Land Rights Activist Yang Chunlin Sentenced to Five Years

May 5, 2008

Yang Chunlin, the land rights activist who organized a petition titled "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics," was sentenced to five years in prison on March 24 by the Jiamusi City Intermediate People's Court in Heilongjiang province for "inciting subversion of state power," according to March 24 articles by the Associated Press (AP) and Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).

Yang Chunlin, the land rights activist who organized a petition titled "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics," was sentenced to five years in prison on March 24 by the Jiamusi City Intermediate People's Court in Heilongjiang province for "inciting subversion of state power," according to March 24 articles by the Associated Press (AP) and Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). The court also sentenced Yang to two years deprivation of political rights, according to CHRD. Procuratorate officials claimed that the petition received heavy foreign media coverage and hurt China's image abroad, and accused Yang of writing essays critical of the Communist Party and accepting 10,000 yuan (US$1,430) from a "hostile" foreign group, according to a February 19 Reuters article (via the Guardian) and a March 25 Guardian article. The Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch Web site (CRLW), a site that supports rights defenders in China, reported on March 28 that Yang would appeal the ruling.

According to Yang's lawyer, police scuffled with Yang's son after the sentencing and shocked Yang with electric batons, the AP article reported. Yang has alleged that because he refused to confess to a crime, authorities chained his hands and feet together from August 6 to August 14, 2007, and that he was unable to move during this time, according to the CRLW report. Chinese law prohibits and punishes the use of torture to coerce a confession and China has ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. A March 31 CHRD article reported the allegation that on March 5 prison cadres beat Yang for pointing out their misconduct. The article also said prison officials have refused to allow Yang any time outdoors. Article 25 of China's Regulations on Detention Centers provides that detainees should be allowed one to two hours of outdoor activity each day.

"We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics" Petition

Yang was first detained on July 6, 2007, after he and land rights activists Yu Changwu and Wang Guilin launched the petition in June, according to a March 24 Human Rights in China statement. The AP article said that Yang had gathered more than 10,000 signatures for the petition, mostly from farmers seeking redress for land that officials allegedly took from them, and that the petition was posted on the Internet. As noted in the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) Political Prisoner Database, officials formally arrested Yang on August 13 and held his trial on February 19.

The petition is connected to a movement by farmers in Fujin city, Heilongjiang, to reclaim land seized by the government and to challenge China's rural land policy of collective ownership. Yang's February 19 criminal defense pleading, prepared by Yang's lawyers and posted on the CHRD Web site, said the reason behind the petition was the "illegal expropriation of land from 40,000 farmers in Fujin, the failure to set up any social safeguards, and the lack of any resolution despite the farmers representatives' more than 10 years of frequent petitioning." According to a January 14 Washington Post (WP) article, farmers in Fujin have sought to reclaim 250,000 acres of land that local officials took in the 1990s and planned to sell to private agricultural businesses. The article said the farmers have also expanded their claims to include the right to own the collective land they currently lease, and that their efforts sparked similar movements in other parts of China. Both Yu and Wang were recently sentenced to reeducation through labor for two years and one and a half years, respectively, in connection with their advocacy on behalf of the Fujin farmers. (For more information on Yu and Wang, see their records of detention, searchable through the CECC Political Prisoner Database).

Article 105 of the Criminal Law

The language of Article 105, Paragraph 2, the Criminal Law provision on inciting subversion of state power, is vague and overbroad and China's legal institutions have failed to provide clear guidance as to the limits on Chinese citizens' constitutionally protected right to free speech, according to Yang's lawyers. They said that Yang's peaceful expression of a different political viewpoint was protected under Article 35 of China's Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, according to the defense pleading. Article 105, Paragraph 2, restricts that right, they said, but the brevity of the provision made it impossible to determine the boundary between subversion and free speech. Furthermore, neither the Supreme People's Court nor the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress had issued any interpretations of Article 105, Paragraph 2. "So what are the boundaries of 'endangering the state'? We have been unable to find any legal principles that could be referenced in any domestic legal precedent or legal interpretations," they wrote. One of the lawyers, Li Fangping, warned that "[i]f everyone who speaks freely is accused of subverting state power, then it will be very difficult to guarantee free speech because people won't know what they can say and what they can't," according to a March 25 WP article.

In recent months a number of other Chinese citizens have been punished for "inciting subversion of state power," for peaceful expressions of dissent. These include activist Hu Jia, who was sentenced to three and a half years on April 3, freelance writer Lu Gengsong, who was sentenced to four years on February 5, Internet essayist Wang Dejia, who was released on bail on January 12, and Internet essayist Chen Shuqing, whose four-year sentence was affirmed in October 2007. (For more information on these cases, see their records of detention, searchable through the CECC Political Prisoner Database). At a March 18 press conference (posted on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site, Chinese, English), Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao described as "totally unfounded" the allegation that China is cracking down on dissidents before the Olympics. He said "China is a country under the rule of law" and that cases such as Hu Jia's would be "dealt with in accordance with the law." Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi also recently said that it is "impossible" for someone in China to be arrested for saying "human rights are more important than the Olympics."

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) and human rights groups have echoed the concern raised by Yang's lawyers that under Article 105, Chinese officials retain broad discretion to declare peaceful forms of expression "incitement of subversion." In a report on its 2004 mission to China (available on the UNWGAD's Country Visits Web page), the UNWGAD expressed concern that China's Criminal Law had not adopted a definition of the term "endangering national security" (the category of crimes which includes Article 105) and that "no legislative measures have been taken to make a clear-cut exemption from criminal responsibility of those who peacefully exercise their rights guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." In a January 8, 2008, report titled "Inciting Subversion of State Power: A Legal Tool for Prosecuting Free Speech in China," CHRD studied 41 cases from 2000 to 2007 in which Article 105, Paragraph 2, had been used to punish Chinese citizens for exercising their right to freedom of expression. The report found that in such cases:

"[T]he 'evidence' often consists of no more than the writings of an individual or simply shows that he/she circulated certain articles containing dissenting views, without any effort to show that the expression had any potential or real subversive effect. That is to say, speech in and of itself is interpreted as constituting incitement of subversion....[T]he text of the law fails to clearly define the key concepts, 'subversion' and 'state power,' and to precisely specify what constitutes 'subversion' and 'state power.' Thus, anything from calling for an end to one-party rule to criticizing corruption has been construed as 'inciting subversion of state power.'"

As noted in the CECC Political Prisoner Database, Yang was reportedly detained in 2006 on four occasions for his work with farmers and for taking part in a hunger strike proposed by Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng and other rights defenders.

For more information on freedom of expression in China, see Section II - Freedom of Expression, in the CECC's 2007 Annual Report.