Guo and fellow protester Sun Desheng were imprisoned for their part in an anti-censorship protest outside a newspaper office in Guangzhou

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A prominent Chinese activist who described himself as a foot soldier in the battle for democracy has been jailed for six years in the latest chapter of president Xi Jinping’s war on dissent.



Guo Feixiong, a 49-year-old writer and veteran campaigner, was sentenced in a court in Guangzhou on Friday morning, according to his lawyer Zhang Lei.

Guo, whose real name is Yang Maodong, is one of the most influential activists in southern China and has been involved in the pro-democracy movement since the 1980s.

In 2007, he was jailed for five years in what activists said was a politically motivated vendetta stemming from his publication of a book about a political scandal in north-east China.

A second activist, Sun Desheng, was also jailed for two and a half years on Friday for allegedly “assembling a crowd to disrupt public order”.



The charges against Sun and Guo relate to their involvement in a 2013 anti-censorship protest outside the Southern Weekly, a left-leaning Guangzhou-based newspaper.

At the time, one demonstrator told reporters: “The people are starting to realise that their rights have been taken away by the Communist party and they are feeling that they are being constantly oppressed.”



Human rights activists lamented Guo’s sentencing as the latest step in an ongoing Communist party campaign to wipe out any opposition to one-party rule.

In a recent interview, Guo’s wife, who now lives in the United States, described the deplorable jail conditions in which she said her husband has been held since being detained in August 2013.

“One of the biggest issues is that they have locked Guo Feixiong up for [more than] two years in a very small and confined space, where he hasn’t been able to move around,” said Zhang Qing.

“He hasn’t been allowed outside for exercise, or to see sunlight, and this has done huge damage to his health. I think that this has already turned into a form of deliberate harm; it’s a slow form of torture,” Zhang added.

“This is a form of political persecution, and it’s a form of physical abuse and torture to lock him up in such a terrible environment for such a long time.”

Zhang Lei, the activists’ lawyer, said his client was now in a very bad physical and mental state.

“When he entered the court, he asked the court to examine his injuries. He said he had been blindfolded and had his hands twisted brutally by the prison guard on the way to the court and inside the court. He asked for his injuries to be examined but the court ignored him.”

After his sentence was read Guo vowed to appeal, the lawyer added. “He said he was not guilty and that this was persecution.”

In a lengthy statement to one court hearing last year, Guo said he was prepared to suffer for his cause.

“The price that I pay to immerse my life in this movement is worth it,” he said, according to an online translation, complaining of the “ubiquitous political terror” of contemporary China.

Guo, who has two young children, described the immense personal price his family had paid for his activism.



“During my challenge to the government and the tumult of my arrest and imprisonment, my wife and children have suffered the most,” he said, pointing to what he said was near constant harassment of his family by security agents.

On one occasion, as group of agents pursued them through a park in southern China, Guo recalled his daughter turning to him and saying: “Daddy, this is all your fault!”

“I felt too pained to say anything,” he said.

Additional reporting by Christy Yao