A FORMER university professor in China, who called for multi-party democracy and wrote letters to senior government figures, has been jailed for 10 years for subversion.
Guo Quan, a former associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, was picked up by police in Nanjing, the provincial capital of Jiangsu, on China’s eastern coast, in November 2008 after publishing a number of articles and writing letters on the internet, some addressed to Chinese president Hu Jintao, chief parliamentarian Wu Bangguo and others.
The letters advocated a multi-party, competitively elected democratic system, while addressing social problems and concerns of laid-off workers and peasants who had lost their land.
“This sentence is indefensible from a legal perspective, because using peaceful and rational means to petition cannot be considered subversion of state power,” Mr Guo’s lawyer Guo Lianhui said in a statement issued by Human Rights in China. “Subversion of state power can only be achieved by armed insurrection.”
Guo Lianhui said Mr Guo had a constitutional right to free speech.
A court in Jiangsu sentenced him on Friday. He had been detained many times since 2007, when he founded the China New Democracy Party, which he claimed had 40 million members.
Mr Guo is a former member of the China Democratic League, one of the eight state-approved “democratic” parties.
He graduated from Jinling Vocational University in Nanjing in 1990 with a degree in English, afterwards serving as secretary of the Nanjing Municipal Economic Reform Committee. He became a judge in the criminal division of Nanjing Intermediate People’s Court.
Mr Guo received his doctorate from Nanjing University in 1999 and studied literature at Nanjing Normal University, where he remained to teach.
The sentencing comes just a few weeks before a visit to China by US president and Nobel peace laureate Barack Obama, a visit which will bring focus on China’s policies on human rights. It also comes just weeks after China celebrated 60 years of communist rule and 20 years after troops crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing.
Liu Xiaobo, a prominent pro- democracy writer and rights activist, also remains in detention, facing charges.
Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, said: “By criminalising lawful and peaceful activities protected under Chinese law and international human rights law, the Chinese authorities are contributing to the radicalisation of rights defence work.”