A Chinese court sentenced US-based Chinese dissident Wang Bingzhang (
In response, the Mainland Affairs Council issued a statement last night denying that Wang had been paid to gather intelligence for Taiwan.
The council also criticized Beijing for ignoring human rights.
"China's ruling on this case demonstrates that China is still a country that can't respect human rights -- the universal rights valued by most of the international community," the statement said.
The council called on the international community to keep a close eye on developments.
Wang, 55, was arrested after police said they found him July 3 tied up in a temple in southern China while they were investigating a kidnapping case. Activists have suggested he was abducted in Vietnam by Chinese agents after meeting with Chinese labor activists in Hanoi.
Wang was convicted of spying for Taiwan between 1982 and 1990 and of setting up a terrorist group, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said he ordered an unspecified assassination in 1999 and plotted to blow up China's Embassy in Thailand.
The report was the first time the communist government publicly accused Wang of links to specific terrorist acts, but it gave no evidence to support the charges.
In a faxed statement, Wang's parents accused Chinese authorities of "illegal abduction and illegal interrogation."
"All people of conscience will feel furious," said the statement, signed by his father and mother, Wang Junzhen and Wang Guifang. "The world is fighting terrorism, but the Chinese government is making terrorism."
Wang, a Chinese citizen, has lived abroad since 1979, first in Canada and then the US, where he has permanent residency. In the 1980s, he lived in New York, where he published the pro-democracy journal China Spring. He slipped back into China without permission in 1998 in hopes of organizing an opposition party. He was caught and deported.
Xinhua said Wang was accused of using his 1998 visit to set up a terrorist group. It said he told a man to carry out explosions and an assassination in 1999 on China's National Day holiday, which is Oct. 1. The report said he told Taiwanese authorities that he had stockpiled explosives in China to blow up roads and bridges.
"The charges that have been leveled against him ... are trumped up and have no relation to reality," said Timothy Cooper, international director for the Free China Movement, an activist group in Washington. The group appealed to the US government to "exert all its influence" to win Wang's release.
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