A Chinese court has sentenced a dissident writer to seven years in prison over a poem he wrote urging his countrymen to gather at a public square, a human rights group said Friday.

The hefty sentence comes ahead of next week’s visit to the U.S. by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping— widely expected to be China’s next leader — where he is likely to face questions on human rights.

A court in Hangzhou city sentenced dissident Zhu Yufu on Friday in a hearing attended by his ex-wife and son, said the Chinese Human Rights Defenders. Zhu’s ex-wife and lawyers could not immediately be reached.

Zhu is among a group of writers and intellectuals targeted by Chinese authorities in a crackdown aimed at preventing Arab Spring-style popular uprisings.

Three other dissidents have received nine- and 10-year prison terms for subversion or inciting subversion over the last few months.

The Guardian has quoted Zhu’s son, who describes the activities that landed Zhu in court:

Zhu Yufu was jailed for “inciting subversion of state power” by a court in Hangzhou, eastern China, after a trial hearing on 31 January when prosecutors cited a poem and messages he had sent on the internet, his son Zhu Ang told Reuters.

The poem said: “It’s time, Chinese people! It’s time. The Square belongs to all.” References to a “square” might evoke memories among many Chinese people of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, though the poem did not mention it or the 1989 pro-democracy protests.

Prosecutors also cited text messages that he sent using Skype. There was no suggestion that the online chat service helped police to collect evidence.

[...]He [Zhu Ang] said the verdict cited his father’s online calls for mobilisation in the name of democracy.

An English translation of the entire poem can be seen on Bruce Hume’s blog.

BBC further quotes Zhu’s son, and gives a brief outline of Zhu’s earlier clashes with the State:

“Basically, the only chance that my father had to say anything was when he was being taken out after the hearing, and he stopped and said, ‘I want to appeal’.”

Mr Zhu, a veteran activist who turns 59 this month, was involved in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, which pressed for faster change in China.

He has been jailed twice before for his activism – in 1999 for seven years and in 2007 for two years.

Zhu’s incarceration comes just as Vice President Xi Jinping prepares to visit the U.S. The sentencing happened in spite of a recent meeting between U.S. Vice President Joe Biden (who will be Xi Jinping’s host) and China focused human rights activists. From the Taipei Times:

In the meeting, Biden and the activists “discussed the deterioration of China’s human rights situation, prospects for reform and recommendations for US policy,” a White House statement said.

“The vice president underscored the administration’s belief in the universality of human rights and its commitment to human rights as a fundamental part of our foreign policy,” it said.

“He reiterated his view that greater openness and protection of universal rights is the best way to promote innovation, prosperity and stability in all countries, including China,” it said.

An AFP report describes U.S. State Department appeals on Zhu’s behalf:

“We are deeply concerned about these reports that he has been found guilty of inciting subversion of state power and sentenced to seven years in prison for writing a poem,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

[...]“We call on the Chinese government to release Zhu Yufu and all others detained for exercising their rights and to respect the universal human rights of all their citizens,” she added.

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The still-unidentified Tibetan man shouted slogans before self-immolating, they said.

“The protester appeared to be a monk,” Yeshe and Tsering said, quoting a source, “but his name and place of origin and other details are not known.”

“He was immediately taken away by soldiers and police,” they said, adding that two other monks were detained in the vicinity.

“Their identities are also unknown,” Yeshe and Tsering said.

The latest incident took place amid a worldwide vigil day called for by the Tibetan exile leader and, if true, would bring to at least 20 the number of Tibetans who have taken their lives to protest Chinese rule since March 2009, according to The New York Times. It also comes just days after three Tibetan livestock herders reportedly lit themselves ablaze in Sichuan’s Seda County.

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Interrogator: “What is it all about? You are the initiator, correct? Who are the members? How much money have you spent on it? Who gave you the money?”

Me: “I set it up to collect everything about Chen Guangcheng in Chinese or other languages. The purpose is to get more people to know about him, raise awareness of the plight of him and his family, and call for his freedom. It needs no money, nor did anyone give me money. It’s built on a free blogging platform. Members are netizens whom I don’t personally know …. We don’t originate content. I am not a leader, and there is no need for us to contact each other.”

Interrogator: “That’s not possible! How can a website belong to no organization, no leader, not spending money? Impossible!”

“Believe it or not, nobody leads,” I said, thinking, Where do these people come from? Do you have to have a leader to call for freedom?

Reading the whole account is strongly recommended: Part 1, Part 2

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[Lu Yeqin, Villager]:
“Officials from the village sold land. This land originally belonged to the villagers. After it was sold, the [villagers] were not given any money for it. The villagers are upset, and after all, this land was passed down through their family business. They rely on the land for their livelihood, but now it has been sold.”

Police did not stop more than 3000 villagers from marching to the village committee, but neither have the villagers received a response from local officials.

Local resident Mrs. Ma says the turnout has been huge.

[Mrs. Ma, Villager]:
“Everyone from the village came out. Today we will march again, and the whole village should come. I have even seen kids coming out, passing by my building.”

The Chinese blogosphere is buzzing with chatter about the demonstrations in Panhe East and West, where tensions between local residents and officials have followed a Wukan-like trajectory. From Tea Leaf Nation, which also posted images that had surfaced on Sina Weibo yesterday:

As reported on the Internet portal China.com, the Panhe Village Committee spent the last several years selling off piece after piece of Panhe’s land, all without the villagers’ knowledge. On June 11, 2011, a Wenzhou copper company brought thugs and local police as it began to mine pieces of ancestral land, leading to a confrontation that saw villagers injured, including women and the elderly. The report further states that after villagers’ attempts to report the matter were ignored, they retaliated on October 16, 2011 by attacking the property of another local company. In response, the report continues, the local government arrested nine villagers, two of whom are still in custody.

World Journal, a popular Chinese-language newspaper in North America, reports that government officials and police fled the small village of approximately 5,000 in October of last year following a violent confrontation with villagers in which more than ten were arrested. The reports agree that villagers’ demands for compensation were substantially ignored by authorities.

According to World Journal, the Wukan uprising’s ultimate success inspired Panhe villagers to decide to hold widespread demonstrations starting February 1.  Since that time, the report continues, demonstrators have circled the village unmolested. The street demonstrations shown in photographic accounts include demonstrators waving banners with slogans such as, “Denounce the Local Panhe Government’s Deceit Of The Masses,” “Down With Corrupt Officials,” and “Reselling Land And Destroying Fertile Farmland Is A Heinous Crime.”

See also CDT coverage of a new survey in which 43% of farmers reported being victims of land grabs. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Elizabeth Economy wrote Tuesday that “more Wukans are on China’s horizon” unless China creates a real system of official accountability or enforces the rule of law.

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Among their most critical findings is that the relationship between prosecutors and judges tends to be so close that there is “little space for lawyers to work within.” More basically, a judge is quoted as saying, “the police, the judge and the prosecutor are in one family ….”

The interviews found that some participants in the system would prefer a higher level of legality. Ultimately, however, criminal justice is “a process within a system, a Party-centered system which demands certainty of outcome (conviction).”

The authors write that despite “traces of due process,” the value system allows exceptions that violate the law. Violations of the law have become “systematic and entrenched… they have also become internalized… the rules to be followed are quite different from the rules in the formal rules” of the Criminal Procedure Law and merely changing legal rules would not improve rights and increase the reliability of the system. It would be necessary for the Party-state to “discard existing prejudices and adopt new and liberal values… ‘system reform’ not ‘law reform.’”

See also two previous posts by Lubman, via CDT: Laws on Paper vs. Law in Practice and A Glimpse into Chinese Law-Making.

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Zhang, speaking with McCain on a panel at the high-level Munich security conference, dismissed his comments about a looming Chinese Arab Spring as “no more than fantasy” and condemned foreign interference in Chinese internal affairs.

McCain, who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, told Zhang in front of an audience of ministers, diplomats and security officials: “It is a matter of concern when Tibetans are burning themselves to death because of the continued repression of the Tibetan people in your country.”

“I have said on many occasion and I will say again the Arab Spring is coming to China as well.”

Zhang responded by calling McCain’s claim “more than a fantasy,” and expressed China’s resentment of any lecturing on how to govern within its borders. While the two reportedly shook hands at the end of the panel, reports in China’s state media painted a less rosy picture of the exchange. From Shanghaiist:

The two apparently shook hands at the end of the meeting as McCain told Zhang, “I hope you didn’t interpret my remarks as anything other than the advocacy that I and others hold for every nation in the world, including yours.”

Back home, a report by People’s Daily described the confrontation as being “full of gunpowder smell”, and McCain as “aggressive”, notes the South China Morning Post.

“China has implemented different policies from those implemented in the West Asian and North African nations. China is different from those nations because the policies and governance of the country have the overwhelming support of the people,” the paper quoted Zhang as saying.

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If confirmed, the latest cases would bring the total self-immolations over the past year to 19, an unprecedented wave of self-inflicted violence among the tiny ethnic minority in China, according to scholars. They were also apparently the first by lay people, rather than current or former members of the clergy, suggesting that self-immolation may be gaining popularity as a form of dissent.

The incidents took place Friday in a remote village in Seda County, once a center of Buddhist teaching, but reports did not surface until the weekend because the government has cut Internet and telephone connections to the area, said Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan poet in Beijing.

She said that one of the three men had died and that the other two, believed to be about 30 and 60 years old, were severely injured.

The local party secretary for Seda County disputed the latest reports in a Global Times article published Monday:

“Everything is all right here, although we still have no Internet access,” said Wang, who said there had been rumors saying some Tibetans were going to set themselves on fire, but “it has not happened.”

Zhang Yang, from the publicity department of the Party committee of Sichuan Province, told the Global Times that he has not heard of any self-immolation incidents over this weekend.

Despite claims in official state media that recent unrest between Tibetans and local authorities in Sichuan is no cause for concern, Beijing has put officials on alert ahead of this month’s Tibetan New Year festival. From The Telegraph:

“Officials must put all their efforts into maintaining a stable, unified social situation in our region. They must have a clear head and fully recognise the extreme importance and urgency of the job of maintaining stability,” a Communist Party notice said in the state-run Tibet Daily newspaper.

“Government departments must unstintingly carry out all measures designed to maintain stability, ” the notice ordered.

The diktat did not detail what measures should be deployed to quell any further unrest.

But with the fifth anniversary of the large-scale March 2008 Tibet uprising also looming, the message to strike hard and stamp out any signs of mass revolt was clear.

Meanwhile, the elected leader of Tibet’s government in exile told the Financial Times on Monday that he is worried about a forceful crackdown by the Chinese government:

“The military build-up is increasing rapidly. We have seen pictures of hundreds of convoys filled with paramilitary forces with automatic machine guns moving towards various parts of Tibetan areas,” Lobsang Sangay, the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, told the Financial Times on Monday, referring to images sent by sources in the Tibetan region.

“We are really worried that with such a military security build-up and so many guns in the hands of Chinese police and military personnel, we fear the Chinese government is preparing for something very drastic and unforeseen and tragic.”

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Wednesday’s voting will result in the selection of an independent election committee to supervise upcoming rounds of voting for villagers’ representatives and a new village committee, according to election procedures.

Eleven villagers who will make up the election committee will not be permitted to run for the village committee.

“This is to ensure fairness in the coming village committee election,” said Lin Zulian, the village’s Communist Party of China (CPC) secretary. Lin was appointed secretary following last year’s protests.

The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore, the first foreign reporter to breach the December police blockade of Wukan and report from within the village, reported today that the election went smoothly other than a “small scuffle at the beginning over access for Hong Kong journalists.” Even though today’s vote only serves as the prelude to the main election in March, its symbolism was evident:

“We had to make a big thing, a big show, out of it to underline its importance and to guarantee that it was all fair and transparent,” said Yang Semao, one of the chief organisers.

“Wukan has been in the dark for so many years; its elections always manipulated. It is the first time we have done this so we want to do a good job,” he added. In the past few days, several academics and students have also arrived in Wukan, partly to observe the proceedings, and partly to offer advice to the villagers.

“This is very meaningful,” said Chen Liangshan, 61, who used to work in one of the village’s temples. “I have already got the list of people I will vote for in my mind. I am glad to get the chance to choose people who will actually do something. This is the first time we have ever seen a ballot and we are excited about it.”

Mr Chen filled in his ballot, a sheet of A4 paper, at a table covered by a bright red tablecloth and deposited it in one of seven shiny aluminium ballot boxes. According to an official press release, he was one of 7688 eligible voters, with 1043 voting by proxy.

Villagers believe the election is China’s first fully transparent and democratic vote, Moore wrote yesterday, though Voice of America reported skepticism from some that corrupt officials would ultimately regain power. Today represents “a small step towards grassroots rights,” according to Reuters:

At the end of polling, villagers burned unused ballot papers and clapped in jubilation at a largely orderly and trouble-free poll with turnout well over 80 percent.

“This far exceeded our expectations,” said Yang Semao, a village elder who helped officiate. “It shows our passion for democracy.”

Earlier, Xue Jianwan, daughter of village protest organizer Xue Jinbo, who died in police custody last year sparking further protests, visited her father’s memorial in the village square before voting. His body, which family members said bore marks of torture, has yet to be returned by authorities.

“This is something my father would have hoped for,” she said, bursting into tears after casting her ballot. “We just want to do our best to fulfill his final wishes.”

BBC News published a brief photo series with several shots from today’s election, including one of newly-installed village chief Lin Zulian, a leader of the protest movement who has taken charge of organizing the elections. The voting “marked the peaceful denouement” of the December standoff between villagers and armed police, according to the New York Times, which reported differing expectations among two Chinese observers:

Li Fan, an election expert at the World and China Institute in Beijing, thought the best one could hope for was an uncompromised election in Wukan. “It should be better given that all the media is watching,” he said. “If it is a good election, that will be unusual for China.”

But Lin Jiang, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, said he hoped that the once-belligerent fishing village could serve as a high-profile counterpoint to those who argue that democracy is ill-suited for China’s rural citizenry. “Peasants in China may be undereducated but the election in Wukan shows that just because you don’t have a good education, doesn’t mean you can’t elect officials to represent your interests,” he said.

One expert called today’s election a “paradigm shift” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. While the Chinese government censored nearly all information from the Internet amid the protests in December, The WSJ’s China Real Time Report noted the “unusually open-and borderline euphoric” dialogue about Wukan now permeating the Chinese blogosphere:

“This is a model,” Chinese real-estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang said Wednesday via the popular microblogging service Sina Weibo, where searches for Wukan were producing nearly a million posts.

“The start of something new,” observed another user of the service.

…

For many, the election brought to mind one of Mao Zedong’s favorite revolutionary slogans/sayings: “If you want freedom and democracy, you have to fight for it yourself,” wrote one Internet user in the popular discussion forum Maoyan Kanren. “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Others saw in the elections a rebuke of people, like martial-arts star Jackie Chan, who’ve questioned whether Chinese culture is compatible with democratic government.

“After this, whoever says Chinese people aren’t good enough for democracy, I’ll sue the bastard,” one particularly excited blogger promised on Sina Weibo.

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Post tags: corruption, democracy, Jackie Chan, land grab, Lin Zuluan, microblogging, online public opinion, protests, sina weibo, village elections, Wukan, Xue Jinbo
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Against a backdrop of rapid socio-economic change and modernization, China continues to be an authoritarian one-party state that imposes sharp curbs on freedom of expression, association, and religion; openly rejects judicial independence and press freedom; and arbitrarily restricts and suppresses human rights defenders and organizations, often through extra-judicial measures.

The government also censors the internet; maintains highly repressive policies in ethnic minority areas such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia; systematically condones—with rare exceptions—abuses of power in the name of “social stability” ; and rejects domestic and international scrutiny of its human rights record as attempts to destabilize and impose “Western values” on the country. The security apparatus—hostile to liberalization and legal reform—seems to have steadily increased its power since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China’s “social stability maintenance” expenses are now larger than its defense budget.

At the same time Chinese citizens are increasingly rights-conscious and challenging the authorities over livelihood issues, land seizures, forced evictions, abuses of power by corrupt cadres, discrimination, and economic inequalities. Official and scholarly statistics estimate that 250-500 protests occur per day; participants number from ten to tens of thousands. Internet users and reform-oriented media are aggressively pushing the boundaries of censorship, despite the risks of doing so, by advocating for the rule of law and transparency, exposing official wrong-doing, and calling for reforms.

China’s state media has responded to the report with a flurry of indignation, as HRW’s Nicholas Bequelin noted:

此地无银三百两： People’s Daily and China Daily have published a total of 10 (!) articles on Human Rights Watch (@hrw) in one week.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) January 31, 2012

(“此地无银三百两”: “No 300 taels of silver here”; to draw attention to something by denying it.)

People’s Daily, for example, suggested that criticism of China’s rights record arose from Western insecurity:

It seems that some Western countries and NGOs have set out to attack China over its human rights issues. They first assume that human rights are being ignored, then seek evidence from rumors, and make speculations to blindly accuse China of violating human rights with the real purpose of distorting China’s international image ….

Why does the West still hold a prejudice against China’s human rights? The only reason is that the Cold War mentality and ideological hegemony still prevails. As long as China is a socialist country, the West will insist on distorting its image and see China as a threat to the Western system.

Since the end of the Cold War, the West has been too boastful of its political system, believing it is the only system that has universal value in the world.

China’s significant economic progress has stirred Western anxieties. Distorting China’s human rights becomes the only political choice.

Elsewhere, People’s Daily also criticised the report for failing to acknowledge China’s progress in legal reform. From Xinhua:

The World Report “gave no word on the great progress in terms of China’s judicial reforms that have been demonstrated in the Criminal Procedural Law draft amendment,” the article said.

Legal experts say the draft amendment will help improve the protection of criminal suspects’ human rights, by preventing judges from accepting confessions from tortured suspects and giving these suspects more defense options.

In fact, the report does acknowledge the amendment, but reiterates concern at the prospect of legalised enforced disappearances:

In August 2011, in an effort to … improve the administration of justice, the government published new rules to eliminate unlawfully obtained evidence and strengthened the procedural rights of the defense in its draft revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law. It is likely it will be adopted in March 2012.

However, the draft revisions also introduced an alarming provision that would effectively legalize enforced disappearances by allowing police to secretly detain suspects for up to six months at a location of their choice in “state security, terrorism and major corruption cases.” The measure would put suspects at great risk of torture while giving the government justification for the “disappearance” of dissidents and activists in the future. Adoption of this measure—which is hotly criticized in Chinese media by human rights lawyers, activists, and part of the legal community—would significantly deviate from China’s previous stance of gradual convergence with international norms on administering justice, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1997 but has yet to ratify.

See more on CDT.

People’s Daily also objected to the report’s claim that “the government continues to build a ‘new socialist countryside’ [in Tibet] by relocating and rehousing up to 80 percent of the TAR population, including all pastoralists and nomads.” From Xinhua:

The People’s Daily article, jointly published by two Tibet experts, said the HRW’s conclusion was groundless and contradictory to basic facts.

The two authors, Zhang Ming, or Lorong Dramadul, with the China Tibetology Research Center, and Professor Yang Minghong with Sichuan University, hoped that their experiences and observations from over 20 years of field research in Tibet could help clarify the misunderstandings.

They cited official statistics and said that in 2011, 1.85 million Tibetans, or 61 percent of the total population, had settled in permanent residences.

“No more than 150,000 people, or less than 5 percent of the Tibetan population, had left their original residence,” the experts wrote.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Pan Xizhe’s op-ed at China Daily accused Human Rights Watch of sloppy methodology and political motivations:

At first glance, Human Rights Watch appears to be keen on the protection of international human rights. But it actually carries out its work with double standards and bias. Its observations lack political neutrality and its research methods are questionable. The organization’s employment of unqualified workers has also hurt the credibility of its report. Human Rights Watch should reflect inward before passing on judgment to others.

The media and international observers have long criticized Human Rights Watch for passing judgment of human rights conditions of a country or region through tinted lens. It turns a blind eye to human rights issues in some countries while criticizing others vehemently. The Sunday Times quoted a human rights insider in the United States as saying that the organization caters its reports to the US government, which greatly affects its objectivity ….

In the China portion of its report, Human Rights Watch used expressions such as “estimate”, “possibly”, and “probably”. It criticized China’s judiciary system, religious institutions, regional autonomy by ethnic groups, family planning policy as well as foreign and economic policies.

The US section of the report, which criticises the Obama White House’s failure to pursue Bush administration officials for approving the use of torture and decries America’s “abusive” counterterrorism policies, growing poverty and world-leading prison population, can be read here.

While the World Report looked back at 2011, at The Diplomat, HRW’s Phelim Kine looks ahead to 2012:

These cases represent more than the Chinese government’s well-documented contempt for freedom of expression explicitly guaranteed in Article 35 of the Constitution. They are also clear efforts to breed fear and sow silence among China’s beleaguered community of human rights defenders and civil society activists. The aim: to ensure that the 12-month senior Communist Party leadership transition this year proceeds without public challenges to the Party’s 61-year monopoly on power. China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are preparing to step aside for a new generation of leaders, widely touted to be Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, in a secretive political succession that won’t be complete until in March 2013 ….

The government’s overriding obsession with maintaining its monopoly on power make it likely that these abuses will continue under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Foreign governments could help reverse this trend and give support to Chinese who want a more accountable government by more vigorously engaging the government on such violations. Thirty years since the launch of China’s economic reform and opening, a decade after China entered the World Trade Organization, and five years since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the deterioration in respect for human rights and rule of law in China should be of serious concern for all countries seeking long-term, sustainable and mutually-beneficial bilateral relations with China.

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Veteran activist Zhu Yufu faced trial in the prosperous eastern city of Hangzhou, where police arrested him in April and charged him with “inciting subversion of state power,” his lawyer, Li Dunyong, said.

The court did not deliver its verdict straight away. But Zhu, who turns 59 in February, appears likely to follow other Chinese dissidents who have received stiff prison terms from the party-run judiciary on subversion charges, which are often used to punish ardent advocates of democratic change.

In Zhu’s case, the prosecutors cited his poem, “It’s time,” as well as text messages that he sent using the Skype online chat service, said Li.

Read one of Zhu’s poems in this previous CDT post. Zhu previously served two years in prison on 2008. See also an explanation of the difference between “inciting subversion” and “subversion,” by the Siweiluozi blog.

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