Chinese democracy activist charged with subversion

BEIJING—A veteran democracy activist has become the latest person detained by Chinese authorities in a widening crackdown on dissent following anonymous calls for anti-government protests like those in the Middle East and Africa, a rights group said Wednesday.

Though the calls for demonstrations every Sunday have not drawn any overt protesters, the authoritarian government has reacted strongly. Human rights groups say more than 100 bloggers, lawyers, activists and artists have been detained, though only a handful have been formally charged.

The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said in a faxed statement that police charged Zhu Yufu with "inciting to subvert state power" on April 5 and were holding him at a detention center in his hometown of Hangzhou in eastern China.

It said Zhu was arrested within days of posting an essay online that declared his support for online calls to stage rolling weekly protests across China.

The center said Zhu wrote in his essay that the protest calls could be "the single spark that could start a prairie fire," and bemoaned the worsening of China's social problems.

Zhu, 58, earlier spent seven years in prison for his part in organizing the banned Chinese Democratic Party. He was released in 2006. He was jailed for another two years between 2007 and 2009 on charges of attacking police and interfering in public duties after he and his grown son got in a fight with police.

Zhu is the fourth dissident to face subversion charges since the crackdown began in February, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, another rights group in Hong Kong. The three others are blogger and writer Ran Yunfei, and democracy activists Ding Mao and Chen Wei. All but Zhu are based in southwest China's Sichuan province.