China Sentences Editor to Prison for Attack on Party

PEKING — A Chinese editor accused of calling for the overthrow of the Communist Party was sentenced to seven years in prison, becoming the first person convicted in a crackdown on capitalist influences, the China Legal News said today.

The newspaper said Liu De, 29, an editor of the Jiannan Literature and Art journal in Mianyang, a city about 900 miles southwest of Peking, was found guilty of “counterrevolutionary” activities. It did not say when Liu was tried.

The report said Liu “frothed at the mouth and arrogantly declared . . . ‘If I am not killed by the Communist Party, the Communist Party will collapse.”’

It said Liu, a Chinese studies graduate of Sichuan University, was attracted by “bourgeois liberalism” and “advocated the so-called democracy and freedom of capitalist countries.”