His Excellency Jiang Zemin
President
Beijing
People’s Republic of China
Fax: + 8610 – 6512 5810
Vienna, 9 November 2001
Your Excellency,
The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists, strongly condemns the nine-year prison sentence given to freelance journalist Jiang Weiping.
According to the information before IPI, Jiang was charged with “revealing state secrets”, “instigating to overthrow state power” and “illegally holding confidential documents”. He was sentenced to nine years in jail by the Dalian Intermediate Court, Liaoning province, in a secret trial held on 5 September 2001. The sentence has not yet been officially announced.
Jiang was arrested on 5 December 2000 after publishing a number of articles for the Hong Kong magazine Qianshao (“Front Line”) that revealed official corruption among senior officials in northeastern China.
IPI would remind Your Excellency that, for the past six years, China’s leaders have been asking the country’s investigative journalists to help fight corruption and that at least one of the cases exposed by Jiang, concerning the misappropriation of public funds by Ma Xiangdong, vice mayor of the provincial capital of Shenyang, was widely reported in the official Chinese press as an example of the government’s success in the campaign against corruption.
Another investigative journalist, Gao Qinrong, is currently serving a 13-year prison sentence in China. She has been in jail since December 1998 for reporting that water tanks built to irrigate drought-stricken Yuncheng, Shanxi province, were not connected to any water source and that there were no pipes carrying water to irrigate the fields. Gao’s article was published in a special limited edition of the Renmin Ribao (“People’s Daily”) that is distributed only to a select group of Communist Party cadres. However, the story became national news when China Central Television ran reports on the irrigation scandal.
According to IPI’s sources, at least 15 journalists are currently being held in Chinese prisons because of what they have written.
IPI regards jail sentences against journalists as a gross violation of everyone’s right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”, as guaranteed by Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
We therefore urge Your Excellency to ensure that Jiang Weiping is immediately and unconditionally released from prison and that he is allowed to carry out his profession without further harassment. We further urge you to do everything in your power to ensure the release of all journalists currently imprisoned in China because of their work.
We thank you for your attention.
Your sincerely,
Johann P. Fritz
Director
