Beijing China January 10 ANI China has indicted twenty or so lawyers and activists who gathered at a rental villa near the Chinese seaside for discussing the besieged human rights movement.
Chris Buckley, writing in The New York Times, said that a weekend get-together in 2019 gave Beijing a chance to deliver a blow to the rights defence movement. Two key participants are facing the prospect of years in prison.
According to indictments, the two best-known attendees - Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi - are awaiting trial on subversion charges related to the gathering.
Get-togethers like this, once common among Chinese rights activists, have become increasingly risky under Xi Jinping's hard-line rule.
Buckley said that many journals, research organizations and groups that once supported independent activists in China have been dissolved under him.
As he prepares to extend his era of power, those who still speak out are wondering how China's human rights movement can survive a tighter ring of monitoring, house arrest, detentions and trials.
This shows how they are afraid of small bits of Chinese citizen consciousness and civic society, said Liu Sifang, a teacher and amateur musician who took part in the gathering, in an interview from Los Angeles, where he now lives.
He fled abroad in late 2019 after the police began detaining those who attended the villa get-together. He said that the border police in China have blocked his wife from joining him.
Several people who attended the weekend session in Xiamen, eastern China, were soon detained, spending weeks or months locked up before the release, according to The New York Times.
One of the lawyers in Chang Weiping was arrested for a second time and was arrested for a charge of subversion after he said on video that interrogators had tortured him during his first stint of detention.
Xu, 48, and Ding, 54, both told lawyers that they did nothing illegal, but they face prison terms of 10 years or longer if a party-controlled court convicts them, as seems almost unavoidable.
The prosecution of Xu and Ding highlights the Chinese Communist Party's intense campaign against dissent in China, while Western governments have focused on mass detentions of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.