Wang Xidong was attending a meeting at her son’s school when the police arrived for her. They said she had helped organize a demonstration by 500 people held a few weeks earlier. They took the mother of three away on April 21, 2004, and if she serves her full sentence, she won’t be home again until 2009. Ms. Wang, 43, is a Three Gorges migrant who was moved off fertile farmland near the dam site in Hubei province 12 years ago and resettled with her family in the nearby city of Yichang. In May of this year, St. Petersburg [Florida] Times reporter Kris Hundley visited the family’s home, which she described as a “crudely built ground-floor apartment near a train depot.” There she met Ms. Wang’s husband, Chen Zhiyan, 45, who told her they had received only a portion of the promised compensation for land that his family had farmed for seven generations. They were owed the equivalent of US$22,000, but received only $6,000, he said. None of the people relocated from their township, Maoping in Zigui county, had received the full compensation, and thousands had signed petitions urging the government to honour its promises. Ms. Wang had been detained four times before her arrest, Mr. Chen said. She had also been badly beaten in the seven months she was held in the local jail before being handed down a five-year sentence and transferred to Wuhan Women’s Prison. Four men were arrested at the same time as Ms. Wang, but she received the harshest punishment. Liu Zhengzhen was sentenced to three years, and remains in jail, while Xia Chenghu, Wu Yansheng and Qin Wenjun have been released, according to the New York office of Human Rights in China. Ms. Wang’s sentence is also considerably longer than any meted out to 13 people in another township in the Three Gorges area who are known to have served time in jail for complaining about rampant corruption in the resettlement operation. Most of the Gaoyang township petitioners received prison sentences of one or two years, with one, retired boatman He Kechang, jailed for three years. Mr. Chen is frustrated at the lack of concern about his wife’s case, and particularly the fact that nobody seems to care about a serious mistake in a court document that vastly overstates her educational level. “It’s ridiculous, because she’s illiterate, but in her sentence they said she was a middle-school graduate who had organized protests. Basically, if the government wants to put you in jail, they can do it.” Despite being under near-constant police surveillance, “Chen continues to petition for his wife’s release, begging someone to consider the absurdity of her sentence,” Ms. Hundley wrote. “I just hope something happens to bring her back …,” Mr. Chen told the reporter. “[But] we’re too remote and nobody cares.”

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(A picture of Chen Zhiyan can be found on the St. Petersburg Times website. See picture No. 5 in the photo gallery that accompanies Kris Hundley’s article, Heavy Toll in Powering a Nation [PDF]. In the picture, Mr. Chen is holding two official papers from his wife’s case. In one, it documents that she is illiterate. In the other (her sentencing report), it says she is a middle-school graduate.)