A Chinese activist who sought to document shoddy construction that contributed to deaths in China's devastating 2008 earthquake has been sentenced to five years in prison for subversion, his lawyer said on Tuesday.
Tan Zuoren was formally accused of inciting subversion of state power in emailed comments about the bloody crackdown on June 4, 1989, on pro-democracy demonstrators around Tiananmen Square.
But Tan's supporters and Amnesty International say he was detained because he planned to issue an independent report on the collapse of school buildings during the Sichuan earthquake, in which more than 80,000 people died.