Remembering 709: Confronting Today and Tomorrow

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here are the remarks that I delivered at today's event, the 5th China Human Rights Lawyer Day, hosted by several US and Taiwanese organizations. I am honored that I was asked to participate in the program, yet I am sad that I cannot be more encouraging than last year about the prospects for China’s human rights lawyers and other Chinese advocates for political and civil liberties in their country.

Of course, I again want to try to rally China’s beleaguered human rights activists and their many foreign supporters to keep the faith. We must not lessen our support for all those engaged in the great and historic effort to nourish the development of justice, due process, government under law and freedoms of expression in China, even while those of us outside China strive to meet similar challenges in our own societies.

Yet we owe each other and our shared cause the duty of candor. Illusions and self-deception cannot serve us. We are engaged in a long-run struggle. The six years since the start of the tragic 709 crackdown are a mere speck in China’s long history. Even the 70 years since the establishment of the People’s Republic is but a short interval. It is important to note that these most recent seven decades have been marked by major swings in the pendulum of political development. The current Xi Jinping era is especially depressing to those who hope for a democratic dawn or at least a more pluralistic and freer country that offers protection to individual rights. But change will come again, as many of us predicted even during the darkest days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. I recommend that everyone inside and outside China see the so-called film comedy “THE DEATH OF STALIN”. As the nineteenth century poet Swinburne wrote: “No life lives forever”.

In the interim, what should we be doing?

1. Certainly we should give all the support we can to those who, despite all obstacles, continue to engage in the struggle for the protection of human rights in China. We should continue to let them know that we greatly appreciate the risks and suffering they endure and the contributions that they are managing to make.

2. We need to do much more to inform the world about the true situation of China’s human rights lawyers and the extent to which the PRC’s criminal process serves as totalitarianism’s major weapon of repression and injustice.

3. We must provide full support to those Chinese human rights lawyers who escape from China, and we must benefit from the accurate information and advice that they bring us.

4. We must attempt to persuade UN institutions, other international organizations, foreign governments and legislatures, NGOs, the media, bar associations, law firms, law schools, and individual lawyers, judges, officials, scholars and students to focus on the suppression of China’s human rights lawyers and to maximize pressures to alleviate their persecution. Every day in many fora we have to keep asking questions such as: Is the great lawyer Gao Zhisheng dead or alive? Is the great civic reformer Xu Zhiyong  again suffering torture while imprisoned?

We must not succumb to compassion fatigue. Indeed, if we increase our efforts, perhaps next year’s 709 conference will be convened in a more optimistic atmosphere. 

The link to the video of today's program is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJY_WNtPcOs

The 709 Crackdown is a Permanent Process

By Jerome A. Cohen

I recently had an interview with William Yang on the fifth anniversary of the “709 Mass Arrest.” Although I do not think that the intensity has increased, this campaign has become a permanent, ongoing process. This is partially because the original crackdown did not wipe out all of its intended targets, but also because Xi Jinping is experiencing increasing pressure at home and abroad. Read the full interview here.

Our 709 commemoration evokes the memory of the 1957-58 anti-rightist movement

By Jerome A. Cohen

The ongoing suppression of human rights lawyers and legal scholars in China makes me recall the huge attack that was dramatically launched against them in early June 1957 as Mao decided to end the dangerously developing “Hundred Flowers Bloom” Campaign by launching the Anti-Rightist Movement. One of the major targets was law professor YANG Zhaolong, Harvard Law SJD and protégé of former Dean Roscoe Pound, who played a prominent role in Republican China’s legal development and who decided to stay on to help build a post-Liberation legal system. He was often attacked in existing legal publications of the day, detained and punished as an “extreme rightist” and, after his release, again punished severely during the Cultural Revolution as a “counterrevolutionary”. In 1971, Yang was first sentenced to death but, because he was so well-known abroad, this was reduced to life imprisonment. His wife and son also suffered severely. After Mao’s death and Deng’s rise, Deng, who had presided over the horrendous Anti-Rightist Movement as the Party’s Secretary-General, began the process of rehabilitating (平反píngfǎn) many of those who had been most unfairly abused. Yang died in 1979 some time after his release and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1980. In 2017, Fudan University managed to get by the censors a massive volume of Yang’s collected writings, mostly but not entirely from the relatively freer pre-Liberation days, in tribute to him but also as an impressive, implicit signal of the continuing loss to China’s rule of law efforts.

Second Anniversary of the 709 Crackdown on Chinese Lawyers and Activists

Today is the second anniversary of China’s “709 crackdown” on human rights lawyers and activists. ChinaChange published a statement by the The China Human Rights Lawyers Group here.

This statement is sad but important (I almost mistyped “impotent”). It is noteworthy in many respects but two stand out to me. The first is an extensive note of bitterness not only, as usual, against the Party and government responsible for this obscenity but also against the legal scholars, professors and lawyers in and out of government who have lent their cooperation or blessings to the repression.

The second is the absence of any optimistic prediction that, at least in the near future, the numbers of human rights lawyers will be expanding in response to the effort to suppress them.  This is a grim, realistic assessment of the situation. Those of us lucky enough to be on the outside can only hope that the programs being held today to commemorate 709 will stimulate greater support for this gallant, besieged group and their families, inside as well as outside China. I share the statement’s confidence that, in the long run, the Chinese pendulum will again swing in the direction of freedom and that the historic role of the human rights lawyers will be vindicated. 

Source: China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, July 6, 2017

More on rights lawyer Wang Yu’s “confession and release” and China’s revival of “brainwashing” practice

There is no doubt whatever that Wang Yu will not be free to resume her practice of human rights law or her previous professional or even personal friendships. Her hope must be to obtain her husband’s release from jail, to be able to see her son and to procure for him the right to study abroad, as was originally planned. The elements of the deal struck will gradually emerge.

To say that her statement was “probably” the product of coercion is silly since she has been held in an immensely coercive environment for over a year. These “confessions” are reminiscent of the “brainwashing” era of the 1950s for which the new China became infamous. Brainwashing was based on long-run confinement in a coercive environment combined with heavy doses of thought reform and the realization that release depended on adopting, at least temporarily, the “new truth”.

The regime obviously altered Wang Yu’s restrictions (it did not “let her go”) because of the enormous international pressures brought to bear. The American Bar Association’s annual meeting at which the award is to be granted is about to be held. Her alleged repudiation of the award, which was a brilliant decision by the ABA to recover its loss of prestige from earlier inadequate criticism of the PRC, is the PRC’s attempt to discourage all foreign legal organizations from further attacks on the PRC’s human rights violations.

Of course, some lawyers and their legal assistants have been released during the past year while other lawyers are still detained and awaiting criminal conviction and prison punishment as well as the loss of their right to practice law, unless they too succumb to the brainwashing and other coercion to which they are being subjected. Even legal assistants such as Zhao Wei have not been spared the “confession and release” farce.

Non-release “release” of human rights activists and their confessions

Photo: Wang Yu and her son Bao Zhuoxuan, Photo courtesy of Bao Zhuoxuan

Chinese human rights lawyer Wang Yu has been “released” on bail, as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal. Wang Yu was seen in a video making a confession. “I also wrote inappropriate things online and accepted interviews with foreign media. For this, I feel ashamed and express remorse,” She said. As to the inaugural American Bar Association (ABA) International Human Rights Award given to her, she was quoted as saying she did not “acknowledge, recognize or accept” the award.

It’s obviously too soon to analyze with confidence but it sounds like another of the curious deals that are being struck between PRC oppressors and courageous but hapless human rights victims, deals involving the welfare of spouses, children, parents, lovers etc as well as the target whose captivity and torture are at stake.

This is all so sad, not only for the oppressed, broken victims but also for China and its standing in the world. These pathetic, ludicrous “confessions” and charges are obviously designed for a Chinese audience, but tens of millions of Chinese are not foolish enough to believe these farces.

Yet the damage to China that these torture-inspired fairy tales inflict abroad is incalculable. Does the Chinese leadership not see this? Xi Jinping is holding himself and the country up to increasing worldwide ridicule. This is the Chinese Communist Party’s distinctive contribution to the playbook of international Communist abuse of the legal system and promises to rank in notoriety with Stalin’s infamous purge trials, although so far no Chinese victims have been formally executed!

I’d like to think that if the ABA, in its new vision, could honor every detained human rights lawyer in China, it could guarantee them some minimal concession from their oppressors, but we know that international prizes can only be helpful in a few cases and certainly cannot free even Nobel Prize winners!

I don’t know what this foretells re the ABA’s work in China. Certainly it adds fuel to the fire of the continuing debate over what the appropriate ABA response to the vicious repression of human rights lawyers should be. If this case results in the termination of the ABA’s praiseworthy activities in China, it would be another classic instance of what Beijing propagandists like to call “dropping a rock on your own foot”.

China's 709 Crackdown on Human Rights Lawyers: One Year On

It is encouraging that petitions, protests, reports, documentaries, editorials, op eds and blogs seek to alert the world to the first anniversary on July 9 of the Party’s most recent and intense crackdown on human rights lawyers, collaborating activists and their loyal families. It is discouraging to realize how little impact all these efforts will have on Xi Jinping and his spear carriers or even on the Chinese people, most of whom are deprived of their right under China’s Constitution to know about such efforts. The scholarly work of Eva Pils, Terry Halliday, Liu Sida and others helps us to understand the motivations of these martyrs to the cause of political and civil rights. Yet how long can we expect even the bravest and most dedicated human rights advocates to endure in the cruelly punishing conditions that Xi Jinping has imposed upon them?

Although signs of internal friction and power struggles increasingly emerge from Xi’s non-transparent polity, the odds still favor his continuing to rule for another five years after the 2017 Party Congress, and some insiders doubt that he will voluntarily surrender the throne in accordance with Party rules in 2022. This recalls the examples set by Marcos in the Philippines and Park Choon-Hee in South Korea. Yet those East Asian precedents for illegally extending dictatorship, like the unspeakable abuses of Mao Zedong, in each case led to a public reaction that produced a more civilized, lawful regime. In China, unfortunately, the post-Mao reaction proved to be halting and incomplete, and Xi Jinping’s four years have featured repression more than progress. Comparisons are stimulating between the Xi regime and Russia under Putin, who successfully reversed his country’s post-Soviet democratic tide of the early 1990s. Will Xi, who admires Putin, seek some similarly imaginative formula for legitimizing the extension of his rule? How long will China’s human rights heroes have to suffer and sustain their faith?