A Chinese court has jailed two of the country’s most prominent human rights defenders for over a decade on subversion charges, according to the wife of one of them and a U.S.-based human rights group. The heavy sentencing drew strong condemnation and threw light on the high price paid by government critics perceived by the Chinese authorities for challenging its rule.
A court in Shandong province Monday sentenced Xu Zhiyong to 14 years in prison and Ding Jiaxi to 12 years. Both were convicted of the crime of “subversion of state power,” according to Ding’s wife, Sophie Luo Shengchun, and U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.
Xu, 50, a former law lecturer at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, was a cofounder of the now-banned legal aid center Open Constitution Initiative and the New Citizens’ Movement, a nationwide social initiative that advocated civil rights, government transparency, and education equality. Ding, a former commercial lawyer, was actively involved in both initiatives.
Both had previously been jailed for their criticisms of the Communist Party. Ding was imprisoned from 2013 to 2016 for urging officials to declare their assets. Xu served four years in prison, from 2014 to 2018, also for campaigning for official transparency over private assets and for equal rights for migrant children.
Beijing had no immediate comment on the matter. China’s Communist Party-controlled judiciary often hands down heavy sentences to political dissidents, particularly those who refused to stop their activism after they had been released from earlier sentences.
“Now I only have one goal: eliminate totalitarianism and autocracy. Just wait and see!” Luo said in a Twitter post. Luo, who has fled to the U.S., said she was informed about the sentences by their lawyers, but the authorities barred them from releasing their verdicts to their families.
Luo told VOA that the heavy sentences given to her husband and Xu were "ridiculous and absurd."
"What Ding and Xu have long been advocating was for citizens to exercise the rights that have been granted by law and the constitution. Their jailing shows the authorities' disregard for their own laws, which are just lies to deceive their own people and the international community," she said.
She wrote that additionally, Xu was also given four years of “deprivation of political rights” and Ding given three years — which means they would be barred from taking public positions, speaking publicly and publishing — when they are released.
Luo last week posted statements on Twitter from both men, which were dictated to their lawyers earlier in their detention. Xu said he dreamed of a China where everyday people could elect public officials and freely express themselves. Ding called for democratic reforms and an end to autocratic rule.
Their trials were conducted behind closed doors and riddled with procedural problems and allegations of mistreatment, Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
“The cruelly farcical convictions and sentences meted out to Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi show President Xi Jinping’s unstinting hostility towards peaceful activism,” said Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Bejing’s treatment of the country’s best-known human rights defenders should be a reality check for foreign leaders rushing to return to business as usual with Beijing.”
Veteran dissident journalist Gao Yu, who has been jailed several times herself, said their heavy sentences — longer than Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo’s 11-year jail term — “proved [their] contribution towards China’s democracy and freedom.”
“You are the rivals of dictatorial regimes… you can see the dawn every day even behind bars,” she wrote on Twitter.
The authorities detained Ding, 55, in December 2019, after he and Xu and some 20 rights lawyers and activists attended a secret gathering in the southeastern province of Fujian to discuss human rights and China’s political future. After the event, Xu went into hiding and in February 2020, he was arrested in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Earlier that month, Xu published an essay which criticized Xi for his lack of ability to govern China, citing the coronavirus crisis and the mishandling of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. “Whenever you face a looming crisis, you’re clueless… Mr Xi Jinping, please step down,” Xu wrote.
Xu, who has a PhD in law from the prestigious Peking University, has been a champion for social equality and the rule of law for 20 years. He began his activism in 2003 when he and fellow doctoral graduates, Teng Biao, and another friend successfully campaigned for the national legislature to scrap rules on detaining and repatriating migrants.
Teng, now a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, said, "The Chinese Communist Party decided to do everything to wipe out the human rights movement and dissidents. The brutal sentence of two leading lawyers shows Xi’s exaggerated sense of insecurity."
In 2012, Xu said in an interview that he would bravely face jail as “it’s glorious to sacrifice for the sake of social progress and fighting injustice.”
Li Qiaochu, Xu’s girlfriend and a women’s rights and labor activist, has been detained since February 2021 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power” and is awaiting trial.
Xu was a 2020 recipient of PEN America’s PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award. In 2023, the United States Department of State awarded Ding the Global Human Rights Defender Award.
