Is there a quiet pre-Olympics crackdown on human rights lawyers?

By Jerome A. Cohen

I was tempted not to post this report of the official disappearance of another human rights lawyer, since events like this occur so often perhaps they no longer constitute “news” and attract public interest. Yet some observers believe that a special, below-the-radar effort may have begun to prevent the PRC’s continuing harsh repression from being exposed to the media as the Winter Olympics approaches. The long-anticipated last month “trial” of the well-respected and long-confined lawyer-activists Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi may have been postponed until after the Olympics or after the 20th Party Congress at year’s end (or even the 2049 100thanniversary of the PRC’s establishment!). There has been much PRC silence about many other long-pending cases. This week’s detention of lawyer Xie Yang may be designed “merely” to remove him from society until after the Games or, unlike his previous detentions, he may this time be permanently lost to life like the famous human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng who, after repeated formal imprisonments failed to halt his protests, has simply not been heard about for several years. Like many, Gao is a victim not of Xi Jinping’s vaunted “rule by law” but of lawlessness. What should the International Olympics Committee be doing in response to this situation? The Amnesty report cited here is especially worth reading.

The Forthcoming Trials of Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong

Xu Zhiyong (left) and Ding Jiaxi

By Jerome A. Cohen

I recently received a sad message from Shengchun Sophie Luo, the wife of human rights and commercial lawyer Ding Jiaxi. Ding and the terrific legal scholar and political reformer Xu Zhiyong are set to be prosecuted soon, but neither the lawyers nor family members have received any information regarding the trial dates. December 6-7 will mark the second anniversary of the Xiamen meeting in which they and about twenty other activists met for a couple of days of discussions reviewing the human rights situation in China. That led soon after to a wide scale roundup of as many of the group as could not evade arrest. Xu and Ding seem to be regarded as ringleaders of a subversive effort and are finally expected to be brought to separate trials before the year’s end. Two recent letters summarizing their plight are linked here and here and reveal the realities of the PRC criminal process, including extended and harsh incommunicado detention, persistent torture, long-delayed access to defense lawyers and illegal restrictions on defense lawyers activities.

Here are summaries of the indictments (Ding Jiaxi here and Xu Zhiyong here) and an excellent analysis of the cases by China Change.

I admire the continuing optimism that reportedly sustains the defendants’ will to resist injustice, but do not share it. Nevertheless, I hope others will do all that they can to protest these tragic abuses by the PRC even if, to borrow the traditional Chinese simile employed by the disappeared tennis star Ms, Peng Shuai, “it’s like throwing an egg against a stone!”

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.

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?

Video talk: why lawyers are not dentists!

Here is my talk for a conference in Taipei earlier this month about the plight of Chinese rights lawyers in the current severe climate: "Public Lawyers in Transitional Societies – Why Lawyers Are Not Dentists!"

My video talks on “The Governance of China”

Here are my video talks for the New York Review of Books conference in Hong Kong on “The Governance of China,” which just took place over the weekend. Congrats to the organizer for a successful conference. 

1. Some Legal Vignettes about China (12 minutes):

How China’s ideology has affected its legal development and the current challenges facing the legal profession

2. Legal and Constitutional Reform (24 minutes):

How the Chinese Communist Party maintains unfettered power and how law reformers hope to restrain it

Chinese Communist Party’s Persecution of Churches: China Change’s Interviews with “Pastor L”

By Jerome A. Cohen

Photo from ChinaChange: "Believers and SWAT clashed when the cross of this church in Wenzhou was removed on July 21, 2014. TIME Magazine has a video report here"

China Change has just released a remarkable interview with “Pastor L.” The interview not only updates us about the plight of Christianity in an important area of China but also offers a persuasive analysis of what underlies the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of religions generally. Indeed, it demonstrates the similarities between the CCP’s persecution of religions and its systematic attacks on all freedoms of expression, media, teaching, research and publication, and the legal profession to which victims of suppression vainly turn for protection against an arbitrary and repressive state. This interview deserves widespread dissemination. One need not be a religious person – and I am not – to appreciate its significance.

The interview does prompt a few immediate thoughts. It consistently refers to “Christianity” without distinguishing among the varieties of organized believers who have earned that designation. Readers who are interested in how many of the affected church groups are “Protestants” of one kind or other and how many are “Catholic” can find more information in the first interview China Change released here.

The interview’s account of how local business people, a formidably successful group, have helped to spread the faith during their business trips throughout China evokes thoughts of Max Weber and the connections between capitalism and religions.

It also offers the pathetic story of how Beijing lawyer Zhang Kai, one of several counsel seeking to defend the churches but secretly detained like many of his clients, has been coerced, like them, to issue a jailhouse statement claiming that he no longer wants the help of defense lawyers. This is a vivid illustration of the “rule of law” in practice, as distinguished from the speeches of Xi Jinping, the preaching of the Party plenums and the reformist norms of the National People’s Congress and the Supreme People’s Court. Church believers could render further service by doing empirical studies of the many cases involving interaction of the legal system with their daily lives.

I look forward to further reports from the estimable “Pastor L” and China Change. 

Who gets punished?: Sons and daughters of rights lawyers - Collective punishment in China

by Jerome Cohen

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

Wang Yu, a leading rights lawyer detained in July during a large-scale crackdown on lawyers, must be under greater pressures than ever. Not only is she detained, but also her teenage son Bao Zhuoxuan has been prevented from leaving China to study abroad. When the boy tried to escape China days ago, he was caught in Myanmar and brought back to the country. Chinese media now claim that this is “a plot by external forces, who forcibly drew a minor into the vortex of politics and used the case to vilify China's rule of law.” Wang Yu, detained for more than three months now, appeared on state TV to condemn the supposed smuggling of her son (See Verna Yu’s report here). Meanwhile a son of another prominent rights lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan, has also been denied permission to leave China to pursue an overseas education.

There is no doubt that in fact, not in formal law, the Chinese Government has been resorting to collective punishment of the family members of those it regards as political offenders. Indeed, the People’s Republic has been doing this for a long time in order to punish people it deems to be dissidents and to force them to “confess” to alleged crimes they have not committed.

Such formal collective punishment was abolished over a century ago in China as part of reformers’ efforts to bring Qing dynasty justice up to the standards of the Western imperial powers and end the incubus of “extraterritorial” foreign jurisdiction. Yet it persisted in practice under China’s post-imperial, pre-Communist regimes. Chiang Kai-shek’s government continued to secretly mete out collective family punishment on Taiwan. Many still recall how Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) police even killed the children and mother of a distinguished Taiwan independence advocate while he was in prison.

Is collective punishment happening more often in the PRC today than in the past? It’s impossible for outside observers to know. Surely the Internet and social media keep us better informed than in the past.

The authorities evidently think it is an effective tool, since it can transform even the most courageous dissident into the Communist Party’s compliant victim.

This vicious practice may soon backfire, however, since knowledge of its use is increasingly widespread and leaves in tatters any further attempt by the Xi Jinping regime to resort to “soft power”. I am glad Xi’s daughter had the opportunity for a Harvard education. It is a disgrace that he so often denies this opportunity to the children of so many worthy citizens.