jshen@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Jun Shen) (01/24/91)
BEIJING (UPI, Jan 23) -- A Chinese court began the counter-
revolution trial Wednesday of a key student protest leader whose
thoughtful and persuasive appeals in the 1989 pro-democracy move-
ment landed him at the top of a government ``most-wanted'' list.
The trial of Wang Dan, 22, indicated China's communist
government is committed to moving ahead with prosecutions of what
it has deemed core agitators of the crushed Tiananmen Square pro-
tests, now denounced as a ``counterrevolutionary rebellion.''
Wang, a Beijing University student jailed since July 1989,
was tried on charges of ``agitating counterrevolutionary pro-
paganda,'' according to a notice posted outside the Intermediate
People's Court in downtown Beijing.
The government has cited Wang for sponsoring campus debates
it says were catalysts for the nationwide pro-democracy movement
that was suppressed by Chinese troops on June 3-4, 1989.
Wang topped a warrant naming 21 ``most wanted'' student
activists issued after the Beijing massacre.
The United States and other Western governments, along with
human rights organizations, have voiced deep concern over the
political trials, asking that defendants not charged with
violence be freed.
Critics allege Beijing has chosen to move quickly ahead with
the trials while world attention is transfixed by the Gulf war.
At least 20 Tiananmen Spring activists now have been
prosecuted since the trials began in December.
Most have been prosecuted on charges of counterrevolution, a
political crime whose vaguely stated penalties range from several
years in prison to death in cases deemed egregious.
The only two dissidents known to be charged with the more
serious capital crime of sedition -- intellectuals Wang Juntao
and Chen Ziming -- are expected to be the last to be tried.
The Chinese government recently began a quiet campaign to
ease Western concern, telling several diplomats that ``lenient''
sentences would be more common. But diplomats said this has in
fact heightened fears over the arbitrariness of China's judicial
system.
``Several high court officials have told a number of Western
embassies that the sentences were going to be very light,'' said
one Western diplomat who has been following the trials.
``This suggests very strongly that these officials have rea-
son to know that the trials are pro-forma, and that the results
are decided in advance,'' the diplomat said.
Chinese judicial sources have acknowledged that guilty ver-
dicts lodged in the first trials on Jan. 5 were preordained.
Under China's socialist legal system, defendants brought to
trial are virtually assured of being convicted and are expected
to earn leniency by admitting their guilt and expressing remorse.
Wang Dan, a bespectacled history major at prestigious Beij-
ing University who helped organize the quickly banned Autonomous
Union of University Students, was arrested in Beijing on July 2,
1989, after eluding a nationwide dragnet for nearly a month.
The government said Wang had failed in attempts to flee
through southern China and accused him of having met with a
Taiwan reporter to plot a new escape plan. The reporter was
detained for a week and then freed.
Wang was singled out from the beginning of the 1989 movement
and throughout the crackdown, accused of agitating the unrest by
holding 17 open-air ``democracy salons'' on the Beijing Univer-
sity campus.
Officials also accused Wang of doing the bidding for dis-
sident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and his wife, university profes-
sor Li Shuxian, who were denounced as ``ringleaders'' of the pro-
tests and took refuge for a year in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
But Wang, spindly, boyish and reserved in public appear-
ances, clearly wielded great influence over his student peers,
persuading them with his calm and well-reasoned appeals for demo-
cracy and an end to one-party communist rule.
``We make no attempt to conceal the aim of the current stu-
dent movement, which is to exert pressure on the government to
promote the progress of democracy,'' Wang wrote in an article
published in May 1989, at the height of the protests.
``People's yearning for democracy, science, human rights,
freedom, reason and equality, which lack a fundamental basis in
China, have once again been aroused,'' he said.
Although the Intermediate Court notice said Wang's trial was
being held in the downtown courthouse, sources in China's secre-
tive judicial system say virtually all the trials are being held
at Qincheng Prison outside Beijing.
Qincheng is China's leading political prison and has been
home to Wang and most other Tiananmen Spring dissidents since
their arrests.