PRC environmental activist's trial will begin next week

A Chinese man who tried to register an independent environmental group is to go on trial next week on charges of stealing state secrets, an overseas human rights group said yesterday.

Tan Kai (譚凱) a computer repairman, has been in custody since Oct. 19 when he and five others were summoned by police in the eastern city of Hangzhou, New York-based Human Rights in China reported.

That came after Tan opened a bank account as part of attempts to register an environmental watchdog group "Green Watch," HRIC said.

The other five individuals, also Green Watch members, were questioned and released the same day, the group said.

Green Watch was banned by the local government, HRIC said, an apparent reflection of authorities' deep suspicion of any civic group dealing with sensitive issues outside direct government control.

HRIC said Tan helped organize Green Watch informally last summer after seeing villagers in the nearby city of Dongyang attempt to shut down chemical plants spewing noxious waste that they blamed for crop failures and birth defects in children.

Charges against Tan apparently derive from repairs he conducted on a computer belonging to a member of the provincial Communist Party committee, HRIC said.

Tan made a routine backup record of files on the computer's hard drive, leaving him open to the charge of "illegally obtaining state secrets," it said.

Tan's trial begins tomorrow, HRIC said.

Phone calls to Hangzhou's Xihu District Court and prosecutors offices rang unanswered yesterday. A woman who answered the phone at the city's police headquarters directed calls to the courts. The woman wouldn't give her name.

China recently enacted rules to allow non-governmental organizations to register, but is wary of any challenges to their political monopoly or revelations that could tarnish the image of the government and ruling Communist Party.

The Dongyang protests are a particularly sensitive issue since they led to clashes between villagers and hundreds of police that injured at least 30 people.

Villagers had set up bamboo huts in an industrial complex, forcing the plants to shut down temporarily.

The incident was one of the largest in which increasingly desperate farmers have used force to protest pollution, corruption, land confiscation and other abuses of power.

Top party figures say such incidents are due at least partly to graft and incompetence among local officials. Yet they have done little to boost accountability.

China's leaders have issued a series of proclamations calling for measures to tackle worsening pollution that has fouled city air and almost all major rivers.