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.
PLA MANEUVERS: Although Beijing has yet to formally announce military drills, its coast guard vessels have been spotted near and around Taiwan since Friday The Taiwanese military is on high alert and is closely monitoring the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) air and naval deployments after Beijing yesterday reserved seven airspace areas east of its Zhejiang and Fujian provinces through Wednesday. Beijing’s action was perceived as a precursor to a potential third “Joint Sword” military exercise, which national security experts said the PLA could launch following President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visits to the nation’s three Pacific allies and stopovers in Hawaii and Guam last week. Unlike the Joint Sword military exercises in May and October, when Beijing provided detailed information about the affected areas, it
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Five flights have been arranged to help nearly 2,000 Taiwanese tourists return home from Okinawa after being stranded due to cruise ship maintenance issues, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications announced yesterday. China Airlines Ltd (中華航空), and EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) have arranged five flights with a total of 748 additional seats to transport 1,857 passengers from the MSC Bellissima back to Taiwan, the ministry said. The flights have been scheduled for yesterday and today by the Civil Aviation Administration, with the cruise operator covering all associated costs. The MSC Bellissima, carrying 4,341 passengers, departed from Keelung on Wednesday last week for Okinawa,
China is deploying its largest navy fleet in regional waters in nearly three decades, posing a threat to Taiwan that is more pronounced than previous Chinese war games, the Ministry of National Defense said today. Speaking in Taipei, ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang (孫立方) said the scale of the current Chinese naval deployment in an area running from the southern Japanese islands down into the South China Sea was the largest since China held war games around Taiwan ahead of 1996 Taiwanese presidential elections. China's military has yet to comment and has not confirmed it is carrying out any exercises. "The current scale is
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