HONG KONG — A court in southern China sentenced a blogger to four years in prison for his work documenting mass unrest around the country.
The blogger, Lu Yuyu, was convicted Thursday of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” by a court in the city of Dali in Yunnan Province, said Wang Zongyue, one of his lawyers.
The charge of picking quarrels is often used to prosecute cases of political dissent and in recent years has expanded to cover online activities.
Mr. Lu, a migrant worker from Guizhou Province in southwestern China, began using the internet to research and publish information about some of the tens of thousands of strikes, protests and riots across China each year.
Such incidents are usually ignored by the Chinese news media and are difficult to cover for foreign journalists based in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. In contrast, Mr. Lu and his girlfriend, Li Tingyu, were able to research and share news of large-scale protests, sometimes more than one each day.