Dui Hua revealed in a November 2007 press release that official statistics published in the 2006 China Law Yearbook show the number of arrests in China for “endangering state security” more than doubled in 2006 compared to 2005 (see graph).
These annual figures provide some of the only publicly available official statistics regarding China’s handling of political crime. The sharp rise in 2006, following a three-year period during which there had actually been a significant decrease in political arrests, corresponds to a heightened crackdown on dissent that began in the last quarter of 2005.
Despite Dui Hua’s extensive research to uncover information about Chinese political detainees, the foundation’s prisoner database contains information about less than 10 percent of the total arrests in 2006—an indication of how many political arrests take place under conditions of secrecy in China.