China Jails Human Rights Activist for 9 Years

BEIJING — A Sichuan Province court sentenced one of China’s most prominent human rights campaigners to nine years in prison on Friday for writing essays that called the nation’s Communist Party a dictatorship and an “enemy of democracy.”

The activist, Chen Wei, is among more than 80 rights advocates who were detained, arrested or disappeared this year in a government crackdown that followed online calls for a “jasmine revolution” modeled on uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.

At least 22 remained in custody or missing as of December 8, according to the rights organization Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

Mr. Chen was found guilty of inciting subversion, according to one of his lawyers, Liang Xiaojun. The nine-year prison term, which he called unusually severe, is one of the harshest given to a rights activist since a fellow Sichuan activist, Liu Xianbin, received a 10-year sentence last March. Mr. Liu was also convicted of subversion, largely for pro-democracy articles published abroad.

Taken with the 11-year sentence meted out last year against the author and Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, the cases underscore the growing clampdown on criticism of Communist Party rule in the last two years, said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong researcher for Human Rights Watch.

“Until Liu Xiaobo, we had a few years where people convicted of this type of crime generally served three, four, five years,” he said. “It’s another indication that the government is reverting to very severe sentences for crimes of free expression.”

Like Liu Xianbin and Liu Xiaobo, Liu, Mr. Chen has a record of rights activism dating to the 1980s and the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, a factor that also may have figured in their unusually long prison terms.

Mr. Chen was sent to Beijing’s Qincheng prison, commonly used to house political dissidents, after the Tiananmen protests. He was arrested and sentenced to five more years in jail after trying to organize a commemoration of the Tiananmen protests in May 1992.

“Sticking to one’s beliefs over time is a far more serious offense than just calling for political change,” Mr. Bequelin said.

Mr. Chen does not intend to appeal the sentence, “as Chen Wei doesn’t want to play with them,” his wife, Wang Xiaoyan, said of the court system in a telephone interview on Friday.

“All of us just played with them today, as actors, because the final sentence had been decided long before the trial.”

According to his lawyer and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which examined the two-page indictment, Mr. Chen was arrested for writing 26 articles between March 2009 and last January, some posted online in China and others published abroad, that criticized Communist rule.

The writings, with titles like “The Disease of the System and the Medicine of Constitutional Democracy,” claimed that the Communist Party had suppressed citizens’ thoughts and beliefs and used violence to control them, the indictment said.

Authorities in Suining, the Sichuan town where Mr. Chen lives, detained him in February as the first anonymous posts appeared on Chinese microblogs calling for a so-called jasmine revolution. There is no evidence that Mr. Chen played any role in the microblog posts, which appear to have originated outside China.

According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, the Suining court sent Mr. Chen’s case back to prosecutors for further investigation before deciding in November to schedule a trial.

According to his lawyer, Mr. Chen said “I am innocent” as he was escorted from the courtroom by police. “Democracy must win; autocracy must die.”


(2011-12-23/nytimes)