AUG. 7, 2014
Gao Zhisheng in 2010. Credit Gemunu Amarasinghe/Associated Press
HONG KONG — One of China’s most famous dissident lawyers, Gao Zhisheng, was released from prison on Thursday, his wife and brother said. But it remained unclear how much freedom Mr. Gao would enjoy and whether he would be able to reunite with his exiled wife and children eight years after he disappeared into a shroud of repeated detention and, he has said, torture.
Before the police detained him in 2006, Mr. Gao had embraced a succession of politically contentious cases and causes, emerging as one of China’s most prominent, and combative, human rights advocates. But his conviction that year for “inciting subversion of state power” made him an example of the Chinese Communist Party’s determination to silence dissent using means that rights advocates and a United Nations panel have called arbitrary and ruthless.
That official secrecy at first left unclear even whether Mr. Gao had been freed from prison Thursday after serving out his sentence. Later on Thursday, his older brother confirmed that he had accompanied Mr. Gao as he left the prison.
“He’s out. Everything is fine,” the brother, Gao Zhiyi, said in a brief telephone interview. He said he and his brother were in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the region in far western China where Mr. Gao had been imprisoned. “He’s in his father-in-law’s home,” said the brother. But he would not comment on how long Mr. Gao would stay in Urumqi, or what might happen next.
Although a prison officer had told the family that Mr. Gao was due for release Thursday, his wife, Geng He, who lives in San Francisco, endured hours of uncertainty waiting for confirmation of his release, and then spoke to him for a few moments, she said. In 2009, Ms. Geng and the couple’s daughter and son escaped surveillance and fled to the United States, and she said she hoped Mr. Gao would be allowed to join them there.
“I could finally hear my husband’s voice,” Ms. Geng said. “I asked him how he was and how his health was, and he told me that his teeth were in bad shape, and I wanted to ask more, but there was a sound of many people and then my sister took the phone and said it would be impossible to continue talking to him.”
Ms. Geng said her sister said Mr. Gao had four or five loose teeth on his lower jaw and several more on his upper jaw, making eating difficult.
Mr. Gao’s release comes as the Communist Party, under President Xi Jinping, has imprisoned rights activists and dissidents in a nationwide drive against political dissent. Yet Mr. Xi and other leaders have also promised to create a less arbitrary, more accountable legal system.
“How Gao Zhisheng will be treated will be very important, because we’ll be looking at whether or not the current leadership approaches him any differently than the previous administration,” said Maya Wang, a China researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. “Will they repeat the use of enforced disappearance for Gao Zhisheng?”
