China’s cyber monitoring leaves little room for free expression even among small groups.
Eva Dou of the Wall Street Journal has a great report on “Jailed for a Text: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups.” It is worthy of a Pulitzer Prize for the insights it gives into contemporary China and its legal system. It illustrates the currently enhanced degree of repression and the impact it has on ordinary citizens. Orwell has arrived. The increasingly smooth integration of China’s cyber monitoring systems, its various police organizations, its “Justice” Ministry, its prosecutors and its judges – no small feat – now leaves little room for free expression even among small groups.
Of course, as Mr. Chen, the protagonist in Eva Dou’s story, discovered, one is really tempting punishment by joking on WeChat about one of the most powerful officials in China, Mr. Meng Jianzhu, who had served as chief of the Ministry of Public Security before becoming czar of the Party’s all-powerful Political-Legal Commission that controls and coordinates all the institutions that comprise the legal system.
This story has so many implications. It shows how many intelligent, ambitious Chinese who have improved their lives under the Communist system have gradually awakened to its methods and costs and come to question and even modestly challenge it. The story also illustrates the fate that many challengers, and the lawyers who are asked to help them, quickly suffer.
Large numbers of Chinese like Mr. Wang are nagged by a sense of injustice that is universal, no matter what Xi Jinping preaches, and become petitioners who find no relief in the system. Many lawyers who have never thought of themselves as human rights advocates nevertheless become drawn into situations that make them feel compelled to vindicate the lawyer’s obligations and then are disbarred and often arbitrarily detained, criminally punished and then eternally harassed after serving their formal jail terms.
Even Mo Shaoping, a lawyer brave enough to have signed Charter 2008, whose prominence as China’s most famous human rights lawyer has allowed him more continuing scope for courageous defense than many other colleagues, has now lost his WeChat account. This is a warning shot across the bow from the Party, which has long restricted his professional activities without risking the domestic and foreign condemnation that his detention would incur.
Of course, if the draft law to formally establish the National Supervisory Commission is enacted next March, it will be even easier for the Party to detain rights activists, including lawyers, without having to violate the country’s laws that are now so blatantly ignored or distorted.