Campaign for human rights and rule of law on mainland will not be defeated by crackdowns or defence of one-party rule, activist insists
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 31 August, 2014, 4:49am UPDATED : Sunday, 31 August, 2014, 4:49am
Teng Biao, a mainland civil-rights lawyer, says the desire for rights and justice will not be defeated by repression. Photo: May Tse
Softly spoken and easily embarrassed, Teng Biao has a reserved, childlike gentleness. Yet few people have his moral courage to speak up for what they believe in, particularly when there is a price to pay.
On the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown on June 4, the mainland law academic made an impassioned speech at the candlelight vigil in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, criticising the persecution of political activists on the mainland.
“The massacre did not stop in 1989. The killing, in the name of a political ‘campaign’, in the name of law, in the name of maintaining stability, in the name of state unity, has never stopped,” Teng told the crowd.
For the past two years, Teng has been a visiting scholar at Hong Kong’s Chinese University. He leaves in a few days to take up a visiting position at Harvard University in the United States.
But Hong Kong, the mainland and universal rights are unlikely to be far from his thoughts.
In his speech to the crowd in Victoria Park, Teng proclaimed his support for the push in Hong Kong for universal suffrage and the Occupy Central movement, saying he “also looks forward to occupying Tiananmen Square with love and peace one day”.
Teng knew his declaration would antagonise the authorities. He said they had warned him to stay away from the vigil or face “serious” consequences – something that he believed would probably include arrest if he returned to the mainland.
Over the past year and a half, scores of his friends and fellow campaigners, including legal scholar Xu Zhiyong and lawyer Ding Jiaxi of the New Citizens Movement, have been jailed over their calls for officials to declare their assets.
Without going into specifics, he said mainland authorities were now targeting his family as a way of punishing him. But he insisted: “I cannot give in.”
And the 41-year-old legal scholar has no regrets about what he said in Victoria Park.
Teng, who started his human-rights career a decade ago, has paid a heavy price for his work. A law lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law in Beijing, he was suspended from teaching three times and stripped of his lawyer’s licence in 2008 because of his activism.
Before the Beijing Olympics, he was hooded, forcibly taken away by secret police and held for days after speaking out against the country’s rights abuses.
In 2011, he was arbitrarily detained in solitary confinement for 70 days.
Teng said that even though detention filled him with a sense of fear and isolation, it did not diminish his determination to pursue rights for his fellow citizens.
