2015-04-23
Tang Jingling, a top human rights lawyer in Guangzhou, and his wife Wang Yanfang in an undated photo.
(Photo courtesy of Wang Yanfang.)
Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong look set to move ahead with the subversion trial of the “Guangzhou Three” rights lawyers next month, their lawyer said on Thursday.
Tang Jingling, Wang Qingying, and Yuan Xinting were criminally detained on May 16, 2014 initially for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” but the charges were later changed to the more serious “incitement to subvert state power.”
“I think the indictment will come very soon now, within the next three weeks,” Yuan’s lawyer Ge Wenxiu told RFA after meeting with his client in Guangzhou’s No. 1 Detention Center on Tuesday.
“They will [all three] be indicted at the same time … as they will all be part of the same case,” Ge said. “We are still waiting for confirmation, and we won’t know the details until the indictment is released.”
The three were detained amid a nationwide crackdown on activists and family members of victims of the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square student-led pro-democracy movement in the run-up to the 25th anniversary on June 4.
Ge said Yuan had seemed in relatively good spirits during the visit.
“He said he wasn’t doing too badly in there, and I gave him letters from his son and daughter,” he said. “He said the conditions in there aren’t too bad, and that they allow him to read books.”
“His health is not too bad either.”
Appeal for world’s attention
He said Yuan had called on the international community to pay more attention to the struggle going on inside China for freedom and democracy.
“Chinese people make up a fifth of the world’s population, and their liberation movement is closely bound up with the freedom of humanity as a whole,” Ge quoted Yuan as saying.
Tang’s wife Wang Yanfang told RFA that the news came after the state prosecution service had twice referred the case back to police for further investigation, although no new evidence had been produced against her husband.
“Everybody knows that this is a political case, and that what they did in no way amounts to a crime under Chinese law,” Wang said.
The police charge sheet for Tang mentioned his involvement in “civil disobedience movements,” a commemoration of the death of Mao-era dissident Lin Zhao, and a June 4 meditation event.
Also mentioned was his part in a campaign to end China’s “hukou” household registration system linking access to education and other public services to a person’s town of birth.