To build those breathtaking buildings, thousands of Chinese families were evicted from their homes, and the vast majority of them have neither been given any financial compensation, nor alternative housing. Many have been tortured and imprisoned. This is the darkest secret of the Beijing Games.

On June 25, Liu Shaokun, a schoolteacher who photographed collapsed school buildings in quake-ravaged Sichuan, was sentenced to a year of re-education-through-labour. He is not even allowed family visits. The same day, Xie Changfa, a dissident from Hunan, was arrested on “suspicion of subverting State power”. Three days later, police detained Datong railway workers’ rights activist Liu Jianjun. On July 5, Liu was arrested as a criminal on, yes, “suspicion of inciting subversion of State power”.

Four days later, Tianjin police detained dissident Lü Honglai. No one knows where he is. His wife has been told that Lü is “under investigation by the relevant department”. Huang Qi, founder of website tianwang64.com, had been collecting information from parents who lost their children in the collapsed schools. He sought to expose official corruption behind the shoddy construction of schools. He is in prison now for “illegally possessing State secrets” (The definition of “State secrets” in the Chinese State Secrets Act is so vague that you could hang for publishing the recipe for Mandarin Chicken). The police have detained dissident writer Du Daobin. They seized his computers, CDs and manuscripts, and told his wife to change her phone number so foreign journalists would not be able to contact her.

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