Chengdu Court Sentences Tan Zuoren to Five Years and Upholds Huang Qi's Sentence

February 26, 2010

In mid-February 2010, the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court in Sichuan province sentenced writer and environmental activist Tan Zuoren to five years in prison for inciting subversion, and upheld the three-year sentence of fellow activist Huang Qi for illegal possession of state secrets. Both were active in criticizing the government for not doing enough to investigate the causes of school collapses in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake and were detained shortly thereafter.

On February 9, 2010, the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court in Sichuan province sentenced writer and environmental activist Tan Zuoren to five years in prison, and the day before upheld the three-year sentence of fellow activist Huang Qi, according to a February 8 Chinese Human Rights Defenders article and a February 9 Associated Press article (via New York Times). Both had criticized the government for not doing enough to investigate the causes of school collapses in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake or to address the demands of grieving parents.

The court in Tan's case made no mention of the independent investigation Tan undertook just before he was detained and which found that problems with the quality of the construction of school buildings were a contributing factor in some of the students' deaths, according to a copy of the court's judgment posted on the China Free Press Web site on February 10, 2010. Instead, the court concluded that Tan had committed the crime of "inciting subversion" for activities relating to commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen protests and criticizing the Party's handling of the protests. The judgment said Tan had posted an essay on a foreign Web site in 2007 that "distorted" and "slandered" the Party's handling of the protests, organized a blood drive in 2008 commemorating the protests, and e-mailed the overseas exile and former 1989 student leader Wang Dan regarding a proposed blood drive to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the protests in 2009. The court also noted that after the Sichuan earthquake Tan had given interviews to foreign media in which he "issued a lot of speeches seriously slandering the Party and government's image."

A lower court sentenced Huang to three years in prison for illegal possession of state secrets on November 23, 2009. Authorities detained Huang in June 2008 after he used his human rights Web site to advocate for parents who lost children in school collapses during the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The court, however, punished Huang for the crime of illegal possession of state secrets, claiming that Huang possessed "confidential" city-level and Communist Party documents on a portable hard drive. One of Huang's lawyers said the documents were publicly available and that the charges were fabricated.

Following the earthquake, which officially left 68,712 dead, including 5,335 schoolchildren, and 17,921 missing, parents of the children grew frustrated with officials' unwillingness to investigate fully the role that shoddy construction and corruption may have played in the school collapses, many of which occurred while other nearby buildings remained standing. For more information about official efforts to suppress public criticism of the collapse of schools and schoolchildren deaths following the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake, see p. 47 in Section II―Freedom of Expression in the CECC 2009 Annual Report, as well as a previous analysis on Huang's August 5 trial and Tan's August 12 trial.