A court in eastern China on Thursday imposed jail terms of up to six and a half years on three activists who were part of a nascent civil rights movement that has urged government officials to publicly disclose their assets.

The sentences, decried by other dissidents as excessively heavy, reflect the increasingly hard line that China’s Communist party has taken against political dissent, no matter how peacefully expressed or loosely organised. Party leaders have been wary of any independent social force with the potential to threaten the party’s rule by mobilising groups of people and have sought to quash the loosely knit New Citizens Movement that the three activists were part of.

A district court in the city of Xinyu sentenced Liu Ping, a labour activist, and Wei Zhongping to six and a half years’ imprisonment each while another activist, Li Sihua, was given three years, said one of their lawyers, Zhou Ze.