Newsday
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Monday, February 10, 2003

NEWS

Beijing - A Chinese court sentenced a U.S.-based Chinese dissident to life in prison today for spying for Taiwan and organizing and leading a "terrorist" group, triggering protests from an international rights group.

The sentence handed down to Wang Bingzhang, 55, was one of the heaviest for a pro-democracy activist in recent memory.

"We are very angry. We lodge a strong protest," Wang Xizhe, a spokesman for the Washington-based rights watchdog Free China Movement, said by telephone. Also a Chinese dissident, he fled China in 1997.

The official Xinhua news agency issued a terse two-paragraph dispatch that said Wang was also deprived of his political rights for life. It gave no further details.

The Intermediate People's Court in Shenzhen convicted Wang, who has a doctorate in medical research and had lived in Elmhurst, after a one-day trial behind closed doors in January.

Court officials reached by telephone declined to comment, underlining the sensitivity of the case.

The Free China Movement has accused China's security apparatus of kidnapping Wang in Vietnam last year and bringing him to the boom town of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, to stand trial on "false" charges.

Wang and two other exiled dissidents had been missing for months when Xinhua reported in December that Chinese police had "rescued" them from kidnappers. Police found them tied up in a temple in the southern region of Guangxi, which borders Vietnam, on July 3, Xinhua said.

Xinhua said Wang is a Chinese citizen. Rights groups say he has renounced his Chinese citizenship and has permanent residency in the United States.

Yue Wu, one of the other exiles said to have been rescued, had been cleared and returned to France, according to the Free China Movement. Zhang Qi, the third dissident, was still under house arrest in China, it said.

Wang was denounced by the Chinese government after his involvement in the 1989 pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square. In January 1998, Wang slipped into China using a false passport to help establish the China Democracy and Justice Party. He was detained after a nationwide manhunt, but Beijing expelled him the following month to avoid a flare-up with Washington.

China's democracy movement is in tatters with its leaders either bickering in exile or languishing in jail.

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