BEIJING: Two prominent Chinese human rights lawyers have been sentenced to more than a decade in prison, Human Rights Watch said Monday, the latest in a crackdown by the ruling Communist Party on its critics.
The rights group said Xu Zhiyong, 50, was sentenced to 14 years and Ding Jiaxi, 55, was given 12 years in prison under the vague charge of “subversion of state power.” Such proceedings are conducted under intense secrecy.
“The cruelly farcical convictions and sentences meted out to Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi show President Xi Jinping’s unstinting hostility towards peaceful activism,” Yaqiu Wang, the group’s senior China researcher, was quoted as saying in a news release.
The court in Shandong province, south of the capital Beijing, did not immediately respond to requests for confirmation.
Xu and Ding are among a generation of Chinese who held out hope that the ruling party would adopt a more liberal approach to governance after the political chaos of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution and the bloody crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Current party leader and head of state Xi Jinping has quashed such beliefs with a renewed emphasis on strict party control over civil society and free speech. He and the loyal members he chose for the Politburo Standing Committee justify their monopoly on political power by citing China’s success as the world’s second-largest economy, with its tightly enforced social stability and rising global influence.