A prominent Internet activist was set to go on trial in China on Tuesday, as the government appeared undeterred by recent difficulties it had encountered in battling cyber-dissent through the courts.
Jiang Lijun, who was detained in November last year and later charged with ”incitement to subvert state power,” would be tried in a closed court session at the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, said a court official.
Indications are that authorities suspect Jiang, who represents a growing sub-culture posting their political views on the internet, of being a ringleader of online pro-democracy activism. Reflecting his prominent status, he is being kept in Beijing’s Qincheng Prison which has previously held China’s last emperor Pu Yi and several senior-level Communist Party officials.
Jiang is reportedly a close confederate of other internet activists, including Liu Di, a Beijing student who was also arrested a year ago after posting democracy essays online.
The case of Liu, a 22-year-old psychology student known by her online alias of ”Stainless Steel Mouse,” has proved a hard nut to crack for China’s law enforcers.
Prosecutors bounced it back to police last week, telling them to come up with better evidence, according to sources, including her family.
Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said this ”highlighted the arbitrary nature of police arrests in China.”
”The Chinese justice system has clearly cast doubt on the investigative work of Beijing police,” the organisation’s secretary general Robert Menard said in a statement.
China’s government — happy about the internet’s economic potential but concerned about its political implications — seems to have launched a clamp-down on online dissent in recent weeks.
Fifty-eight well-known intellectuals issued an open letter to Premier Wen Jiabao, highlighting the worries triggered by the new wave of detentions and trials of online dissidents.
The letter, reported by the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, urged the release of Du Daobin, a writer on social and political issues who was arrested in central Hubei province last week.
”The detention of the internet author on suspicion of ‘subverting state power’ is the beginning of a new crackdown on the freedom of speech,” the open letter said, according to the centre. – Sapa-AFP