Dissident Gets 9 Years for Prying Into China’s State Secrets

BEIJING —  A Chinese court has sentenced dissident and former student leader Li Hai to nine years in prison for allegedly prying into state secrets in a trial held behind closed doors, a family member said Tuesday.

“We’re very surprised,” the relative, who asked not to be identified, said by telephone.

Li had initially been charged with leaking state secrets, but his lawyer challenged the charges, arguing that the dissident was not a civil servant and had no access to state secrets.

“We thought he would get a lighter sentence . . . [after] the charge was changed to prying into state secrets,” Li’s relative said.

“Our only hope is in the appeal,” he said after Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court handed down the sentence. The relative said he believed that the appeal process had already started.

The appeals trial also was expected to be held behind closed doors because the case involves state secrets.

It was not clear how Li might have pried into state secrets or if any other people have been arrested or charged in the alleged incident.

The family has not been allowed to meet Li since he was detained in May 1995.

Li was first arrested in May 1990 for his role in the 1989 student demonstrations for democracy.

He was released six months later and expelled from the philosophy department of Beijing University, where he was a graduate student.

He was one of 56 signatories to a pro-democracy peace charter issued in May 1995 to coincide with the sixth anniversary of the military’s bloody crackdown on the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

China jailed or sent to labor camps dozens of dissidents in 1996 as part of a drive for stability that followed an easing of foreign pressure over its human rights record, diplomats and activists said.

Western human rights activists said sending dissidents to labor camps has been increasingly favored as a way of removing them from society without the complications or publicity of a trial.