"Cyber-dissident" Huang Qi Jailed For 12 Years

The activist and human rights advocate dubbed China's first "cyber-dissident" has been jailed for 12 years for leaking state secrets.

Huang Qi was also convicted of providing state secrets to foreign entities by the Mianyang Intermediate People's Court in Sichuan Province.

Huang was also deprived of his political rights for four years.

The 56-year-old is perhaps best known for running a website called "64 Tianwang" – named after the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

His website, which reported on local corruption, human rights violations, and other topics rarely seen in ordinary Chinese media, is blocked on the mainland.

The website was awarded a Reporters Without Borders prize in November 2016. A few weeks later, Huang was detained in his hometown of Chengdu, according to Amnesty International.

His sentence is one of the harshest meted out to a dissident since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, according to court records.

Huang's work has repeatedly drawn the ire of Chinese authorities.

He has been in and out of jail for the past two decades.

In 2009, he was sentenced to three years in prison after campaigning for parents of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which left nearly 87,000 people dead or missing and authorities facing huge public anger over shoddy building construction.

Five years later Huang and at least three citizen journalists who contribute to "64 Tianwang" were detained by police after the site reported on a woman who set herself on fire in Tiananmen Square. (AFP)