By Jerome A. Cohen
It is indeed great news that Wang Quanzhang has finally been allowed to return to Beijing and his family. Many who supported him and his human rights cause for five years will be moved by the video of the family reunion.
The significance of Wang’s release from “non-release release” (伪释放) in Jinan after a week of the Party’s uncertain waffling in the unusual glare of foreign media has yet to be determined, of course. What are the conditions, if any, of his return to Beijing?
Did his dynamic, gallant wife manage to resist the usual pressures to keep the ex-prisoner at home cut off from the world? Was her illness and hospital trip the straw that broke the Party’s back? Will Wang, having already had unusual access to people and media in Jinan, continue to have such access in Beijing? The Party may decide it’s too late to lock the barn door. Will he now actually be freer to tell the full story of the cruelty inflicted upon him so unfairly by the Party’s criminal justice system?
And might this case indicate recognition by the Party that the police should not have unlimited discretion in determining the scope of post-conviction “deprivation of political rights” (DPR)? After all, as the Soviet origins of this largely unrecognized punishment demonstrate, DPR was thought by many merely to deprive an ex-convict of the rights to vote and stand for election, not an enormous deprivation given the realities of Communist politics.