“To subvert you - can he do that? Does he have any army? Does he have a police force? Does he have courts? With a piece of paper and a pen, can he subvert you? Are you so fragile?”

An official at the Guiyang People’s Intermediate Court telephoned by Reuters declined to give any information or to give contact details for the division of the court that tried Chen, who is also known as Chen Youcai.

Communist Party chiefs are preparing for a leadership handover late next year, when the party’s long-standing focus on fending off political challenges is likely to intensify.

The court in Guiyang, southwest China, tried Chen, swiftly declared him guilty of “inciting subversion of state power,” and said he deserved a tough sentence of a decade in prison, his wife, Zhang Qunxuan, told Reuters by telephone.

Beijing chose the quiet Christmas period for these trials as it was trying to avoid international attention and diplomatic censure, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher on China for New York-based Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization.

“If the government wants democracy and progression, you need people who speak out their negative opinions,” she said.

The long sentence comes days after another dissident — Chen Wei from Sichuan province in southwest China — was jailed for nine years on similar charges of “inciting subversion.” Chen is a common family name in China, and the two men are not related.

“Killing the chicken to frighten the monkeys,” is a Chinese saying meaning singling out victims for harsh treatment in order to deter others.

“Severe punishment is the Chinese government’s clear choice of response to spreading protests at home and in many parts of the world: it is determined to ‘kill the chicken in order to frighten the monkeys’,” Renee Xia, the international director of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, said in emailed comments.

“PAY-BACK”

“Inciting subversion” is a charge often used to punish dissidents, and China’s party-run courts rarely find in favour of defendants in trials, especially for political charges.

Chen Xi, 57, was convicted over 36 essays critical of the ruling Communist Party that he published on overseas Chinese websites, said Zhang. The trial took about two and half hours, she added.

Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, was convicted on December 25, 2009, and jailed for 11 years for inciting subversion. In March this year, the dissident Liu Xianbin was also jailed for 10 years on subversion charges.

“The judge said this was a major crime that had a malign impact and he was a repeated offender,” Zhang said by telephone.

“It’s not the sign of a confident government that feels it has a strong case against a particular individual,” he said by telephone. “It’s pay-back for decades of standing up to the government.”

Police held hundreds of dissidents, rights activists and protest organizers in a crackdown on dissent this year, when the Communist Party sought to prevent the possibility of protests inspired by anti-authoritarian uprisings in the Arab world.

Chen Xi, however, was arrested only last month after being released from a week-long detention triggered by his campaigning for independent candidates seeking to win places in the party-controlled People’s Congress assemblies, said Zhang.

Chen is a former soldier and factory worker who was jailed for three years for his support for 1989 pro-democracy protests that ended after troops crushed demonstrations, said his wife.

He was again jailed in 1996, but since his release in 2005 had been an organizer of a citizens’ human rights forum in Guiyang.

China uses a “firewall” of Internet filters and blocks to prevent citizens from reading web sites abroad deemed to be politically unacceptable. But many activist use technology to break through obstructions and publish on uncensored websites.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a daily briefing that he did not know about Chen Xi’s conviction. China is a “country of rule of law,” added Hong.

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard and Reuters TV; Editing by Robert Birsel)

This month, a Beijing court sent one of China’s best known rights lawyers, Gao Zhisheng, back to jail, though he appears never to have escaped secretive confinement in the first place.

BEIJING (Reuters) A court in China sentenced on Monday a veteran dissident, Chen Xi, to 10 years in jail for subversion, his wife said, one of the heaviest sentences given for political charges since Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo was jailed two years ago.

Chen said he would not appeal, because it would be futile, said Zhang.

LOS ANGELES Famed New York painter Chuck Close and other artists are suing Sotheby’s, Christie’s and eBay, contending the auctioneers willfully violated a California law requiring royalty payments on sales of their works.

The lawsuits contend the auctioneers engaged in a “pattern of conduct” intended to conceal that the sale or seller was in California.

The Los Angeles Daily Journal first reported some of the suits.

“Although Christie’s has yet to be served with the complaint, it views the California Resale Royalties Act as subject to serious legal challenges. Christie’s looks forward to addressing these issues in court,” the company said in a statement.

The 1977 California Resale Royalties Act grants artists or their estates 5 percent of the proceeds from resale of their works if the sale is made in California or the seller is a resident. The law applies only to original paintings, drawings, sculpture or glasswork by living artists or those who have been dead for less than 20 years.

The three federal suits filed Tuesday seek class-action status to represent many other artists and demand unspecified royalties and damages which could total hundreds of thousands of dollars given current art prices.

“We believe that we have meaningful defenses to the claims asserted and they will be vigorously defended,” Sotheby’s said in a statement Thursday.

An email seeking comment from eBay was not immediately returned.

The suits were filed on behalf of Close best known for his enormous photorealistic paintings along with Los Angeles artist Laddie John Dill, and the estate of late sculptor Robert Graham. Graham’s works include the ceremonial gate for the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that was commissioned for the 1984 Olympics and features nude statues modeled on some of the athletes.

A foundation of late California painter Sam Francis also is named as a plaintiff in the suits against Christie’s and eBay Inc.