Olympics near, China gives activist jail time
The 31/2-year term for Hu Jia was decried as a sign of a pre-Games crackdown on dissent.
BEIJING - Like many Chinese, Hu Jia broke into tears when Beijing lost out to Sydney, Australia, for the right to host the 2000 Olympic Games. He was elated a year later when Beijing captured this year's Summer Games.
He will not be able to attend.
A Beijing court yesterday sentenced Hu, 34, a prominent activist, to a prison term of 31/2 years for posting on overseas Web sites five essays critical of aspects of communist rule and for speaking to foreign reporters.
"Hu Jia is a person with a strong sense of national pride," his wife, Zeng Jinyan, 25, said bitterly outside their apartment complex as a phalanx of police officers kept an eye on her every move. Tearstains streaked her face.
The verdict against Hu - on the heels of the crackdown in Tibet - is the latest sign that Chinese officials see the run-up to the Olympic Games as a dangerous period in which any outcry should be dealt with harshly to discourage further dissent, a U.S. rights campaigner said.
'Inciting subversion'
"They are afraid of encouraging other protesters, other acts of protest," said John T. Kamm, executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based advocacy group that seeks the release of political prisoners in China. The group estimates there are 30,000 of them.
Beijing's First Intermediate People's Court convicted Hu of "inciting subversion of state power," a catchall charge against enemies of the state. His conviction drew an international outcry.
"It is a decision that is deeply disturbing to the United States," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in Bucharest, Romania, where she is attending a NATO summit.
'Backsliding'
The United States will raise such cases as indicators of "structural issues" in China when the two sides renew their "human-rights dialogue," Rice said.
The countries halted the talks in 2003 after the State Department said the execution of a Tibetan and the arrests of pro-democracy activists indicated "backsliding."
Kamm, who has spent two decades working to gain the release of political prisoners in China, said it made 742 arrests last year for endangering state security.
"The trend is very definitely up," he said, adding that detentions are mounting after unrest in Tibet.
Another Chinese dissident, Yang Chunlin, 53, a laborer who launched a petition demanding "human rights, not the Olympics," received a five-year term late last month, charged with inciting subversion.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said there was no particular crackdown tied to the Aug. 8-24 Games. "We can't stop implementation of the law because of the Olympics," she said.
Hu became an activist on AIDS issues but broadened his focus in recent years to include democratic rights, environmental issues, and freedom of religion. Last fall he demanded a halt to alleged police abuses in a pre-Olympics "cleanup" of petitioners and activists in Beijing.
More than a dozen police in riot gear broke into his home Dec. 27 to arrest him. His wife and their 4-month-old daughter have been under virtual house arrest since then.
She came to the gate of her apartment wing to speak to foreign reporters. She said she feared Hu would not get treatment for his liver ailment while in prison.
China Says Tibet Is Calm Again
Chinese officials said
yesterday that they had restored order in heavily Tibetan areas across
the country's west and are moving to arrest monks and others involved in weeks of protests. The Tibet Tourism Bureau said the region would reopen to foreign tourists May 1.
Police have arrested
more than 800 people, and 280 others have surrendered in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital that was the site of a deadly March 14 riot, an official there said. They will be tried by the end of the month, Lhasa's official tourism Web site said.
Protests spilled beyond
Lhasa over the last few weeks and were reported in more than 42 areas in surrounding provinces with large Tibetan and other minority populations.
Exile groups said
the manhunt, a stepped-up police presence and harsh tactics were provoking fear and more unrest, but Chinese officials said they were acting within the law.
Chinese Premier
Wen Jiabao appealed for unity and pledged
more support for poor minority areas during
a tour of Yunnan province, China's most diverse. "All ethnic groups form one big family," Wen said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
- Washington Post