China jails dissident Chen Xi for 10 years
Mary Hennock
26 December 2011
A Chinese court has handed down a 10-year jail sentence to Chen Xi, the second dissident in four days to be convicted of inciting subversion through online essays.
Another democracy campaigner, Chen Wei, was sentenced to nine years on 23 December. The two men are not related.
It is one of the heaviest sentences for inciting subversion since the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo was jailed for 11 years on Christmas Day 2009.
Arrests and detentions have gathered pace this year as the Communist party reacted to online calls for protests like those that have toppled dictators across the Middle East. The calls, however, have drawn little response and no large-scale protests have taken place in China. more
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On Friday, fellow veteran democracy activist Chen Wei, who is not believed to be related to Chen Xi, was sentenced to nine years for subversion in the southwestern province of Sichuan.
"In both cases, sentences were handed down with minimal court deliberation, strongly suggesting that the verdicts had been determined before the trial even began," Joshua Rosenzweig, an expert on China's human rights at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the AFP news agency.
"This is very troubling, yet more evidence of the authorities' willingness to take advantage of vague statutes nominally aimed at protecting national security to silence those like Chen Xi and Chen Wei who persist in pressing for political change."
Chen Wei, who was a leader of the Tiananmen democracy protests, was sentenced after a trial lasting less than three hours over essays he had written that were critical of the Communist Party.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-
pacific/2011/12/201112261711713110
.html
http://onlyinamericablogging.blogspot.com/2008/01/chinese-blogger-beaten-to-death.html
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/news/international/China_Nobel_winner_Mo_Yan_hopes_for_jailed_laureates_freedom.html?cid=33711764
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