China quake activist jailed for three years

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese dissident who tried to help victims of last year's Sichuan earthquake was jailed for three years on Monday on charges of illegally possessing state secrets, his wife said, decrying the sentence as "revenge."

The court decision is another sign that China is in no mood to ease political controls after last week's visit by U.S. President Barack Obama, who pressed the government on human rights.

Huang Qi was convicted by a court in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in the nation's southwest where the earthquake on May 12 last year killed at least 80,000 people, including children crushed in schools that collapsed.

A veteran human rights activist, Huang was detained in June last year after offering to help parents protesting that schools which fell in the quake were vulnerable due to shoddy and corrupt building practices. The government has said that 5,335 schoolchildren died in the earthquake or remain missing.

Huang's wife, Zeng Li, who attended the hearing, said he received the maximum sentence for charges of illegally possessing state secrets, but the judge and prosecutors did not say in the courtroom what secrets he was accused of holding.

"They still won't say what the specific charge is, not even at the verdict. They just spoke of documents related to a certain matter," Zeng told Reuters by telephone.

"I think it was revenge for the earthquake and his other work. But the court would not even give me a copy of the verdict."

China's secrets and subversion laws are vaguely worded, giving authorities much scope for defining actions critical of the ruling Communist Party as crimes. The courts run by the Party rarely reject prosecutors' cases.