{"id":37857,"date":"2014-01-29T18:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-29T18:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=37857 "},"modified":"2014-01-29T18:42:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-29T18:42:00","slug":"37857-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=37857","title":{"rendered":"China Jails Another Anti-Graft Activist"},"content":{"rendered":"
2014-01-29<\/div>
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An undated file photo of members of the New Citizens’ Movement in Beijing holding a banner calling on officials to disclose their assets.<\/div>
 EYEPRESS NEWS<\/div>
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Authorities in Beijing on Wednesday sentenced a second activist who called on ruling Chinese Communist Party leaders to reveal their assets to a one-year jail term on public order charges.<\/div>
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Yuan Dong, who stood trial on Monday alongside fellow New Citizens’ Movement members Ding Jiaxi, Li Wei, and Zhang Baocheng, was convicted for “gathering a crowd to disrupt public order,” the Haidian District People’s Court said on Wednesday.<\/div>
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Their trials came a day after the sentencing of prominent dissident Xu Zhiyong, a co-founder of the New Citizens’ Movement, to four years’ imprisonment on the same charges.<\/div>
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Yuan’s lawyer Chang Boyang said his client should have been found not guilty and released, and that the charges against him were politically motivated.<\/div>
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“The prosecution really hadn’t a shred of evidence to prove that Yuan Dong was guilty of any crime,” Chang said after the verdict and sentence were announced. “These were trumped-up charges, which trample on the law.”<\/div>
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He said Yuan’s sentence was much lighter than Xu’s because he was seen by the government as a camp follower with far less influence than the movement’s co-founder.<\/div>
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He said Yuan had already accepted that the likelihood of a “not guilty” verdict was remote.<\/div>
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“But he said if he was found guilty, that he would appeal immediately,” said Chang, who recently spoke with Yuan on a visit to the detention center where he is being held.<\/div>
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Wife ‘uneasy’ over sentence<\/div>
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Meanwhile, Yuan Dong’s wife, Zhu Yachun, said she was “very uneasy” about the sentence.<\/div>
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“Basically this means he will be locked up for another 10 months,” Zhu said.<\/div>
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“It’s nearly Spring Festival, and we won’t have the family to celebrate together,” she added, using the Communist Party’s preferred term for Chinese New Year.<\/div>
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“In court, I told Yuan Dong to start the appeal process as soon as possible,” she added. “We will definitely appeal. But then the court police took me away after a very quick exchange.”<\/div>
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Chang said Yuan hadn’t received a fair trial, because both he and his lawyer were repeatedly cut short by judges as they tried to make their arguments for the defense.<\/div>
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“There were a lot of points that we were unable to make, and his summing up statement was also interfered with,” he said. “There were lots of breaches of legal procedure.”<\/div>
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“But [Yuan] was able to put out his statement, via his wife, on the Internet.”<\/div>
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In it, Yuan said that he had been moved to act by official corruption, and by the need for transparency around official assets.<\/div>
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He called the recent string of trials “a triumph of party power and official power over people power,” and called on the government not to treat its own citizens as enemies.<\/div>
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Hou Xin fined<\/div>
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On the same day, Beijing authorities issued a fine to another New Citizens Movement activist, Hou Xin, who was tried alongside fellow activist Zhao Changqing for the same offense last Thursday.<\/div>
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Hou, who was released after paying a fine, said she was surprised not to have been sent to prison.<\/div>
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“I hadn’t expected this,” she told RFA following her release on Wednesday. “I thought that because Xu Zhiyong had been sentenced to prison, that I would go to jail too.”<\/div>
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“I think perhaps the government is showing signs of progress, which is a limited improvement, and probably the result of public pressure from its citizens,” she said.<\/div>
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Earlier, Hou released a statement online saying she was innocent of all charges.<\/div>
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She also called on the government to allow its citizens the freedoms of expression, publication and association which are enshrined in China’s constitution.<\/div>
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Anti-corruption campaign<\/div>
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Since taking office in March, China’s President Xi Jinping has demanded officials cut down on waste and extravagance and get closer to the people, as part of a broader campaign against corruption.<\/div>
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Xi has warned that the party must beat graft in order to survive, and has launched a campaign targeting powerful “tigers” as well as lowly “flies.”<\/div>
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But rights groups say dozens of activists who called on high-ranking officials to reveal details of their wealth have been detained in recent months.<\/div>
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Experts say the recent trials of anti-corruption activists is a clear indication of a worsening climate for political debate and rights activism in China.<\/div>
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Xu is China’s highest-profile dissident to be sentenced to jail since 2009, when Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo was jailed for 11 years for subversion after co-authoring “Charter 08,” a document that called for sweeping changes to the current system under the Chinese Communist Party.<\/div>
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He was detained in July after organizing street protests in March that called on Chinese leaders to reveal details of their assets and those of their families.<\/div>
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Xu’s conviction came four days after a U.S.-based journalism group released a report linking relatives of President Xi Jinping and other party leaders to offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens.<\/div>
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Reported by Xin Lin for RFA’s Mandarin Service and by Wen Yuqing for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.<\/div>
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Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>the<\/span><\/a> <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>original article<\/a><\/a><\/a>.<\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/div>
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VOA: China Convicts Two More Anti-Corruption Activists<\/a><\/div>
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Reuters: China convicts two anti-graft activists in crackdown<\/a><\/div>
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<div>Yuan Dong, who stood trial on Monday alongside fellow New Citizens' Movement members Ding Jiaxi, Li Wei, and Zhang Baocheng, was convicted for "gathering a crowd to disrupt public order," the Haidian District People's Court said on Wednesday.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}