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on recent developments in the rule of law in Asia and China
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By Jerome A. Cohen
Here's my op-ed in today's SCMP, China should not use the coronavirus as an excuse to silence human rights activists like Wang Quanzhang. "Covid-19 has outlived its use as an excuse for repression. This time the world is watching, so the party faces a challenge to its ingenuity, or at least its brazenness."
By Jerome A. Cohen
The excellent Radio Free Asia report, Chinese Lawyer Withdraws Appeal Against Disciplinary Sanction, gives valuable insight into how the Chinese Communist Party’s suppression of speech hinders the fight against Covid-19. The woman lawyer suppressed in this instance was not a conventional human rights lawyer but an idealistic general lawyer trying to expose the government’s mishandling of the health crisis. She would surely have been disbarred from practice, as another local lawyer was, had she been more energetic in seeking and revealing virus-related information or more resistant to the professional institutions that sought to stifle her.
The CHRD report cited by RFA is very important since it gives details about how thousands of people have been persecuted by the Ministry of Public Security for allegedly disseminating “false and harmful information”. CHRD itself has documented roughly 900 cases of persons recently sanctioned by the public security forces for “spreading misinformation” or ”disturbing public order” regarding the epidemic. Almost 20% were sent to police detention for up to 15 days, a process that, under the “Public Order Administration Punishment Act”, requires no participation by defense lawyers or any court. Conditions in police detention cells are often appallingly overcrowded, coercive and unsanitary.
The RFA report also gives keen insight into the plight of Chinese lawyers who try to speak out. Their law firm is pressed by the Lawyers Association and the official Judicial Bureau to stop them or fire them. If the firm fails to take sufficient action to suppress its lawyer, it will be closed down by the Bureau, and the lawyer will be disbarred and even jailed. It is notable that the courageous lawyer involved in this case, Ms. Liu Yingying, was coerced into abandoning her appeal against the reprimand she had received from the Lawyers Association for posting “inappropriate comments” and had to admit her mistake, delete her post and reflect sincerely on her error. That was why the Lawyers Association, which is supposed to protect the rights of lawyers, said it would treat her leniently!
This may be a rare opportunity to press the PRC to make a humane human rights decision. Will the world seize it?
By Jerome A. Cohen
While striving mightily to overcome the blow that its handling of the Coronavirus has dealt its aspirations for “soft power”, the Chinese party-state is now confronted by a new dilemma — the rising tide of international protests against the continuing confinement of famous human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang following his formal release from almost five years in prison on Sunday.
The PRC’s now customary modus operandi is to ostensibly release Chinese human rights lawyers after completion of their long terms of wrongfully-imposed criminal punishment, but then immediately deprive them of their freedom forever via the application of comprehensive secret police measures, including total disappearance, that assure their enduring silence. This is what I have long called the “Non-Release Release”, what has until recently been a low visibility, low political cost, extralegal procedure that has done less damage to the PRC’s public image than a formal criminal sentence to life in prison or the death penalty might occasion.
But the current Wang case presents a challenge to this horrendous practice. The PRC’s too clever resort to the excuse of needing to shelter Wang for a post-release 14-day Coronavirus testing period has begun to focus international attention on what his gallant wife Li Wenzu has rightly condemned as its shameful NRR practices. This has given world opinion a rare chance to influence a PRC human rights decision.
What will the PRC do with Wang at the end of 14 days? Announce that he needs yet another 7 days of further surveillance? He had already tested negatively five times for the virus before his departure from prison! And how will it justify the continuing prohibitions on his electronic as well as personal contacts after that period? Will it claim that his sentence to a five-year deprivation of his political rights following prison release requires his total exclusion from all society? Given the gradual mobilization of public opinion, both inside and outside China, against disgraceful persecution of a courageous lawyer and human rights, what will be the calculation of PRC propagandists and leaders?
Wang Quanzhang (left) and his wife Li Wenzu with their son in 2015. Photo: AP
On April 5, Chinese rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, the last lawyer of the group convicted during China’s 2015 infamous “709” crackdown, will be released from prison since his detention in July 2015. He is unlikely to be a free man, however.
I’ve used “Non-Release Release” (NRR) to describe the phenomenon of individual rights activists and lawyers in China often being released from prison into other, nominally “free” forms of what amounts to detention, such as de facto house arrest or enforced return and restriction to their native village. But NRR can also be used for large numbers of ordinary people, such as Muslims in the Xinjiang region. Many Uyghurs and other minorities there have reportedly been released from “re-education center” prisons, only to be forced to work in factories in various places.
NRR is nothing new in China. It came into use as a system at least as early as the Communist Party’s infamous “anti-rightist campaign” of 1957-58 when the government promulgated regulations that formally authorized the notorious, supposedly non-criminal, punishment of “reeducation through labor” (RETL). In providing for eventual release from RETL’s forced labor camps, the regulations permitted the police to keep on the labor camp premises, after their formal release, those prisoners who had no fixed abode, job or family awaiting them.
I knew, for example, an Indonesian Chinese who had studied law in China in the mid-1950s, served briefly as one of the new Soviet-style lawyers that Beijing had introduced during a brief liberalizing experiment, and was then rounded up for RETL in remote Xinjiang in 1958. He was “released’ in 1961 at the end of his three-year sentence but forcibly kept for another two decades at the same isolated work camp where he had been confined, ostensibly because he had no family in China to which to return. Although he was paid slightly more than when detained under RETL, he was actually forced to provide the regime with cheap labor in a part of China where most people did not want to work. Obviously, this arrangement was also a type of stability maintenance, political control.
The NRR system has evolved continuously, of course, over the years despite the formal termination of RETL in 2013. By then the police had acquired a lot of experience keeping under continuing control people who had been formally released after completing criminal sentences or even after being detained by the criminal process without ever being convicted or after having been “merely” detained under RETL or similar supposedly “non-criminal” sanctions. One could even say that former Party chief and Premier Zhao Ziyang became a victim of NRR, since, after being toppled just before the massacre of June 4, 1989, he was informally but effectively confined outside of prison — in the Party leadership’s comfortable living quarters — for the last 16 years of his life!
In the past decade NRR has been customized to suit the Party’s needs for effectively suppressing human rights lawyers on a more individualized basis than a formal system might allow, and also for a longer time than formal criminal or administrative sanctions might seem suitable. To the public, NRR looks better than sentencing a lawyer to life in prison, but it can nevertheless amount to a more discreet form of stifling someone forever. For example, whatever became of the great, courageous lawyer Gao Zhisheng? While repeatedly subjected to the formal criminal punishment system, his resistance generated periodic bad publicity for the Party and government. Since his last “release”, however, which forced him back to his native village, he has disappeared. Do people still remember him? Many wrongly assume he has happily been “reformed”.
Think blind “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng, who, after four years in prison, was “released” to his rural farmhouse with a couple of hundred thugs guarding him around the clock until his miraculous 2012 escape to the American embassy.
What will Wang Quanzhang’s “release” on April 5 amount to? It might have been more appropriate to release him on April Fool’s Day!
By Jerome A. Cohen
Here is reference to a moving and informative tribute to the great but now almost forgotten human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, by Professor/lawyer TENG Biao, himself a great human rights activist now living and working for the cause in exile in the U.S. Teng confirms that there has been no news of Gao for two years. Gao has been subjected to unspeakable tortures since first detained in 2006 and, when last heard from, had been transformed from one of China’s leading business lawyers into a pathetic human vegetable.
Gao Zhisheng (source: RFA)
As I have written here before, in March 2005, in a Beijing discussion with about a dozen human rights lawyers who were debating how to respond to attempts to restrict their defense efforts in court, Gao boldly favored open opposition to Party violations of the PRC’s Constitution and criminal procedure legislation. He argued forcefully that true law reform would never be effective in China so long as the Party monopolized power. I said that I agreed with him but that, if he continued to voice those views in public, he would soon lose his freedom and be of no use to anyone.
Sadly, we were both right. We should be grateful to Professor Teng for recalling the sacrifice of this great person.
By Jerome A. Cohen
The case of human rights lawyer WANG Quanzhang (my Washington Post op-ed) is one more tale of PRC cruelty toward a leading lawyer and his family but deserves special further scrutiny from several points of view.
When finally allowed to see him after more than 1,400 days into his detention, his wife Li Wenzu discovered the reason why the regime delayed so long and resorted to so many ridiculous ploys to deny her and any defense lawyers access to him. Like some other well-known professional colleagues, Wang has been reduced to a vegetable through a combination of tortures, physical and mental, as this brief account makes clear.
Yet there are still unsolved mysteries about the case that render it unusual among the many similar examples of the crushing of the right to defense in violation of China’s Constitution and legislation and the PRC’s international human rights commitments. Why, contrary to standard practice even in “sensitive” cases, has no court judgment confirming and supposedly explaining his long-delayed conviction and sentence been issued to his wife and the public? Is it yet known when his anticipated prison release will occur? Has he, like others, been forcibly subjected to unnecessary and unwanted “medical” treatment that weakened his extraordinary resolve to resist his lengthy incommunicado interrogation?
What will be the terms of his release? Will it be another illustration of what I have often called the “non-release release” (NRR) because the victim is in effect illegally transferred from one mode of loss of personal freedom to another involving less financial and reputational cost to the regime? So many valiant human rights lawyers have been neutered in one way or other after ostensible “release” from their years of futile resistance to unspeakable forms of detention.
I hope many journalists will pursue these inquiries.
By Jerome A. Cohen
I've long sympathized with the plight of Wang Quanzhang and his family, but never seemed to find the right moment among too many sad choices for comment. Here is my op-ed on Wang from today's Washington Post.
By Jerome A. Cohen
I've just uploaded on my SSRN my latest article—"Law's Relation to Political Power in China: A Backward Transition," which is slated to appear in Social Research: An International Quarterly in the Spring of 2019.
In the article, I examine China's legal progress and regress in recent years. While noting certain legislative and judicial advances, I discuss the continuing reality of the unchecked powers of the police, the plight of Chinese human rights lawyers and the newly established National Supervision Commission that significantly expands the Chinese Communist Party’s incommunicado detention system to all deemed to be government officials.
I'm pasting the introduction below. Comments are welcome!
By and large, for the past dozen years, China’s professed transition toward the rule of law has witnessed more setbacks than progress. The extent to which the exercise of governmental power should be subject to domestic and international legal restraints continues to be a matter of enormous importance. This is true in every country and in relations among countries in our increasingly interdependent world. The earthshaking impact of Donald Trump’s election to the American presidency has made the relationship of law to power as preached and practiced by the United States a virtually universal concern. Yet, as Americans and others strive to cope with this new challenge, the world is also increasingly anxious about how a rising China—with more than four times the population of the United States and almost as much economic strength—respects the “rule of law” at home and abroad.
This essay, building on the excellent analysis by Jean-Philippe Béja (Social Research: An International Quarterly, this issue) updating his earlier overview of the political situation in the Central Realm, will focus on China’s domestic legal situation. In doing so, we must be fully aware that the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—an increasingly oppressive Marxist-Leninist dictatorship—denies foreign scholars, and even its own people, the opportunities for knowledge and analysis that American freedoms of expression and transparency offer domestic and foreign observers of the United States. I regret the limitations that these restrictions impose upon my comments.
Keywords: China, rule of law, legal reforms, human rights lawyers, police powers, National Supervision Commission
By Jerome A. Cohen
Chinese human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison for subversion. But, since we have not yet seen the court’s judgment and don’t know the details of his long detention, we cannot be certain what this sentence means.
Wang has been held in pre-trial and post-trial detention since July 2015, and detention time served is usually deducted from the sentence (with one-to-one credit for the days of regular detention and only half a credit for the days during which he was held in “residential surveillance at a designated location” or RSDL). This probably means that Wang can be expected to be released in April 2020 and perhaps even earlier, depending on how long he was confined in RSDL rather than regular criminal detention. BUT the court may have deviated from the practice of giving credit for time already served prior to sentence, which would mean no release until mid-2023!
In light of the harsh sentences rendered to some other lawyers punished in the 709 crackdown, IF the court has followed the standard sentencing practice, it appears that the Chinese Communist Party/government has gone relatively (and unexpectedly) light on Wang. So many factors go into the sentencing decision. How has he behaved? What shape is he in? Has he made any apparently sincere commitment to abide by the secret promises usually extracted from a convicted person to be a “good boy” upon release? Has the Party decided to look lenient because of the intense world interest, the abusive and unusually lengthy pre-sentence detention Wang suffered and the current widespread international condemnation of China for its abominable misbehavior toward the three Canadians who are being punished in retaliation for Canada’s handling of America’s extradition request of the Huawei executive?
Pressures on Wang not to appeal must be very great. Some convicted defendants decline to appeal because they know that the appeal process will not result in a favorable outcome and only extends the time they will remain confined in conditions that are often much more uncomfortable than the prison cell that awaits them once the appellate process has run its course. To be sure, we don’t know in what kind of shape Wang is mentally and physically and whether he has been subjected to any of the horrific “medical” treatment designed to break the will of so many political defendants. He may not be in condition to carefully weigh the wisdom of an appeal. If he is still capable of rational decision and retains his courageous determination, he may wish to appeal simply to avoid the inference that he accepts the decision as a correct and just one.
In any event it should be noted that only giving half sentencing credit for time served in RSDL is grossly unfair, since conditions tend to be more coercive than if the suspect is detained in an ordinary jail, even though an ordinary detention cell can be extremely uncomfortable. RSDL is not “house arrest” in one’s own home but in that of the secret police. I think double credit should be given for every day of RSDL until that vile detention practice is abolished, as it should be!!
The Code of Criminal Procedure limits RSDL to a three-month term that can be renewed once. Yet I have long suspected that police have meted out more than the maximum six-months RSDL term on some occasions by purporting to charge the hapless suspect with another “national security” offense that supposedly deserves their investigation. This may have occurred in the Wang case and perhaps the delay in issuing the judgment is related to an attempt to obscure that situation.
Wang Quanzhang, wife and son (Wang Quanxiu via AP)
By Jerome A. Cohen
Wang Quanzhang, who has been detained incommunicado since July 2015, was reportedly tried today in a secret trial that neither his wife nor supporters could attend.
Wang Quanzhang and his wife Li Wenzu, with their child. Credit: Li Wenzu, via Associated Press
I didn’t have the good fortune to know Wang Quanzhang but I know what he stands for and what the public martyrdom that is his trial symbolizes. Wang, of course, represents the best, yet vain, efforts of many valiant Chinese human rights lawyers to establish the rule of law in an increasingly repressive Communist system. Like so many of his colleagues, Wang has been crushed after losing his freedom for more than 1,200 days. The wonder is that it has taken his captors such an impressively long time to prepare the secret trial.
In a year when “justice” has been chosen to be the world’s most prominent word, what we are allowed to know of Wang’s so-called trial is a brief but potent demonstration of “injustice”. Yet Chairman Mao once said that we should never underestimate the educational value of negative examples!
Jerome A. Cohen
Amnesty has just issued a plea for urgent action on behalf of what remains of lawyer Jiang Tianyong. Amnesty’s announcement seems understated despite the large cap title. Jiang is exposed to more than the “imminent risk of torture and other ill-treatments”. He has in actuality long been suffering from such abuse that is designed to break him as a person, to destroy him both mentally and physically. And, as we know from many cases including those of Gao Zhisheng and Wang Quanzhang, this calculated campaign to end China’s human rights lawyering seems to be gradually thinning the ranks of human rights lawyers. The many, sometimes bizarre, procedural violations in Jiang’s case are a reminder of the realities of Chinese justice when it comes to those who challenge the regime. His captors should be investigated on charges of what may well amount to “attempted murder”.
I know Jiang but have never cooperated with Wang Quanzhang, whose case appears to be even more outrageous. After three years of absolute silence about Wang’s fate the Party has reportedly decided to finally bring him to “trial” in the near future but his mental and physical condition are both in doubt, and he has not been allowed to retain his own lawyer but must accept a government-selected one.
Despite Chinese Government maneuvers to gain control over the international human rights institutions and the current relative indifference of the U.S. Government to human rights issues, greater efforts must be made to try to stop the PRC campaign against human rights lawyers. One important, if largely symbolic, response would be for the U.S. to impose Magnitsky Act sanctions against those Chinese officials who are directly responsible for executing this notorious campaign, starting at the top of the Communist Party.
By Jerome A. Cohen
Fordham Law School’s prestigious Leitner Center for Human Rights gave Professor Carl Minzner’s book—End of an Era: How China's Authoritarian Revival is Undermining Its Rise—a splendid launch in an all-day program on Monday that focused on its implications for the future of “rights lawyers”. At lunch Carl gave an eloquent overview of the book, which is learned, analytical and stimulating while maintaining a highly readable style throughout. It is plainly directed at a broad and influential audience and likely to have a significant impact on the current reevaluation of the PRC’s power. Teng Biao and I made subsequent comments.
Teng emphasized the totalitarian aspects of the Xi Jinping era and maintained that the U.S. has a special duty to promote democracy in China and that the political costs of transition to democracy have been exaggerated. Among a number of other points he also urged Western nations to defend against PRC efforts to undermine their own democracies.
I focused on the implications for rights lawyers, urging them to recognize that the current era of extreme repression will pass, just as the Cultural Revolution did, and that they should in the interim try to avoid martyrdom by pursuing their craft within the unfair restrictions imposed by the regime in order to survive and recruit others to prepare for the better days to come. Too many brave and able lawyers have already been eliminated as functioning professionals as a result of torture and other punishments including “medication” designed to destroy their mind as well as their will, with corresponding harm to their families.
My final point branded Xi Jinping’s efforts to justify his repression by invoking China’s authoritarian “Confucian” past as ineffective and hollow, as demonstrated by today’s Taiwan and South Korea in addition to Japan and by the prominent roles that rights lawyers are playing in those societies. China’s present leader seeks “soft power” as well as military and economic power but does not seem to realize that his repression of rights lawyers is increasingly earning the world’s ridicule and scorn.
Teng Biao made the proper point that it is very difficult for even cautious rights lawyers to always know where the regime is drawing the line at any given time, and thus some have become unwilling martyrs to the rule of law.
By Jerome A. Cohen
Wu Gan; source: China Change.
Xie Yang; source: Changsha Intermediate Court.
The two Christmas cases of Wu Gan and Xie Yang—victims of China’s 709 Crackdown on human rights activists and lawyers in 2015—demonstrate the continuing importance and benefits of pleading guilty. “Leniency for those who confess, Severity for those who resist.” (坦白从宽，抗拒从严) has been the fundamental maxim of criminal justice in the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) erected into high public principle what has long quietly been the practice of many legal systems. The insistence on confession characterized Chinese justice centuries before the rise of the CCP and for many reasons.
Confession admits the correctness of the government’s charge and helps to relieve those who administer the system of doubts or feelings of guilt they might harbor. Confession reinforces prevailing ideology. It also avoids the embarrassment and risks to administrators that appeals can cause and the delay and administrative costs involved. In China refusal to confess and insistence on appeal are seen to constitute an attack on the prosecution and the government. Confession encourages others to follow suit, and it is viewed as the first step toward the reform of the accused.
Yet how persuasive can any of these factors be when torture is so often the stimulus for confession and everyone knows this? Moreover, at least in non-political cases, the CCP is increasingly concerned about the frequency of wrongful convictions caused by coerced confessions.
The Christmas timing of the two cases is worth noting. There is no doubt the PRC government wants to be thought well of abroad as well as at home, which is why it spends so much on a worldwide system of propaganda and seeks to control the UN and other organizations regarding the PRC’s suppression of human rights. Of course, it prefers not to reveal many abominable acts, which is often possible because of its domination of the media and even social media.
The timing of its repressive human rights acts depends on many factors. Certainly, when it’s possible to manipulate the timing of acts of repression that are likely to be condemned by the world, the PRC is eager to do so in order to reduce publicity and minimize harm to its quest for soft power. The dates of trial hearings and sentencings are one example among many others.
The twinned stories of Wu Gan and Xie Yang may be destined to continue and provide more grist for the mills of those who study the PRC’s expansive and imaginative detention policies. It will be important to see, of course, how long Wu Gan can remain alive and resistant in captivity. It will also be important to see to what extent Xie Yang, having reversed his previous stand under torture, “confessed” on demand and thereby won exemption from further formal imprisonment, will be allowed to resume his former human rights advocacy or, like most of his comrades, remain in what I call “non-release ‘release’”.
The misleading term “house arrest” no longer does justice to the varieties of informal, unauthorized, suffocating restrictions on their freedom that most “released” human rights advocates are suffering. Indeed, many human rights activists suffer such restrictions even before they are formally detained! The PRC has blurred the line between “detention” and “freedom”, giving new meaning to these words.
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.
Zhu Shengwu. Credit: China Change
This sad tale reported by China Change (link here) offers vivid insight into the reality of attempting to defend human rights in China. The story of young lawyer Zhu Shengwu, who started as a commercial lawyer but whose exposure to injustice led him to professional suicide, is really the story of two other lawyers as well. It is good to know that the famous defender Pu Zhiqiang, despite disbarment and living under the coercion of a three-year suspended prison sentence, still manages to be heard from on occasion in his own clever way. And his recollection of Su Bo, the idealistic human rights firebrand of Peking University law students in the heady days before June 4 who is now an instrument of oppression as head of the local Lawyers Association, makes one want to cry and cry out.
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
Photo: 中國維權律師關注組 China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group
Last week we had news that the courageous lawyer Jiang Tianyong has been formally “arrested” after being held incommunicado since last November. It is sadly ironic that, on the same day, the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuracy announced a new standard for compensating citizens who have been illegally deprived of their personal freedom (see HRIC Daily Brief here). At 258.89 RMB (USD38) per day my friend Jiang may someday receive more compensation than he earned as a great human rights lawyer!
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.
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.
Reports about human rights advocates in China suffering in detention and abuse such as this one on Hada, an Inner Mongolian dissident and this one on rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang certainly inspire feelings of sadness and even hopelessness. Yet the odd thing is that many Chinese human rights lawyers and other advocates continue to enter the fray, even though now fully aware of the potential consequences. Efforts are gradually being made to learn what makes them tick. Infectious Western political ideology? Religion, Eastern or Western? The psychology of martyrdom?
Some even now maintain that the numbers of human rights activists are growing, a claim that is plainly difficult to verify. It all reminds me of the situation in South Korea in the ‘70s under General Park while China was still in Cultural Revolution. The late Kim Dae-jung seemed to be motivated by Jeffersonian democracy, indeed believed that the tree of liberty has to be periodically nourished by the blood of patriots, and was prepared to die for the cause, as he almost did on at least three occasions. He was also a devout Roman Catholic and strongly supported by his highly religious wife. South Korea, well over a decade later, experienced a stressful but largely peaceful revolution, and Dae-jung was liberated, vindicated and empowered.
Prospects for his Chinese heirs seem very gloomy at present. Yet, as we mark International Human Rights Day today, we should admire them, wish them well and hope that the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which was adopted with considerable pre-1949 Chinese input, will soon prevail in China too.
