China jails high-profile legal activists who campaigned for fairer society

Two prominent Chinese human rights lawyers were sentenced to prison for more than 10 years after a court found them guilty of subverting state power.

Xu Zhiyong, 50, and Ding Jiaxi, 55, were put on trial behind closed doors in June 2022 on charges of state subversion at a court in Linshu County in the northeastern province of Shandong.

Xu and Ding are prominent figures within the New Citizens’ Movement and have previously served prison sentences. Their movement, founded in 2010, demands greater transparency into the wealth of officials and advocates for citizens to exercise their rights as written in the constitution.

Ding has been handed a 12-year jail term and deprived of his political rights for three years, his wife Luo Shengchun tweeted.

Xu, a former lecturer at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, was sentenced to prison for 14 years and similarly deprived of his political rights for four years.

The activists were separately detained in 2019 and 2020 as a part of Beijing's crackdown on dissent and activism.

"Their lawyers are forbidden from publishing court verdict documents and they do not dare to reveal where they were sentenced and under what charges," Ms Luo told Reuters.

"I will not let them put Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong in jail so easily," she added.

Lashing out at the Chinese authorities, Ms Luo tweeted: "You have the guts to set a sentence regardless of the facts, but you don't have the guts to announce the verdict to your family!"

The two had been held for more than three years, with Ding being taken by police in December 2019 for attending and organising an informal gathering in the southeastern city of Xiamen, where 20 other activists voiced their opinion on the state of China.

Then he was held incommunicado for almost six months while being routinely tortured to extract a confession, his lawyer Peng Jian told the court.

Xu, a close friend of Ding's, wrote a searing open letter calling for Chinese president Xi Jinping to resign due to his poor handling of the country's crisis. He was arrested in February 2020.

The men were accused of publishing seditious essays, producing an "illegal documentary" and holding training sessions for "non-violent colour revolution" between 2012 to 2013.

Human Rights Watch called the convictions "cruelly farcical" which shows the president's "unstinting hostility towards peaceful activism".

Their secret hearings were "riddled with procedural problems and allegations of mistreatment", the rights group added.

“Governments around the world should join in calling on the Chinese authorities to release the two lawyers immediately and unconditionally," said Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at the rights watchdog.

Beijing has dramatically clamped down on dissent since Mr Xi's rise to power in 2012. Hundreds of rights lawyers were detained and dozens jailed in a series of arrests commonly known as "709" cases, referring to a crackdown on 9 July 2015.

China, however, has rejected criticism of a raft of human rights abuses, claiming that the jailed rights lawyers and activists were criminals who broke the law.