As EU officials claimed progress in their dialogue with China on human rights in China, dissidents stepped up a drive to register formally the China Democratic Party, a Hong Kong-based rights group said on Saturday.
On Wednesday, Mr Zeng Ning and Mr Wei Dengzhong applied to Beijing to set up a Guizhou branch of the China Democratic Party, the Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said.
Guizhou is the 10th location where a handful of political activists have formally applied for registration for the embryo opposition party in recent months. They are testing the government's intentions, especially in the wake of the signing by China of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights this month.
The covenant is unlikely to be ratified for at least a year and the Chinese authorities seem uncertain how to handle the emerging new generation of dissidents.
In Henan, the pro-democracy figures - Mr Wang Bing, Mr Zai Weimin, Mr Li Zongshang and Mr An Ning - also applied to register a party branch, the group said, but on Friday, Mr Dong Wanbao, a dissident from Jilin, was taken from his home by police, apparently in connection with China Democracy Party activities.
EU officials, briefing journalists on Friday after a human rights seminar in Beijing with Chinese counterparts, said they had "broadened the dialogue at all levels and deepened it" and detected "more openness on the Chinese side to discuss legal reform".
On the same day it became known that a veteran Chinese human rights dissident was jailed for seven years for allegedly disclosing state secrets. Mr Chen Zengxiang (44), a pro-democracy campaigner had compiled a list of political prisoners in Shangdon Province, the Hong Kong group said. Mr Chen, a veteran of the 19781979 Democracy Wall movement, had been held since March 23rd. The officials, representing the troika of Austria, Britain and Germany (the last, present and next EU presidencies) said they had pressed repeatedly for statistics on capital punishment, but that Chinese officials admitted they themselves did not have such information.
The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, earlier this month pointed out that Beijing had signed 17 international human rights documents, including the International Covenant for Civil Rights and Political Rights.