China Sentences Another Prominent Activist to Jail

BEIJING — For the third time in less than a month, a Chinese court has sentenced a prominent rights activist to a lengthy prison term on charges involving subversion of state power, a telling indicator of the government’s obsession with security as China enters a year of leadership changes.

The sentence, handed down on Wednesday but made public on Thursday, came more than 16 months after Mr. Li was detained in September 2010, and nine months after his trial in April.

The evidence included membership in an alternative political group, the China Social Democracy Party, and a succession of essays that took issue with the government, led by an online criticism titled “Human Beings’ Heaven Is Human Dignity.”

 

Wednesday’s sentencing followed hearings in late December in which a Sichuan Province democracy activist, Chen Wei, was sentenced to nine years in jail for inciting subversion, and a Guizhou Province dissident, Chen Xi, received a 10-year term on the same charge.

 

This week, prosecutors in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, charged a fourth activist, Zhu Yufu, with subversion for writing a poem that urged Chinese citizens to gather together to call for freedom.

Those cases, with similar convictions and sentences meted out to other dissidents, reflect a steady trend of more restricted legal rights and harsher punishments for government critics that dates to late 2008, some experts say.

 

“It’s now a consensus among many people that the legal environment in China is worsening. The authorities are setting up more and more obstacles,” Mo Shaoping, a Beijing lawyer who has defended well-known dissidents, said in an interview on Thursday. “The difficulty for lawyers in these kinds of cases is getting greater and greater. And the sentences are getting heavier and heavier.”

No one can say with certainty why. But most analysts suggest that the crackdown began with vastly stepped-up security surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics, gained steam after activists released the online democracy manifesto Charter 08 in December 2008 and was ratcheted up again after Arab uprisings last spring started an online call for demonstrations in China.

China’s pending transition to a new Communist Party Politburo and government leadership, likely to get under way this fall, has yet again heightened the emphasis on stability, most analysts say.

In part, the latest flurry of convictions is “the long tail of the wave of arrests that took place after the Arab spring,” one of the most knowledgeable critics of Chinese rights policies, Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch, said in an interview on Thursday.

 

The fact that the state’s targets are all veteran dissidents, many with ties to the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, suggests that security officials want to nip any effort to link Arab political uprisings with China’s last mass democratic movement, he said.

 

The government generally does not address questions about individual rights cases. On Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin dismissed comments this week by the American ambassador Gary Locke that China’s recent human rights conduct reflects a fear of an Arab-style uprising. Mr. Liu suggested that objections to the crackdown are much ado about nothing.

 

“Some people always take viewpoints of the minority in China as the mainstream public opinion, and I think this is entirely wrong,” he said. “Should we take the views of those in the Occupy Wall Street movement as society’s mainstream public point of view?”

 

Mr. Li’s case differs somewhat from others recently charged or imprisoned. Although he also is a longtime democracy advocate, he is not prominent outside his home province. He is perhaps best known for promoting the memory of Lin Zhao, a student who was executed during Mao’s rule as a counterrevolutionary, apparently for supporting an army commander who had dared to criticize Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward in the 1950s. Ms. Lin’s case became emblematic to many of the struggle for free speech inside China.

 

It is unclear why Mr. Li was singled out for punishment, but it is possible his writings and memorials for Ms. Lin angered local officials, the research coordinator for Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Wang Songlian, said in a telephone interview.

 

“This environment encourages local party officials to hand out very harsh sentences because they can get away with it,” Ms. Wang said. “The national green light has been give to the local authorities.”

Mr. Li’s case was handled by what Mr. Mo called abnormal procedures that have become common in cases involving dissidents. The court barred a family hired lawyer from defending him, appointing a government lawyer instead. The family’s lawyer disappeared about 10 days before Mr. Li’s April trial, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a network of rights advocates, and later resurfaced.

A relative of Mr. Li who refused to be named for fear of retribution said that only two family members were allowed in the courtroom on Wednesday for the reading of the sentence, and they were not allowed to see papers related to the verdict. Mr. Li did manage, however, to slip one of them a note.

 

“I am not guilty,” the relative quoted the note as stating. “I am a good person, a useful person to society. Find me a lawyer.”