Family: Boston-based Chinese activist goes on trial in Beijing on spying charges

Joe McDonald

BEIJING - A court in Beijing held a three-hour trial Monday for a U.S.-based Chinese activist charged with spying and adjourned without saying when it would issue a verdict, his wife and defense lawyer said.

Yang Jianli, who runs a foundation in Boston that advocates political change in China, was detained in April 2002 after visiting China to meet other activists and laid-off workers. He was using a friend's passport and also faces a less serious charge of entering the country illegally.

Yang, a Chinese citizen with permanent U.S. residency in the Boston area, pleaded innocent during the closed trial in the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate Court, said his lawyer, Mo Shaoping. A court spokesman, Gao Zhihan, said he couldn't confirm whether the trial took place because it was closed to the public.

Yang is accused of acting as an agent of the Nationalist Party, the former ruling party of rival Taiwan, said Jared Genser, a lawyer for Yang's wife, Christina Fu. He said the charges appear to stem from four $100 grants given by a foundation run by Yang to activists in China to promote human rights and democracy.

Mo declined to give details of the trial, but Genser said Chinese prosecutors presented evidence about the grants.

"There was no evidence that he was a spy," Genser said by telephone from the United States. "There was just evidence that he ran the foundation."

Trials in China usually last no more than a day, but it can take weeks for judges to consider the case before issuing a ruling.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said she had no comment on the case or whether diplomats were allowed to attend.

Fu, a Chinese-born U.S. citizen, remained in the United States during the trial. Genser said last week that she was denied a visa to travel to China and that Chinese authorities said that if she came she would be "dealt with according to Chinese law." He said they took that to mean she might be detained.

China has arrested a number of Chinese-born academics with U.S. ties in recent years on charges of spying for Taiwan. Most were convicted and then expelled.

Taiwan has been ruled separately from China since 1949, but Beijing claims the island as its territory and has threatened to capture it by force. The two sides are believed to actively spy on each other.

Yang, a mathematician and economist with permanent U.S. residency, moved to the United States in the 1980s. According to Fu, he has been barred from China since 1989, when he traveled to Beijing to take money to the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protesters. The protests ended in an attack by China's military on June 4, 1989.

Yang was detained while trying to board a plane in China's southwest using a forged identity card. Fu has said Yang entered China using his friend's passport because Chinese diplomats in the United States refused to renew his own.

The communist government rejected a ruling in June by the U.N. Human Rights Commission that it had acted illegally by failing to give Yang a fair trial on the passport charges.

The maximum penalty in Chinese law for espionage is death, but Genser said Yang's family doesn't expect that to be imposed.

"He could prospectively get life in prison," Genser said.

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Source: "AP".