Lawyer gets 2 yrs in jail for subversion

A court in Central China’s Hunan Province sentenced a Chinese lawyer to two years in jail Tuesday for inciting subversion of State power.

Jiang Tianyong will be deprived of his political rights for three years. He told the People’s Intermediate Court of Changsha that he would not file an appeal.

Jiang, 46, was a lawyer in Beijing but was barred from practicing law in 2009.

He was found to have made a large number of statements attacking or defaming China’s government departments, judicial organs and the national legal system, according to court ruling.

Since 2015, Jiang had unscrupulously distorted facts, incited others to gather and cause trouble in public areas, and provoked hostility against the government in several cases including that of Zhou Shifeng, a former lawyer convicted of subverting State power, the court ruling added.

The Xinhua News Agency reported that Jiang and several other lawyers gathered a group of Falun Gong practitioners for a protest in Jiansanjiang, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province in March 2014.

The Chinese government considers Falun Gong a cult.

The court said Jiang had developed ideas to overthrow the current political system under the long-term influence of antiChina infiltrators.

It said Jiang had participated in overseas training in an attempt to overthrow the current administration, and had applied for financial support with anti-China forces to hype hot spot cases.

The court also said Jiang had asked the wife of another Chinese lawyer Xie Yang to fabricate a story of Xie being tortured during detention.

Xie was also charged with inciting subversion and was tried by the same court in May. He was released on bail shortly after the trial.

The court said it believes Jiang’s behavior, including smearing the Chinese administration and its organs, attacking the current system established by the Constitution and inciting subversion in an attempt to overthrow the socialist system, constituted the crime of inciting State subversion.

The court said it had accepted the plea for leniency from Jiang’s attorneys.

Jiang pleaded guilty at a previous trial in August.