China ( Blogger who was jailed for 9 months - Speaks out ) Human rights

Chinese blogger jailed for 'disrupting traffic' fails to have sentence overturned

A female Chinese blogger who was jailed for nine months for "disrupting the traffic" has failed to get her sentence overturned on appeal, highlighting rising Chinese government fears over the power of online activism.

Wang Lihong was arrested last April as China's government mounted a clampdown on activists, lawyers and bloggers in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings Photo: AP

By Peter Foster, Beijing

5:15PM BST 20 Oct 2011

Wang Lihong, 55, was a previously little-known activist who in recent years had attracted a sizeable online following for her work publicising injustices, land grabs and corruption by local government officials.

She was arrested last April as China's government mounted a clampdown on activists, lawyers and bloggers in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings. In September she was jailed for nine months after what her lawyers said was a peremptory hearing.

Her supporters say the charges of "disrupting the traffic" were trumped up after she attended a peaceful protest outside a court in the southern city of Fuzhou where three women whom she had supported were being tried for 'slandering' a government official.

Analysts say her case – which was brought to wider attention by the artist Ai Weiwei, who was himself detained without charge for 81 days earlier this year – hints at growing nervousness among China's security apparatus at the power of the internet to magnify dissent.

Over the last two years China's online landscape has been transformed by the explosion of interest in Sina Corporation's Weibo tool, a Twitter-like microblogging service that has garnered 200m users in just two years.