The Washington Post
Copyright 2003, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved

Monday, February 10, 2003

A Section

Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service

BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Monday) -- A Chinese court today convicted a prominent U.S.-based dissident of spying and terrorism charges and sentenced him to life in prison, the official New China News Agency reported. It was one of the heaviest sentences ever given to a pro-democracy activist in China.

Wang Bingzhang, 55, a Chinese citizen who has lived in New York since 1982, disappeared in June with two other dissidents during a trip to Vietnam to meet with Chinese labor activists. Six months later, the Chinese government announced he had been arrested in neighboring Guangxi province.

At the time, state media said police rescued Wang from unnamed kidnappers on July 3, but Wang's colleagues in the United States said Chinese state security agents abducted him in Vietnam.

The New China News Agency said a court in the southern city of Shenzhen convicted Wang of espionage and "organizing and leading a terrorist group." Without describing the evidence presented in the one-day trial, it accused Wang of passing military secrets to Taiwan, plotting to blow up the Chinese embassy in Thailand and advocating assassination and kidnapping in essays posted on the Internet.

China has sought to portray itself as a partner in the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism, and the government has often justified the detention and harsh treatment of dissidents, especially ethnic Tibetan and Uighur separatists, as anti-terrorist activity.

Some human rights activists overseas held out hope that Wang's unusually heavy sentence could precede a decision to expel him, but others worried that Beijing intended to send a tough message to overseas dissidents with the sentence.

Wang's sentence follows an international outcry over China's decision to execute a Tibetan activist accused of a string of bombing attacks, and it could signal a hardening of Beijing's position on human rights issues as the government completes a leadership transition.

A medical student who was jailed twice for speaking out against the ruling Communist Party before going into exile in 1979, Wang published the pro-democracy magazine China Spring and helped organize the Chinese Alliance for Democracy in New York.

In 1998, he entered China using a false passport in an attempt to establish an independent political party to press for free elections and civil liberties. After what was described as a nationwide manhunt, Chinese police arrested him and expelled him a month later as a gesture to Washington.

Relations between China and the United States have been improving, but Wang's case could be seen as a further snub of the Bush administration, which had praised China's cooperation on human rights issues, including the release of several dissidents over the past year.

Copr. (C) West 2003 No Claim to Orig. U.S. Govt. Works
Copr. (c) 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.