China offers prison time relief for spies, dissidents

Asian Political News, Feb 14, 2005

BEIJING, Feb. 8 Kyodo

China will grant early release to 56 political prisoners, including dissidents and 20 former spies for Taiwan, an overseas advocacy group said.

The prisoners from 11 provinces or regions are up for early release or parole, according to information requested and obtained by the Dui Hua Foundation in San Francisco, the foundation's January newsletter states.

It says Chinese officials offered the information on Jan. 25 following China visits by foundation Executive Director John Kamm in November and last month.

Twenty inmates are Fujian Province prisoners doing time for endangering state security by selling classified documents to Taiwan, the Dui Hua newsletter says. One will walk 28 months early.

Elsewhere in China, Hunan Province prisoner Zhou Zhongzuo, who was sentenced in 2000 to 10 years for subversion, is up for a two-year sentence reduction, according to the newsletter, and ''old revolutionaries'' Jiang Yijiao and Xu Qilin, sentenced in 1982 for espionage, have been recommended for sentence reductions.

Eleven Tibetans incarcerated for separatism also are due for early release.

The early-release list includes both dissidents and ''counterrevolutionaries,'' the newsletter says. Zhan Gongzhen of Fujian, for example, is free after being sentenced to three years in April 2002 for trying to set up an independent trade union.

News of the early releases follows a meeting in November between U.S. State Department officials and Chinese counterparts on resuming suspended human rights dialogue.

China formally suspended human rights dialogue with the United States in March last year over its plan to criticize China's human rights record in a U.N. resolution, though U.S. officials at the time said the dialogue had been already been discontinued since December 2002 due to lack of progress.

But Dui Hua said the reasons for early releases were not clear.

''It is not known whether the relatively large number of paroles and sentence reductions in Fujian Province and the Tibet Autonomous Region is the result of local action or arises from a national investigation into parole and sentence reduction formally launched in April 2004 by the Supreme People's Procuratorate,'' the newsletter says.

''The fact that so many of the prisoners are serving sentences for spying for Taiwan raises another possibility: that China has been quietly releasing Taiwan agents as part of an effort to improve cross-strait relations,'' it says.

The Dui Hua Foundation reports that the ministries of justice and public security have been examining overarching issues in how to handle people in prison for counterrevolution, endangering state security, and ''using a heretical organization to sabotage implementation of the law.''