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Beijing drops case against `NY Times' researcher

In a surprise concession, China yesterday dropped a case against New York Times researcher Zhao Yan (趙岩) that was threatening to overshadow Chinese President Hu Jintao's (胡錦濤) planned visit to the US next month.

His attorney, Mo Shaoping (莫少平), said yesterday he expected Zhao to be released in a matter of days after authorities dropped the charge of revealing state secrets, as well as a lesser fraud charge.

Mo said the court told him that prosecutors "applied to withdraw the charges and the Beijing court agreed."

"In effect, this means that only if new evidence or facts come up, can prosecutors revive these charges and I'm confident that's not going to happen," Mo said.

He said it was unclear whether Zhao, who worked for the Times before his arrest in September 2004, would be sent abroad.

Zhao faced 10 years in jail after security officials charged him with telling the paper details of a rivalry between former president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Hu.

Before starting work for the Times in 2004, Zhao had established a reputation as a campaigning journalist who focused on rural corruption and discontent.

Beijing continued its crackdown on people who express anti-government views yesterday as a court in Shandong Province jailed a secondary-school teacher for 10 years over an essay he posted on the Internet, New York-based Human Rights in China said.

Ren Zhiyuan, who was arrested last May, was sentenced by the Jining City Intermediate Court for "subverting state sovereignty," the group said.

Prosecutors accused Ren of posting an essay entitled "The Road to Democracy" on the Internet and attempting to recruit members to set up an organization called "Mainland Democracy Frontline."

In other news, the UN Human Rights Commission has expressed concern to Beijing about an AIDS activist who disappeared last month after going on a hunger strike to protest violence against dissidents, his wife said yesterday.

Zeng Jinyan (曾金燕) gave reporters a copy of a document from the commission saying it expressed concerns about her husband, Hu Jia (胡佳), to Beijing on March 10. It did not say whether there had been a response.

Hu, 32, is among hundreds of activists who have staged brief hunger strikes in support of a protest launched on Feb. 6 by Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng (高智晟).

Zeng last saw Hu on Feb. 16, while he was under house arrest and watched by police.

Beijing AIDS activist Wan Yanhai (萬延海) yesterday circulated a petition demanding that authorities investigate Hu's disappearance.

Meanwhile, Dutch psychiatrists have determined that a prominent Chinese dissident who spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric institution in Beijing did not have mental problems that would justify his incarceration, two human rights groups said on Thursday.

The two doctors, B.C.M. Raes of the Free University of Amsterdam and B.B. van der Meer, a forensic psychiatrist, spent two days examining Wang Wanxing (王萬星) in Germany in January, five months after China released him and sent him abroad.

They said in a statement that their examination "did not reveal any form of mental disorder." Their findings were released on Thursday by the Global Initiative of Psychiatry and Human Rights Watch, two groups that have been critical of China's use of psychiatric prisons.

Wang, now 56, was confined to the psychiatric facility after he was detained in 1992 for unfurling a banner that criticized the Chinese Communist Party. After his release, Wang described widespread abuses in the asylum. He said he lived in cells with psychotically disturbed inmates convicted of murder and was forced to swallow drugs to blunt his will. He also said that the facility used electrified acupuncture needles to punish patients while other inmates were made to watch.
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