China Jails Man for Sending Democracy Articles Via E-mail

BEIJING -- A man in eastern China has been charged with subversion for sending pro-human rights articles via the Internet, a police official and human rights group said Tuesday.

Wang Jinbo will be tried on Nov. 14 by the Junan county court in the eastern province of Shandong, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. Wang's father has been notified of the trial but told he could not attend, the Hong Kong-based center said.

Court officials contacted by phone said they hadn't heard of the case. But an official at the Junan police detention center confirmed that Wang was being detained there on subversion charges. The official identified herself only as Ms. Liu.

The charge arose from e-mail Wang sent earlier this year to Chinese pro-democracy groups overseas in which he urged the government to release jailed dissidents, the center said. In his messages, Wang also called for the rehabilitation of victims of the bloody crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement centered on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the center also said.

China's authoritarian communist rulers allow no questioning of the official verdict that the democracy movement was organized "turmoil" aimed at toppling the state.

Wang was arrested on May 9 and indicted on Oct. 25, the center said.

China wants to exploit the Internet's commercial potential while closing it off as a channel for free expression. Chinese police sift e-mails and search the Internet for politically sensitive content.

In guilty verdicts handed down this year for subversion, Chinese dissidents have been sentenced to up to four years in prison for posting articles on the Internet critical of Chinese leaders and the Communist Party.