JAN. 17, 2014
HONG KONG — One of China’s most prominent human rights activists, Xu Zhiyong, will stand trial next week and believes that his conviction is all but certain, although he will fight the charges, his lawyer said on Friday.
The lawyer, Zhang Qingfang, said that after a day of unsuccessfully trying to convince court officials in Beijing that there were major procedural flaws in the case, the officials handed him a notice that Mr. Xu would face trial on Wednesday for “assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.” If convicted, Mr. Xu could spend up to five years in prison, Mr. Zhang said in a telephone interview.
“I also visited Xu during the day, and he was very normal and steady,” Mr. Zhang said. “But he sees that this trial is basically just going through the motions. We can foresee the outcome already.”
Another defense lawyer for Mr. Xu, Yang Jinzhu, who also went to the court meeting, confirmed the trial date in a brief telephone interview.
The trial will be a show of the determination of President Xi Jinping and other Communist Party leaders to extinguish any organized opposition, however mild, emerging to challenge their control, Mr. Xu’s supporters have said.
China’s courts are controlled by the Communist Party and rarely find defendants innocent, especially in politically contentious cases like this one. Mr. Xu will nonetheless contest the charges against him, Mr. Zhang said.
Over the past decade, Mr. Xu, 40, has become one of China’s best-known rights advocates, campaigning against, among other things, arbitrary detention by the police, discriminatory barriers against rural schoolchildren and “black jails” used to secretly detain aggrieved citizens who travel to Beijing to complain to officials. He taught law at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
He also became the most prominent advocate of the New Citizens Movement, which won widespread attention early last year with small protests across the country demanding that Communist Party officials disclose their wealth, release political prisoners and give people more say in government. Mr. Xu was detained by the police in July and had been under informal house arrest since April.
After Mr. Xi assumed leadership of the party in November 2012, he promised greater accountability from officials and a fairer legal system. But Mr. Xi and other leaders have also emphasized that they wanted to bolster, not weaken, controls over the Internet, ideology and social unrest — and the efforts to stamp out the New Citizens Movement have reflected that determination.
“They believe there’s a crisis of control and civil forces are constantly strengthening, so finally we have this intense contention,” Teng Biao, a Chinese legal scholar who has long been friends with Mr. Xu, said in an interview. “It’s very difficult for a system like this to abandon power of its own accord.”
Altogether, about 18 participants in the New Citizens Movement were arrested last year, although a few were released, according to Maya Wang, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. Three stood trial in Jiangxi Province in southeast China late last year, and are awaiting verdicts.
The prosecutors’ indictment against Mr. Xu, issued last month, dwelled on allegations that he had orchestrated protests in Beijing, including a gathering by people calling for equal schooling opportunities for rural and urban children.
The trial appears sure to attract Chinese supporters and Western diplomats to the Beijing First Intermediate People’s Court, where it will be held. But they are also sure to be excluded from the courtroom, and only a handful of Mr. Xu’s family members will be allowed to go inside, said Mr. Zhang, the lawyer. Mr. Xu’s wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, on Monday.
