Tianjin: A Chinese human rights activist was convicted of subverting state power and jailed for seven and a half years today, a court said, the latest step in a sweeping crackdown on dissent.
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Zhou was the director of the Fengrui Law Firm and represented individuals who stood up to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
A court in China has sentenced three prominent civil rights players this week: activist Zhai Yanmin, former law practice director Zhou Shifeng, and underground church leader Hu Shigen.
“I instilled these ideas in other people with the goal of achieving “colour revolution”, Hu said, adding that he had “long been influenced by bourgeois liberalism”, according to Xinhua.
A prominent Christian church leader has become the latest to be jailed by Chinese courts during a week of activist trials and public confessions that have shocked global observers.
“He wanted to use sensitive cases to trigger friction, put pressure on the government, overturn China’s existing system and realize “color revolution” in China”, Liu added.
He was also deprived of his political rights for five years, according to a ruling handed down Thursday by the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court in Tianjin Municipality.
Lawyers Zhou Shifeng, Hu Shigen and Li Heping who are also from the same law firm are expected to also be sentenced this week. About 300 people were initially seized and questioned before most were released. Zhai was given a suspended three-year prison sentence – he won’t serve time in jail unless he breaks the law within the next four years. As a lawyer, Zhou famously represented dissident artist Ai Weiwei, members of the banned Falun Gong meditation sect, and journalist Zhang Miao, who was detained for nine months after helping a German outlet report on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International, said that Hu may have gotten a heavy sentence “because the Chinese government wants to set an example to the other activists what consequences they would face for their human rights work”.
He is the third 709 detainee to go on trial in Tianjin this week.
Official party organs have also enthusiastically promoted the line that rights lawyers and activists were no more than agents for the West seeking to undermine the Chinese government.
A week after Zhou’s arrest, he appeared in a video aired on state-run TV admitting that his firm had been involved in “serious” illegal activities and asking authorities to give him a chance and show leniency.
A Chinese court in Tianjin, 60 miles south-east of Beijing, is this week rolling out a string of court sentences against rights activists and lawyers that observers claim have nearly zero credibility. He said it was “troubling” that the defendants had been denied access to their chosen counsel and family members. Their fate was sealed before they stepped into the courtroom and there was no chance that they would ever receive a fair trial.
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Several of those detained, including Zhou and fellow Fengrui lawyer Wang Yu, have made televised apologies for the crimes they are accused of, saying their legal activism was directed by unidentified “hostile foreign forces” to smear and attack the Chinese government.
