stood on the landing outside her door. She was already under police surveillance; the protest “definitely made things worse,” she said.

Yang suffers from a kidney disease and has difficulty walking without taking breaks. That did not stop state security from sending two plainclothes police officers to ride along with her on a public bus, with two marked police cars behind it, she said.

“I’m just an old lady,” a teary-eyed Yang said, wearing a worn yellow blouse and two layers of pants even in summer. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

But a complaint she filed in 1990 is a thorn in the Communist Party’s side. Her parents’ property in Huimin county, Shandong province, was taken away that year by local government officials who built in its place a financial services center housing two banks. They failed to compensate the family, said Yang, who has a written acknowledgment from the local housing bureau recognizing her family’s ownership of the property.

... contd.