Dissident student jailed for 12 years in China

A Chinese dissident has been jailed for 12 years for organising anti-Japanese protests on the mainland, it was reported today.

Xu Wanping, 44, was sentenced by a court in China’s southwestern city of Chongqing on Friday after being convicted of subversion charges, Hong Kong’s Commercial Radio said.

But Xu’s wife, Chen Xianying, was quoted by Commercial Radio and Cable TV as saying that her husband never organised, or took part in the anti-Japanese protests earlier this year.

Tens of thousands of people in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities staged protests in April after Tokyo approved the use of history textbooks critics say downplay Japan’s wartime aggression.

Police stood by as demonstrators stoned the Japanese Embassy, overturned cars and vandalised restaurants serving Japanese food – an unusual move in a country where any form of dissent is tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party.

Human rights activists had alleged that China was using the anti-Japanese protests as an excuse to round up activists, including Xu, who was imprisoned for eight years for participating in the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations centred around Tiananmen Square.

Xu was taken from his home in Chongqing on March 30 by police, who questioned him about his role in a campaign related to an anti-Japanese demonstration, rights group Human Rights in China said.