By Josh Chin
Chinese Nobel Peace Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo is among the most prominent dissidents jailed on state security charges. AFP/Getty Images
Back in March, China Real Time relayed findings from the human rights group Dui Hua Foundation that suggested China’s security forces had taken a savvier, softer-seeming approach to the silencing of dissidents.
It now appears that might only be partly right.
Dui Hua’s original analysis found that the number of indictments on state security charges dropped 21% between 2012 and 2013. Such charges, including subversion and separatism, tend to carry heftier sentences and frequently attract international criticism. At the same time, the group said, there appeared to be an increasing tendency to charge dissidents with less politicized crimes such as illegal assembly – a sign that authorities had not stopped going after political opponents, but perhaps had become more sensitive to appearances when doing so.
On Wednesday, the human rights group published a new report on its website questioning the earlier numbers – which were based on data from the country’s top prosecutor — and painting a different portrait of China’s security apparatus under President Xi Jinping.
Based on data in the recently published and more authoritative China Law Yearbook, Dui Hua said, it now appears state security indictments not only didn’t decline, but instead rose significantly to 1,381 in 2013 from 1,049 in 2012. That would make 2013 the second-highest year on record for state security indictments behind 2008, when Tibetan riots and protests led to an explosion of prosecutions for separatism.
This year’s China Law Yearbook doesn’t explicitly report the number of state security indictments, but it’s possible to extrapolate the number from other data, according to Dui Hua. It wasn’t clear why the data differed from the annual work report of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, on which the group’s earlier report had been based.
Does all this mean Dui Hua’s earlier theory about an increasingly image-conscious security state was wrong? Yes and no.
“Despite the discrepancy in figures, Dui Hua maintains that in 2013 the procuratorate frequently used other crimes (e.g., “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and “illegal assembly”) as [state security] crimes, making the increase in [such] indictments all the more staggering,” the group wrote in Wednesday’s report.
In other words, while the security state under Mr. Xi might be savvier – such as in high-profile cases like that of Xu Zhiyong, a prominent legal activist who was sentenced to four years for disturbing public order last year — it’s not afraid to drop the hammer of political charges in others.
Of those who faced state security charges in 2013, Dui Hua said, it was only able to identify 31 by name. Most were Tibetans implicated in self-immolation protests or Han Chinese political activists.
With a stronger police presence in Xinjiang and a continued clampdown on dissenters, the 2014 figures are likely to show even more such indictments, the group said.
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