China activist lawyer Xu Zhiyong on trial

Human rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong will be tried on Wednesday in Beijing

Xu Zhiyong, a prominent human rights lawyer who campaigned against corruption, has gone on trial in China.

Mr Xu is charged with "gathering crowds to disrupt public order". He is one of several activists from a transparency movement to be tried this week.
Rights groups have criticised President Xi Jinping - who pledged to fight corruption - over their trials.
They come as a report says many members of China's elite have set up offshore companies in overseas tax havens.

The trial of Xu Zhiyong, who was arrested in July 2013, began on Wednesday in Beijing.
Mr Xu, who was also previously under house arrest, is a leading advocate of a group campaigning for government officials to reveal their wealth.

Seven members of the informal grassroots group, New Citizens Movement, also face separate trials this week on similar charges.
'Hypocritical crackdown'

A known legal scholar, Mr Xu also campaigned on behalf of inmates on death row and families affected by tainted baby milk formula in 2009.

In a video message from prison last year, he urged compatriots to unite in pursuing democratic freedoms.

No matter how "absurd" society was, he said, "this country needs brave citizens who can stand up and hold fast to their convictions".
Critics say Xi Jinping's promise to crack down on corruption, made in 2012 after he assumed power, has not allowed room for public dissent.

Rights group Amnesty International condemned what it called China's "hypocritical crackdown on anti-corruption campaigners".
"Instead of President Xi Jinping's promised clampdown on corruption, we are seeing a crackdown against those that want to expose it," Roseann Rife, East Asia research director, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Xu Zhiyong was a "prisoner of conscience and he should be released immediately and unconditionally", Ms Rife added.

"Anything less would make a mockery of the Chinese government's ongoing anti-corruption efforts."
Meanwhile, a report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists said relatives of many of China's political elite, including the brother-in-law of Mr Xi, and the son and son-in-law of former Premier Wen Jiabao, owned offshore companies in international tax havens.

It said that almost 22,000 offshore clients with addresses in mainland China and Hong Kong appear in leaked documents from two off-shore firms that set up offshore companies and accounts for clients.