A 65-year-old democracy activist who tried to set up an opposition party in China has been sentenced to six years in jail, a human rights group said yesterday.
A court in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, sentenced Wang Rongqing (王榮清) on Wednesday on charges of subverting state power for organizing the banned China Democracy Party, Chinese Human Rights Defenders said.
Wang was detained in June, two months before the Olympic Games, the group said. Wang’s brother, Wang Rongyao (王榮躍), confirmed the sentence. The Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court could not be immediately be reached for comment.
Wang has been repeatedly harassed and detained by police during his years of activism, which started in the late 1970s as China’s hardline Maoist era came to a close and some started calling for democracy. He was detained for two months in 1999.
“He was not in good physical condition and he stood in court with the assistance of the police, but he was in good spirits,” said Zou Wei, a friend and fellow dissident of Wang who was in court on Wednesday.
Founded by dissidents in mid-1998, the China Democracy Party was quashed just six months later by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which allows no challenge to its political monopoly. Dozens of activists were arrested and sentenced to up to 13 years in prison, most on charges of subverting state power.
China allows a small number of officially recognized alternative parties, although they serve as advisers to rather than competitors to the ruling CCP.
More than 100 co-signers of a Chinese petition calling for democracy and an end to the dominance of the CCP have been harassed or summoned for questioning by police, Chinese Human Rights Defenders said yesterday.
The group said the signers were pressured by police because of their support for Charter 08, an unusually open call for civil rights and political reforms released early last month.
The rights group also said efforts have been made to stifle information about the charter on the Internet. Searches for Charter 08 on the three main search engines in China — Baidu, Google.cn and Yahoo — turn up blank pages.
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Taiwan yesterday said it was looking forward to attending an upcoming memorial in Japan to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a day after the Japanese city said it had retracted its previous decision to not invite Taiwan to the event. The case has been dealt with by Taiwan’s representative office in Fukuoka and the Nagasaki City Government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The ministry would decide who to send to the Aug. 9 event once it receives the invitation, it added. The ministry made the remarks following a Japanese media report on Saturday that said Nagasaki Mayor
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