French woman, spouse not in touch with others in China after Liu tribute

BEIJING, Dec 22 (Agencies): A French citizen and her husband have been incommunicado for a week after the couple travelled to southern China to paint a tribute to the late democracy activist and dissident Liu Xiaobo, friends and witnesses said Friday.

Marine Brossard and Hu Jiamin painted a mural at the entrance of a public exhibition in Shenzhen on December 15, but city authorities covered the wall with a banner the same evening, witnesses told AFP. Tributes to Liu are censored in China.

Brossard is a French national, but Hu's nationality is unclear, a friend who has known them for over five years said.

AFP tried to call Hu several times this week, but an automated message said his phone was switched off.

The couple had travelled from their home in the French city of Lyon to participate in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism Architecture, witnesses who spoke with the couple in Shenzhen told AFP.

"We have been trying to reach them but we haven't been able to confirm anything," said the friend of the couple, who asked for anonymity due to safety concerns.

Their painting depicted an empty blue chair inside a room with red bars, an apparent reference to Liu, who was in prison when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

An empty chair stood symbolically in his place at the ceremony, which infuriated the Communist regime.

Liu died from liver cancer in July, making China the first country since Nazi Germany to allow a Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in state custody.

Meanwhile, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) seller in southern China has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison, official media reported Wednesday, one of the most severe sentences yet for helping users evade the country's "Great Firewall".

The sentence comes as authorities clamp down on tools for circumventing the severe restrictions on China's internet, which prevents users from visiting a large number of sites, including Google, Twitter and Facebook.

VPNs allow internet users to reach censored content by filtering web traffic through servers around the world but China has cracked down on them.

Wu Xiangyang from the south Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region received the sentence along with a 500,000 yuan fine ($76,000), after being prosecuted by the Guangxi Pingnan County People's Procuratorate.

Wu "illegally profitted" from setting up VPN servers and selling software "without obtaining relevant business licenses", a news website managed by the Supreme People's Procuratorate-the national prosecuting authority-reported Wednesday.