12/6/03 Agence Fr.-Presse
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Saturday, December 6, 2003
Leading Chinese dissident plans hunger strike as premier goes to US.
US-based dissident Wang Bingzhang, who is serving a life term in a Chinese jail, is planning a hunger strike to coincide with a US visit by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, a rights group said Saturday. Wang declared his intention Friday to his brother Wang Bingwu, who saw him for 30 minutes at Shaoguan prison in southern Guangdong province, according to the Washington-based organization Worldrights.
Wang said the hunger strike would be to protest his "cruel and inhumane solitary confinement at the hands of local Chinese prison officials," the organization said in a statement.
Separated by a thick wall of glass, the two brothers had been speaking over a telephone, and the moment Wang expressed his intention of launching a hunger strike, the line was cut, the statement said.
Prison authorities subsequently sought to get Wang to change his mind, and also tried to enlist his brother for that purpose, but the jailed dissident refused, according to the statement.
Wen will leave China Sunday for a three-day visit to the United States.
Worldrights urged President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to protest "the brutality of an arbitrary judicial system that defines the promotion of democracy and human rights as a felonious crime against society."
Wang, who had lived in the United States since the late 1980s, was sentenced to life imprisonment February 10 by a court in Shenzhen after being convicted of espionage and leading a terrorist group.
He was found guilty of providing intelligence to Taiwan between 1982 and 1990 and obtaining "secret military material illegally" in exchange for money.
China admitted in December last year it had arrested Wang, six months after he disappeared.
Friends and rights groups claim he was kidnapped by Chinese agents from Vietnam near the China border, where he tried to meet with Chinese labor activists, and was brought into the country.
ph/sdm.
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