In 1991, sentences still continued to be meted out against those who had taken part in the 1989 Democracy Movement, but this did not stop others from engaging in dissident activities. In 1990–91 there were several attempts in Beijing and other places to establish labor unions and political parties. In Beijing, one of the organizations established was the Liberal Democratic Party of China. The publication in 1991 of what was to become the first of a series of White Papers on Human Rights (see previous text) provoked reactions from dissidents at home and abroad. Since the government accepted and itself made use of the language of human rights, it was inevitable that dissidents also increasingly would come to refer to human rights and China’s international obligations in their statements and open letters. Members of the Liberal Democratic Party of China thus promptly wrote a statement demanding the release of political prisoners and respect for the UDHR. It is also symptomatic that it was issued on the eve of U.S. Secretary of State Baker’s visit to China, as dissident activities have come to feed on foreign visits and foreign media attention. The statement was posted at Beijing University and one hundred copies were printed and distributed to other places around the country. The members of the Liberal Democratic Party of China were all arrested in 1992. They spent two years in incommunicado detention prior to their trial in July 1994, when they received some of the harshest sentences meted out in the post-1989 period. Hu Shigen, who allegedly drafted the statement, was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for counterrevolutionary crimes, Kang Yuchun got seventeen years, and Liu Jingsheng, who helped distribute the statement, received fifteen years. As of this Reader’s publication, they are all still in prison.
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