China | The judicial system

Suppress and support

The Communist Party cracks down on political activists, even as it eases up on some less sensitive legal cases

|BEIJING

A HUMAN-RIGHTS lawyer and three activists have been found guilty of “subverting state power” in a series of trials in the northern city of Tianjin. With resonances of the show trials of China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, they are the latest part of a crackdown on Western ideas and social and political activism that began in earnest after Xi Jinping became Communist Party chief in 2012.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Suppress and support”

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