US lawmakers condemn sentencing of leading Chinese dissident

AFP

The National Security Council, President George W. Bush 's principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy, expressed concern over the verdict and the sentencing, Yang's wife Christina Fu told reporters.

Chinese authorities on Thursday ordered that Yang be jailed for five years for spying and illegal entry, charges which his lawyer termed as baseless.

Yang had fled China following the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests but was arrested when he tried to secretly sneak into the country using his friend's passport in April 2002.

"I don't think they (China) understand what harm they are doing to their desire to be accepted as a leading nation among other nations by this relentless and unjustified persecution of this brave and principled man," said Barney Frank, an opposition Democratic party member of the House of Representatives.

Frank, who represents Massachusetts, said the notion that Yang was spying for Taiwan "does not bear any serious scrutiny," adding that his only offence could have been a minor violation of immigration laws for which a five-year sentence was "too long."

Since his arrest in April 2002, the Harvard University research fellow has been one of the most high-profile dissidents in Chinese custody with US Vice President Dick Cheney raising the case during his visit to China last month.

The US Congress had passed several non-binding resolutions calling for the release of Yang, who had also been reportedly mistreated in prison.

Some 67 legislators sent a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao on April 26, warning that bilateral ties could suffer if Beijing did not release the 40-year-old Yang.

Christopher Cox, the Republican legislator from California, said the prison sentence on Yang "makes it extraordinarily difficult to treat the People's Republic of China as a civilised and rational government and to maintain a dialogue with it."

He wondered whether the Chinese government felt it was an auspicious time to announce the verdict this week because US attention had been wholly concentrated on the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

Cox said the United States government had swiftly moved to investigate charges of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in an open manner, promising to convict the culprits and compensate the victims.

"In the PRC, however, prisoner abuse is not exceptional and when it is discovered, it is not compensated or even stopped," he said. "It is government policy -- for more than two years the government of China has illegally imprisoned Dr Yang."

Another opposition lawmaker, Michael Capuano, said China might have thrown Yang in jail but "they wil never hold his spirit or spirits of people like him in their fight for democracy for all of us."

Fu, Jiang's wife, said her husband would definitely appeal against the sentence.

She said that a National Security Council officer called her Thursday, "assuring me that the United States is very concerned about this verdict and deeply troubled by the sentencing of Jiang."

Jared Genser, Jiang's family lawyer in Washington, said the basis for the espionage charges against Yang were four 100 dollar grants that the dissident's former organization, the China Youth Development Foundation, gave to individuals in China for agriculture research and other "innocuous" activities.

But the Chinese authorities charged that the 400 dollars was given to Yang by an agent of the then ruling party -- which the government itself had never classified as an intelligence agency, Genser said.

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Source: "AFP".