BEIJING (AP) — A court in eastern China on Thursday sentenced to up to 6 ½ years in prison 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 organized. Party leaders have been wary of any independent social force with the potential to threaten the party’s rule by mobilizing groups of people and have sought to quash the loosely knit New Citizens Movement that the three activists were part of.