SEPT. 12, 2014
A man was led away by plainclothes police outside the court where Yang Maodong, better known by his pen name, Guo Feixiong, was being tried on a charge of assembling a crowd to disrupt public disorder. Credit Alex Lee/Reuters
HONG KONG — The trial of one of southern China’s most prominent dissidents was cut short Friday after he and another defendant said they would remain silent and their lawyers boycotted the proceedings. The lawyers said the trial was postponed and would resume at a later date.
The dissident, Yang Maodong, better known by his pen name, Guo Feixiong, faced a charge of assembling a crowd to disrupt public order, stemming from his participation in a surge of citizen activism around the time Xi Jinping, now China’s president, became the Communist Party’s top leader nearly two years ago. Groups across China urged the party to disclose officials’ wealth and respect human rights, using the Internet to spread their demands.
Mr. Yang and another defendant, Sun Desheng, were to be tried on the public disorder charge in the Tianhe District People’s Court in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province. But even before the hearing began Friday, they said that they would not speak during the trial, citing restrictions that they said made a mockery of their legal rights.
In a statement released by one of his lawyers on Thursday, Mr. Yang had denounced what he said was prosecutors’ refusal to let him and his lawyers examine eight computer discs containing evidence — documents, photos and video footage. He called that a violation of China’s criminal procedure law.
That refusal made the “trial improper and illegitimate, and therefore totally invalid,” Mr. Yang said. He added: “Throughout this improper, illegitimate and totally invalid trial process, I will maintain my silence.”
The other defendant, Mr. Sun, also said he would remain silent, his brother, Sun Jinxi, who attended the hearing, said by telephone.
In the end, the presiding judge postponed the trial soon after the defendants arrived in the courtroom, because their lawyers had refused to attend the hearing, said the lawyers and Mr. Sun’s brother, who attended the hearing.
“In a case like this, whatever a lawyer said in the courtroom would have no effect,” Zhang Xuezhong, one of Mr. Yang’s two defense lawyers, said by telephone. “If we had gone to serve as the defense, we would simply have become tools allowing them to complete their judicial persecution of Guo Feixiong.”
Mr. Zhang said that on Friday morning, a judge waiting for the trial to start had called him and warned the lawyers not to boycott the proceedings.
“I told him there were too many illegalities in the handling of the case,” said Mr. Zhang, a Shanghai lawyer who was in Guangzhou for the trial. The court could set a new trial date after about 10 days, he said.
Mr. Sun’s lawyer, Ge Wenxiu, said by telephone that he had also boycotted the trial, citing what he called inadequate notice of the trial date as well as flaws in the evidence. Mr. Ge said his requests for witnesses to appear in court were ignored, and that their absence would have made it impossible to challenge fatal blunders in the prosecution’s case.
