Outcry follows ‘confession’
YUEYANG: A Taiwanese pro-democracy activist pleaded guilty yesterday to subverting state power in China’s first criminal prosecution of a nonprofit worker since Beijing passed a law tightening controls over foreign non-governmental organisations.
Lee Ming-che’s supporters, though, quickly said he had been forced to confess to crimes he hadn’t committed.
Mr Lee told the court in the central Chinese city of Yueyang that he had “spread articles that maliciously attacked the Communist Party of China, China’s existing system and China’s government”.
He said he had also organised people and wrote articles “intended to subvert the state’s power”.
Subversion of state power is a vaguely defined charge often used by authorities to muzzle dissent and imprison critics.
Mr Lee’s wife, Lee Ching-yu, who was in Yueyang to attend the trial, had warned that her husband might be pressured into pleading guilty.
China’s wide-ranging crackdown on civil society has featured a string of televised “confessions” — believed to have been coerced — from human rights activists accused of plots to overthrow the political system.
His supporters blasted the legal process. “This trial is illegal,” said Hsiao I-Min, who travelled to Yueyang with Mr Lee’s wife, and is with the Taiwanese non-governmental organization Judicial Reform Foundation.
Mr Lee “was forced to confess a false truth”, he said.
“Pursuing democracy and freedom is not a crime,” Mr Hsiao continued.
“Mr Lee was accused by the Chinese government of discussing and spreading ideas about democracy from the West. “We think this is a basic human right.” Dozens of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong marched to the China Liaison Office on Monday to protest Lee’s prosecution.
Former lawmaker and social activist Lee Cheuk-yan said Beijing was simply looking for ways to silence its critics.
“”With this regime, whenever you criticise them about their human rights record, then they will take it as subversion,” he said.
Security was tight at the Yueyang City Intermediate People’s Court, with barricades on the streets, dozens of security personnel patrolling the perimeter and reporters ordered to leave the area.
Lee Ming-che, 42, has conducted online lectures on Taiwan’s democratisation and managed a fund for families of political prisoners in China.
He cleared immigration in the semiautonomous Chinese territory of Macau on March 19 but never showed for a planned meeting with a friend later that day.