The sentencing of Chinese human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong: a tragic farce

Jiang Tianyong was sentenced to two years on the charge of “inciting subversion of state power.” His prosecution/persecution has been a tragic farce from the day he was detained a year ago. 

Jiang was a primary school teacher who decided that he could do more for his country if he studied law and learned how to defend human rights. After doing so he became a partner of the dynamic human rights lawyer Li Heping, and I met them both at a lunch meeting with their client, the blind “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng, just, a couple of hours before Chen was literally seized by Shandong police who came to Beijing without notifying their local counterparts. Chen was about to meet with the then Washington Post reporter Phil Pan.

Li Heping was prosecuted earlier than Jiang, was convicted and served terrible prison time before being “released” in a now typical NRR (“non-release release”) and is now inaccessible while recovering at home.

Li’s younger brother, Li Chunfu, also became a human rights lawyer and met the same fate as the older brother on whom he had modeled his career. Li Chun-fu was “released” from prison before his brother and returned home a virtual vegetable suffering from severe mental illness induced by his prison experience, where he had been forced to take debilitating drugs in the guise of (un)necessary medicine for non-existent illness.

Jiang Tianyong, despite disbarment, was able to elude formal detention for a longer period than the other lawyers and still be helpful to detained human rights advocates and their oppressed families. Jiang knew how to work within the limits for a long time. I recall inviting him to dinner one night in Beijing before the 709 campaign began. He said “I’ll have to call you back to confirm in half an hour, since I have to go outside and ask my security police minder for permission”. He later called back and said that the minder told him “If you want to go to the office tomorrow, you should not go to the dinner.” So instead he sent an assistant. This was an illustration of the restrictions on many human rights activists that might be termed PDD (“pre-detention detention”)!

Another, more ordinary pre-detention restriction of Jiang’s freedom was earlier illustrated when Chen Guangcheng, after his forced return to his rural home, was subjected to severe house arrest. Chen telephoned me in Beijing and asked me to persuade a lawyer to travel to his Shandong village that night in an effort to break his illegal confinement. I telephoned Jiang Tianyong, who agreed to book a train ticket. He later called me and said that the police, having listened to our phone conversation, had forbidden him from making the trip. At least that spared Jiang the beating by village thugs who, under police guidance, always used violence to prevent outside contact with Chen.

Collective Family Punishment - Challenge and Response

Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

New York Times’ Chris Buckley and Didi Kirsten Tatlow wrote a good story a few days ago about the resistance and resilience of the wives of Chinese human rights lawyers who have been detained.

These recent spousal responses do represent something new because they are frequently collective or joint rather than individual actions as occasionally occurred in the past and also because the Internet and social media offer opportunities for protest that were not previously available.

Moreover, each such spousal protest stimulates others, even in Taiwan. The Mainland protests of Xie Yang’s wife and Li Heping’s wife, for example, seem to have inspired the feisty wife of Li Ming-che, the Taiwan activist who has been detained in China since March 19.

Another new aspect of current protests is a greater willingness of the spouses to go to Washington in an effort to light fires under the Congress and the Executive Branch. Families of jailed dissidents and their jailed lawyers have long fled to the U.S. for refuge, as some oppressed lawyers have also, but, prior to the 2015 crackdown, they did not generally stir up protests here. And recent protests here have not been limited to Washington but have also taken place in New York and other cities, with college-age children often joining mothers whose English is not fluent.

So one might say that Xi Jinping’s resort to collective family punishments, which were formally abolished at the end of the Manchu dynasty, has evoked a collective family response.

The Courageous Spouses of Human Rights Lawyers and Activists

Prominent rights lawyer Li Heping, who has been held in detention since the “709 crackdown” in July 2015, received a sentence of three years in prison but with a four-year suspended sentence, and deprivation of his political rights for four years, for subverting state power in a secret trial followed by a public sentencing on April 28.

Video statement by Wang Qiaoling and Li Wenzu, April 28, 2017

Li’s wife, Wang Qiaoling, and Li Wenzu, the wife of detained lawyer Wang Quanzhang, issued a powerful and revealing video in response (watch here; see here for the translation by China Change). Both women have been outspoken throughout their husbands’ detention.

Beijing is facing a new phenomenon – the effective outrage of the brilliant and courageous wives of tortured human rights lawyers. One can only admire the bold stand of these long-suffering women.

Moreover, their statement of today lays bare a relatively unknown punishment for “released” activists and their families – “house arrest” for the entire family but not in their house but in that of the police. And without even the formal fig-leaf of the Criminal Procedure Law’s “residential surveillance”, which the police have been using more and more to lock up human rights lawyers in incommunicado detention for initial periods of six months.

Perhaps the righteous collective opposition of these and other spouses of detained human rights lawyers and activists has inspired the continuing public protests in Taiwan by the able wife of Lee Ming-che against her activist Taiwan husband’s detention on the Mainland since he was “disappeared” on March 19. This has given Beijing another well-deserved headache, one that is having a big negative impact on cross-strait relations.