AP News, July 8th, 2007
A protester jailed after the 1989 Tiananmen protests has been released while another activist who was jailed and freed years ago for his role in the pro-democracy uprising has been detained again, a human rights watchdog said Sunday.
Sun Hong, 36, was released from jail on Saturday, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
It said in a faxed report that Sun, a Beijing worker at the time, was detained in June 1989 and given a death sentence, suspended for two years, for arson. A suspended death sentence is usually commuted to life in prison if the convict is deemed to have reformed.
The rights body did not say why Sun was released.
Discussion of the crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy movement is still taboo in China outside of the semiautonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau.
The rights center said in a separate fax that Zhang Zhiyong, who served an 18-month jail term after the Tiananmen uprising, had been detained on July 6.
Zhang, now 43, was one of three students who knelt for hours on the steps of the Great Hall of the People on April 22, 1989. They sought to deliver a student petition to China's top leaders, who were at a funeral service inside for former Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang.
The report said Zhang's family was not told why he had been detained. It said Zhang's detention may be related to his involvement in an underground Christian church in Beijing.
Calls to the Beijing police rang unanswered on Sunday.
China's government calls the student-led protest that was crushed on June 4, 1989, a counterrevolutionary riot and has not fully disclosed what happened. News footage showed soldiers and tanks rolling into Beijing to suppress the protests. Hundreds, if not thousands, died in the military crackdown.
