China sentences trailblazing online activist to 12 years in prison

SF Gate

BEIJING – A court in southwestern China has handed an unusually heavy punishment – 12 years imprisonment – to one of the country’s most prominent activists despite appeals for clemency from international rights organizations and United Nations experts.

Huang Qi, the founder the 64 Tianwang website that aired accounts of government abuse, corruption and fecklessness from across China for two decades, was sentenced for “deliberately disclosing state secrets,” the Mianyang Intermediate People’s Court in Sichuan Province said in a brief online announcement Monday. 

Before he was arrested most recently in 2016, Huang, 56, had served two other stints in prison for his advocacy and spent roughly half of the last 20 years behind bars. Each time he was released, he returned to publishing his website, which became a go-to destination for Chinese petitioners who had few options to seek redress for abusive working conditions or illegal land grabs.

Huang was best known for campaigning on behalf of parents whose children were crushed in shoddy buildings that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which left more than 80,000 people dead or missing and created a political crisis for the ruling Communist Party.

Huang, who is suffering from a serious kidney ailment, will be released in late 2028 if he serves his full term.

Cedric Alviani from Reporters Without Borders, which awarded Huang its Cyber-Freedom Prize in 2004, said Monday that Huang’s 12-year term is “equivalent to a death sentence, considering Huang Qi’s health has already deteriorated from a decade spent in harsh containment.”

More than a dozen international human rights groups have called on China to release Huang. His 85-year-old mother, Pu Wenqing, traveled from Sichuan to Beijing in late 2018 to appeal to judicial authorities for his release, citing his deteriorating kidney. She was trailed by state security agents and later disappeared for weeks.

Reached by telephone at home in Sichuan, Pu told The Washington Post on Monday that she is now kept under house arrest, with guards posted inside her home and outside her apartment door. She said she has not yet been notified of Huang’s sentence and declined to comment further.

Since 2015, hundreds of Chinese activists have been detained and dozens have been prosecuted on subversion charges in an unprecedented nationwide crackdown. Many were quickly released; some were given relatively light sentences after admitting guilt. Others faced longer terms because they refused to adequately cooperate or provide confessions.

Huang’s sentencing, coming three years after his initial arrest, was perhaps meant to send a tough message about a figure seen as a dogged icon to China’s dwindling circle of dissidents – and an intolerable gadfly to the authorities.

One of Huang’s closest confidants, who spoke on the condition anonymity, said Huang recently unleashed a courtroom diatribe about Chinese President Xi Jinping during a hearing and clashed with court stenographers who refused to record his remarks.