Abstract
Chinese lawyers who defend cases for free speech and are increasingly using social media to highlight issues often find themselves targets, reports
Another high profile case occurred a few months earlier. Four lawyers were believed to have been beaten and detained after visiting an illegal detention centre in Jiamusi, Heilongjiang province, according to reports in the local media. Maya Wang, a researcher from Human Rights Watch, tells Index: “These lawyers have been fighting for years. Despite talk of progress we still have cases of people trying to protect others who are beaten by law enforcement officials. That’s the picture of where we are today. They keep up the fight, but the current situation is pretty grim.”
These two examples are just the ones that have made their way into the press; many more go unreported. As we approach the two-year anniversary of Xi Jinping coming to power in November 2012, crackdowns of this nature are becoming commonplace, and indicate where China is when it comes to free speech. Any hope that Xi”s administration would be more tolerant of dissent appear to have been dashed. A common, bleak joke now circulates: “Even lawyers” lawyers need lawyers.”
“A lot of the trends identified in our 2011 report still exist or have worsened,” Amnesty International China researcher William Nee explains to Index. “Xi’s administration seems to want to monopolise the political and legal system, which puts human rights lawyers in a difficult situation.”
In many ways human rights lawyers are part of the story of China’s recent economic success. The legal profession barely featured in China’s imperial past and was largely banned under Mao. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, the seeds of the Chinese legal profession today were planted.
Still, 30 years ago China only had a handful of law schools and there were no more than 1,000 law graduates each year. These lawyers were considered state workers. As the years passed, this started to change. A degree of autonomy ensued. The total number of practicing lawyers in China jumped from 8,571 in 1981 to around 230,000 in 2013, and a small, but growing, proportion of these (around 300 today) have concentrated on human rights.
Lawyers have made tremendous strides in recent years. They have largely moved out of the shadows of the government. This sadly comes at a price. As human rights lawyers gain more autonomy, the backlash is significant.
ABOVE: Protesters carry portraits of Chinese human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and journalist Gao Yu at a march in Hong Kong in July 2014
Credit: Bobby Yip/Reuters
“Five to six years ago they targeted only a very small number of lawyers, but now dozens of lawyers have been affected,” says Victor Clemens from The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of Chinese and international human rights non-governmental organisations.
Index spoke to lawyer Jin Guanghong, who was forced to flee China for fear of his life. Jin first encountered hostility back in the late 1990s, when teaching at Xiamen University. He was considered too radical and removed from his post. He got his lawyer’s licence in 2008 and went on to represent a Falun Gong practitioner, Sun Xianglian from Zhejiang province. Members of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual practise, earned themselves illegal status when they spoke out against the government. This was Jin’s first human rights case and led him onto many more. That was until 8 April 2011, after he acted in defence of a Falun Gong family in Guangzhou. He was arrested, and disappeared until 19 April. Due to the brutal abuse he tells us he received, he has lost some of his memory. Jin has memories of being picked up by police while walking down the street. He was held in a detention centre and later a mental hospital. In the hospital, he was beaten, given injections and drugs, and force-fed. He only has vague recollections of all of this. At the end of the ordeal, three teachers from Xiamen University and his brother were sent to pick him up.
After his release, he sought asylum in the US. Even thousands of miles away he still feels the government’s pinch. He says: “After I came to America in October 2012, I was contacted by Chinese police of Xiamen University, who told me I published some ‘inappropriate words’ on the internet and asked me when I would go back to China and invited me to ‘drink tea’ with him at the police station. You know what he meant, that equals an interrogation by the police.”
On top of torture and imprisonments, other lawyers say they have been seized while trying to meet clients. Others are repeatedly refused access to detainees and to case material. These are the most extreme manifestations of the crackdown. More commonplace tactics include refusal to renew legal licenses, which happens annually in order for lawyers to continue practicing.
It’s this tactic that Liang Xiaojong has become familiar with. Since 2009, Liang has worked at the Beijing Dao Heng law firm. He deals with a large number of high-profile cases, including ones concerning Re-Education Through Labour, a controversial system of detention centres, and Falun Gong. He says that it’s the local public security organs who give him “the greatest obstacles”. They recently notified the Beijing Bureau of Justice about the highly sensitive cases he has taken on, who in turn “warned him off” taking more sensitive cases.
Five to six years ago, they targeted only a very small number of lawyers, but now dozens have been affected
Part of the issue is that Chinese human rights lawyers are prolific on social media and are becoming more outspoken. They attempt to harness public opinion and encourage debate about cases. Often these cases are ones with a large majority of public support. This working style, combined with a combative approach and less fear of authority, has led to them being labelled sike – “diehard” lawyers.
The government sees human rights lawyers as a threat. Support for rule-of-law reforms has become far more open in China. Today human rights lawyers are banding together to support each other. Often now, when lawyers are arrested, people take to the Chinese social media network Weibo to challenge the system. This unnerves the country’s leaders who fear, above all, an increasingly assertive civil society will threaten their legitimacy.
“Superficially, Xi’s Party and government are clamping down on lawyers and dissidents more severely than in the past. It is, in fact, because more lawyers and dissidents dare to challenge communist rule now,” says Jin.
Wang agrees, adding that human rights lawyers have moved from the margins closer to the mainstream and that has provoked the government’s shift in tactic. The government is now going after those who demand moderate rather than radical change.
“Human rights lawyers in the past were able to do quite a lot of things without too much harassment, but then they became more vocal, took on more cases of a sensitive nature and pushed boundaries.”
However, these acts of reprisal have galvanised China’s community of lawyers. Some law firms have been intimidated into not hiring human rights lawyers, but others are undeterred. Liang, for one, continues to practice this type of law, having not been explicitly told to stop. And according to Amnesty’s 2013 annual review, released this year in March, a wave of new lawyers have joined the profession.
In response to the frequent threats and assaults, hundreds have also banded together under the name China Human Rights Lawyers Group. They released open letters and statements calling for an end to rights violations targeting these lawyers. For example, more than 40 lawyers jointly signed a “Letter of Intent for Mutual Support Among Chinese Lawyers” in April 2014. Its purpose was to ensure strength through numbers, so that anyone who is oppressed can expect help from their peers.
“China is a victim of its own success,” Nee says. “This is not to say that the government is the bad guy uniformly, just that society is becoming too diverse for government to use the same tactics as in the past.”
Perhaps then China is changing for the better. Optimists might argue it’s a case of one step back, two steps forward. As for Jin he is taking no chances. His ambition, as he sees it, is to “build China into a country of rule of law and guarantee its people’s freedom and basic human rights by a constitutional government”. But he accepts that for now he has to do this from afar.
