By Chris Buckley

New York Times

BEIJING >> Chinese lawyers and rights activists appeared in televised trials throughout this week in what seemed to be a new, more public phase of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to cleanse the country of liberal ideas and activism.

Legal experts and supporters of four defendants denounced the hearings, held on consecutive days in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing, as grotesque show trials. All four men were shown meekly renouncing their activist pasts and urging people to guard against sinister forces threatening the Communist Party, before they were convicted and sentenced.

But for the government, the trials served a broader political purpose.

By airing the abject confessions and accusations of a sweeping, conspiratorial anti-party coalition, Xi’s administration was “putting civil society in all its forms on trial, and vilifying them as an anti-China plot,” Maya Wang, a researcher on China for Human Rights Watch said in emailed comments.

“The trials thus serve two purposes — to punish the activists, but also to use them to bolster President Xi’s claims,” she said.

Subversion trials are not new in China, but the intense, concerted publicity around these trials signified a shift.

Chinese state-managed newspapers, television programs and websites used the trials to offer a daily torrent of damning words against Western influence and liberal political ideas.

The legal proceedings and the drumbeat of propaganda appeared better meshed than ever, said Eva Pils, a legal scholar at King’s College London who has long studied human rights lawyers in China.

“It does feel rather like a program that has been rolled out,” she said. “It’s a trial process that serves the purpose of projecting the power of the state and casting human rights advocates as enemies.”

The televised trials build on the authorities’ increasing use of televised confessions, including after the four defendants were arrested during a widespread crackdown in July last year.

But generally, coverage in the Chinese news media of previous subversion trials was relatively muted, Pils said. Chinese accounts of trials of dissidents and activists were often terse or even nonexistent, suggesting that the government was happy to let them go unnoticed at home.

But that has been changing under Xi.

“It is a very different approach to handling political trials that we can see now,” Pils said. “Obviously, that’s part of what’s been happening under Xi Jinping, this whole completely anti-liberal turn.”

The legal proceedings this week bore the hallmarks of old-school propaganda, as the defendants, who once vigorously challenged the government to expand human rights, delivered well-rehearsed confessions adopting the preferred lexicon of the Communist Party.

They bowed their heads, denounced themselves and their friends as tools of anti-Communists abroad, and thanked the party for rescuing them from deluded liberal democratic ideas.

One of them, Zhou Shifeng, took a moment before he was convicted of subversion to thank Xi.

“I never grasped that Western ‘peaceful evolution’ of China was so serious,” Zhou said, using the party’s term for a quiet, creeping coup. “My crimes show that the great numbers of lawyers and citizens need to heed a warning bell.”

Zhou, a lawyer in Beijing until his arrest last year, received a seven-year prison sentence for subversion. Hu Shigen, a longtime dissident, was sentenced to more than seven years. Zhai Yanmin, a bankrupt businessman turned agitator, received a suspended three-year prison term. On Friday, Gou Hongguo, an activist who belonged to an underground Christian church, was given a three-year suspended sentence.

“We must see clearly the ugly faces of those hostile foreign forces, and those within the country with ulterior motives,” Zhai said at his trial Wednesday. “Don’t be hoodwinked by the rhetoric they parade about ‘democracy,’ ‘human rights’ and the ‘public good.’ “

Taken together, the prosecutorial claims of anti-government plotting included virtually every cause that Xi and his subordinates in the security services have identified as a threat: “die-hard” rights lawyers, activists adept at igniting online controversy, underground churches that defy government controls, disgruntled workers, separatists from Tibet and Xinjiang, and foreign organizations supporting legal advocacy in China.

And then there are shadowy forces abroad accused of engineering discontent to overthrow the party.

Running beneath the display of legal force, experts said, was an undercurrent of fear.

Jitters about the economy as growth slows and debt grows, international friction over China’s territorial claims, and Xi’s general antipathy to Western influence have reinforced the party’s long-standing fears that public ire over corruption and official abuses could one day spring into outright rebellion with backing from abroad. Preparations for a national leadership shake-up late next year — always a tense process — could amplify those worries, some argue.

“This is generally a symptom of the extreme stress the Chinese political system is under,” said Carl Minzner, a professor of law at Fordham University who studies politics and law in China. “A slowing economy, fierce internal political struggles and a pervasive fear of social unrest have fueled rampant official paranoia toward civil society and rights activists.”

The trials this week were accompanied by newspaper editorials and several videos amplifying the party’s message that China is the target of conspiratorial subversion, backed by Western capitals or even planned by them. It calls such efforts “color revolutions,” a term taken from upheavals in former Soviet states.

“In fact, the Western forces represented by America often wield the banner of ‘democracy, liberty and rule of law’ to create social conflict in targeted countries, with the intention of overthrowing governments,” one documentary said.

“The central government under the leadership of the party is crystal clear about the dangers of ‘color revolution,’ ” it said. But, it added, “We are extremely confident that China will not become the next Soviet Union.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company