Chinese pro-democracy activists have set up an underground opposition party in China to challenge communist power, a spokesman for the group in the US said yesterday. The China Democracy and Justice Party was formed last Sunday, according to Mr Fu Shenqi.
Although it claimed only 100 members, it had branches in more than five cities, making it the first national opposition party since the communist takeover in 1949, Mr Fu added, speaking by telephone from New York.
The party vowed to press for independent trade unions and elections at all levels of government. China's dissident community is small and fractured, consisting largely of individuals airing grievances through open letters and petitions to government leaders. It would be difficult for the new party to organise any co-ordinated political action since police watch every movement by Chinese dissidents and monitor their telephone calls.
The last major organised dissent, pro-democracy demonstrations around Tiananmen Square in 1989, was crushed by the army. Organisers who did not flee the country were hunted down and jailed.
But the authorities would not be able to penetrate the new organisation because it was underground, Mr Fu claimed.
He said the party dropped plans for a secret inaugural meeting in a northern Chinese city after Mr Wang Bingzhang, a US-based dissident who entered China to help to establish the group, was detained. Beijing released Mr Wang and expelled him earlier this month.
Party members, liaising by telephone, went ahead with the launch, Mr Fu said.
A party manifesto denounced the Communist rulers for widespread corruption, saying China needed a revolution. "We declare that to stop corruption by the privileged and uphold social justice, China needs a revolution," it said.
In Hong Kong yesterday three US clerics hailed religious freedom in the former British colony but kept silent about the plight of believers on the mainland.
The three religious leaders, appointed by President Clinton, arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday after rounding off a two-week tour of the mainland with a trip to Tibet.
The three, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation of New York, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, New Jersey, and the Rev Don Argue, president of the US National Association of Evangelicals, yesterday met the Hong Kong leader, Mr Tung Chee-hwa.
"Hong Kong has a tradition of religious pluralism and we are aware of your commitment to preserve and grow an environment that nurtures the `unity in diversity' of Hong Kong's religious communities," Mr Schneier said in a statement after the meeting.
But the clergymen kept silent about their impressions of how religion is faring on the mainland, and chose instead to focus on the fact that their trip was unprecedented.
China yesterday denied claims that it was selling organs of executed convicts, saying a Chinese man arrested in the US had no connection with local authorities. "Any form of trade in human organs is strictly against related Chinese law and is prohibited by the Chinese government," the Xinhua news agency quoted an official from southern Hainan province as saying.
US authorities have detained a former Hainan prosecutor, Mr Wang Chengyong, for allegedly trying to sell organs taken, he said, from executed criminals.