THE trial of a blind Chinese rights activist ended in disarray yesterday after his lawyer was detained and the defendant rejected two officially appointed stand-in lawyers.

Chen Guangcheng’s two-hour trial took place in the week that a journalist and an academic were tried on espionage charges and an outspoken lawyer was taken away for questioning. Mr Chen, 34, was on trial on charges of disrupting traffic and destroying property during a protest last year after he had been put under house arrest. It is not clear when a verdict will be announced.

Mr Chen, a legal activist, had enraged the Government by exposing abuses of the “one- couple, one-child” population control policy in his hometown of Linyi in the eastern Shandong province. Prominent lawyers had been determined to ensure that Mr Chen, who has been in effect under house arrest for a year but was formally arrested only in June, would get a fair hearing.

A five-member legal team that travelled from Beijing to help him was denied access and not permitted to examine a videotape and other evidence. Three were held by local police on Thursday, accused of stealing a wallet. Two were released after two hours but a third, Xu Zhiyong, a law professor, was held for 22 hours, beaten and released 30 minutes after the trial ended. Mr Xu, a member of a district people’s congress in Beijing, said: “It’s obvious the authorities did not want us to defend Chen Guangcheng.”

The court appointed two stand-in lawyers who had never met Mr Chen and knew nothing of the case. Mr Chen’s two brothers, who could attend the trial, said he had protested the decision and was so angry that he vomited during the proceedings. He faces up to five years in jail. Li Fangping, one of the three defence lawyers, said: “The court hearing broke the law. We demand a retrial.”

Mr Chen’s whistle-blowing had angered local officials when he gathered accounts of forced late abortions and sterilisations to enforce birth limits in Linyi County. Lower-level officials often resort to drastic steps to avoid punishment for failing to meet birth quotas, even though such practices are illegal.

The National Population and Family Planning Commission began an investigation after the claims were reported by foreign media. Last September the commission said that Linyi officials had been fired or detained for family planning abuses.

Beijing appeared to have tried to blacken Mr Chen’s name even before the trial. An online search for three characters of his name brings up a notice that these words are illegal in China.

A ten-point notice posted on the bulletin board of the state’s Xinhua news agency accused Mr Chen of misusing a £20,000 donation from the British Embassy, and said he had violated the family planning policy himself by having a second child and preferred to take foreign money than to go out to work.

Ten prominent intellectuals decried Mr Xu’s detention in a statement on Thursday, criticised the powers exercised by local “emperors” and urged President Hu Jintao to pay attention to the case. They wrote that the authorities were “seeking to use barbaric, terrorising means to attack the defence attorneys and prevent a fair trial”.

Gao Zhisheng, a human rights lawyer who has campaigned for Mr Chen’s release, was held by police. State media said he was to be questioned for “suspected involvement in criminal activities”.

On Tuesday, in Beijing, the China correspondent for the Singapore newspaper Straits Times was tried behind closed doors on charges of espionage. Ching Cheong has been in detention for 16 months, accused of spying for Taiwan. Lu Jianhua, an academic, was put on trial the next day on similar charges. Both could face the death penalty.

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