A Chinese court has sentenced a prominent rights activist to eight years in jail on subversion charges in what he said was a “score-settling” punishment for his two decades of rights advocacy.
Yang Maodong, who goes by the pen name Guo Feixiong, was sentenced on Thursday by the Guangzhou intermediate people’s court for “inciting subversion of state power,” his brother Yang Maoquan wrote on social media. Repeated phone calls to the court went unanswered on Friday.
The court jailed Yang for his “long-term attack and smearing of the Chinese political system and incitement of others to subvert state power”, his brother wrote. The court accused him of publishing dozens of “seditious” online essays, founding a website that advocated constitutional democracy and talking to the foreign media after he was barred from travelling to the US to see his terminally ill wife in 2021. He was swiftly detained by the authorities and has been incarcerated ever since. He was charged in January last year, two days after the death of his wife, Zhang Qing.
Yang was also handed three years of “deprivation of political rights”, which means he would be barred from taking public positions, speaking publicly and publishing, once he is released.
Yang had predicted his heavy sentence. In his self-defence statement to the court, posted on overseas websites, he wrote: “This is my third imprisonment. From ‘illegal publishing’, ‘gathering crowds to disturb public order’ to ‘inciting subversion’, what can be expected is I’ll be convicted.
“From my first participation in student rallies in 1986 to now, my political aspiration has never wavered: for China to materialise genuine freedoms, democracy, human rights and rule of law,” said the former philosophy teacher. “Now they’re settling score for my two-decade intellectual activities.”
US and European embassy representatives were all barred from attending court proceedings. “We continue to call for Mr Guo’s speedy release so he may be reunited with his family,” tweeted the US embassy in China. The EU delegation and the German ambassador, Patricia Flor, also called for his release.
Yang, a human rights activist and legal consultant, rose to prominence in 2005 for helping people in Taishi village in southern China defend their land rights and protest against corruption. He has been harassed, beaten, tortured and in and out of detention for years, including a previous total of 11 years in prison. The Taishi village incident was a showcase of China’s nascent rural democracy movement running up against violence and intimidation from local authorities after the central government promised greater electoral accountability at the grassroots level in 1988.
Wang Yaqiu, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Yang’s sentence is “a travesty of justice, another piece of evidence of President Xi’s zero tolerance of peaceful activism”.
