LETTER FROM BEIJING
This year, Chinese authorities did not wait for the still-sensitive date of June 4 – the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – to inflict sentences that are harsh to the point of absurdity on human rights activists, and even ordinary comedians.
On April 9, lawyers Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi were sentenced to 14 and 12 years in prison respectively for "subversion of state power." These two "dangerous" individuals committed a "heinous crime" at the end of 2019. They dared to organize an informal meeting between friends in the southeastern city of Xiamen to talk about democracy! Worse still, they were repeat offenders. For a similar reason, these leaders of the New Citizens Movement were already sentenced in 2014 to four and three-and-a-half years of detention respectively. This time, Xu even had the audacity to write a letter calling for Xi Jinping's resignation, which no doubt explains why he received a longer sentence than his comrade.
Xu and Ding were arrested in February 2020 and have now spent three years in prison before being sentenced again. "Both men were subjected to torture and other ill-treatment during detention, including long hours of interrogation and being bound to an iron 'tiger-chair' with their limbs contorted for more than 10 hours a day across several days," said Amnesty International. Twelve and 14 years in prison for pro-democracy activists is more than the sentence handed down to Liu Xiaobo, author of the "Charter 08" manifesto, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2009. The winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, Liu died, in ill health, on July 13, 2017.
On May 11, another lawyer and human rights activist, Yang Maodong, better known by his pen name Guo Feixiong, was sentenced to eight years in prison, again for "subversion of state power." For some 20 years, Guo has been defending the "little people," campaigning for democracy and going to Chinese-style prisons. His wife Zhang Qing and their two children emigrated to the United States in 2009. Guo tried to join them in January 2021, when he learned that his wife was suffering from cancer. Arrested at the airport, he was officially charged a year later, on January 12, 2022, with "subversion of state power," two days after the death of his wife in the US.
At his trial behind closed doors in May, Guo made a lengthy statement declaring his loyalty to his political ideals: freedom, democracy, human rights and the establishment of the rule of law in China.
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