A court in southwest China has sentenced dissident Chen Wei to nine years in jail for publishing pro-democracy essays online.
Chen is the latest human rights advocate convicted in a crackdown on dissent this year.
His lawyer, Zheng Jianwei, said the court in Suining, a city in Sichuan province, found Chen guilty of "inciting subversion of state power".
Chen's wife, Wang, said the court's guilty verdict cited nine essays that he had published on overseas Chinese websites.
"They downloaded all his essays from overseas, and you can't read any of them on websites inside China," she said. “But they still said that the essays had an extremely malign impact inside China, even though most people in China can't read them."
China uses a "firewall" of internet filters and blocks to prevent citizens from reading websites abroad that are deemed to be politically unacceptable or socially unsound.
Chen (42), was one of hundreds of dissidents, rights activists and protest organisers swept up in a crackdown on dissent this year, when the ruling Communist Party sought to prevent potential protests inspired by anti-authoritarian uprisings across the Arab world.
Many of those detained have been released but remain under police watch. But some have been convicted for their activism.
Liang Xiaojun, the second lawyer who represented Chen at the trial, said the hearing lasted two and a half hours. "He said he's not guilty, he didn't mean to overthrow the political regime and that he wanted to pursue constitutional democracy through non-violent means," Mr Liang said.
In March, the Suining court sentenced dissident Liu Xianbin to 10 years on subversion charges for urging democratic reforms.
In September, Beijing-based activist Wang Lihong was jailed for nine months for "stirring up trouble", because she demonstrated outside a court to support three people on trial for maligning an official. She was later released.
China's party-run courts rarely find in favour of defendants in trials for political charges.
Chen, who was detained February, signed the "Charter 08" manifesto for democratic reform that was co-written by Liu Xiaobo, the jailed dissident who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
Two other dissidents from Sichuan detained at about the same as Chen - Ran Yunfei and Ding Mao - have been released.
Chen was jailed for taking part in the pro-democracy protests centred on Tiananmen Square in Beijing that ended in the armed crackdown of June 4th, 1989. He was released in late 1990.
Chen's wife said she did not know if he would appeal, but said he had told his lawyers before the trial that he would not. She said his jail time would be counted as starting in February.
Reuters