July 23, 2015
Yu Wensheng, 48, said his recent arrest nudged him into the ranks of human rights defenders.
Adam Dean for The New York Times
BEIJING — More than 200 lawyers and associates have been detained, with 20 still in custody. Attorneys have been paraded on television making humiliated confessions and have been portrayed as rabble-rousing thugs. A blast of commentaries in newspapers run by the Communist Party accused them of subversion and swindles.
In what lawyers call the most withering political assault on their profession in decades, the Chinese government is mounting a broad crackdown on rights attorneys, contending that they have exploited contentious cases to enrich themselves and attack the party.
The beleaguered lawyers say the government’s real goal is to discredit and dismantle the “rights defense” movement, a small but audacious group of people who have used the law and public pressure to defend clients in a system stacked against them.
“This feels like the biggest attack we’ve ever experienced,” said Zhang Lei, a lawyer in southern China who was among those questioned and released by the police. “It looks like they’re acting by the law, but hardly any of the lawyers who disappeared have been allowed to see their own lawyers. Over 200 brought in for questioning and warnings — I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Yet, in a telling sign of how much Chinese society has changed in the four decades since Mao’s death, the lawyers are not retreating. Despite the intense police pressure, and the previous imprisonment of lawyers under President Xi Jinping, dozens have organized petitions denouncing the detentions and volunteered to defend those held by the police.
“I used to think being a lawyer was just a tool to make money,” said Yu Wensheng, 48, a commercial lawyer whose recent arrest nudged him into the ranks of human rights defenders. “But now I believe we have a greater mission to change a broken system. The crackdown is fierce, but we rights defense lawyers will fight back.”
To Mr. Yu and others, the future of the rule of law in China is at stake.
In the decades since China’s courts emerged from the ashes of Mao’s war on legal institutions, lawyers have promoted the country’s fitful embrace of Western-style jurisprudence. Their efforts have helped ordinary Chinese win some protections from the diktats of a nearly omnipotent party-state, giving political dissidents, outspoken Christians and victims of illegal land grabs a rare outlet to fight back.
A dozen years ago, the Chinese news media even lionized rights lawyers who persuaded the legislature to scrap a draconian system of residency permits.
But in the latest campaign, beginning about two weeks ago, news reports have depicted rights lawyers as venal con artists, sexual predators and foul-mouthed hooligans, a level of invective that suggests the Communist Party’s determination to not only muzzle the movement but also delegitimize it.
“This is a concerted effort to discredit the entire cadre of rights defense lawyers,” said Carl Minzner, an expert on Chinese law at Fordham University. He said it was a “clear signal” that their use of high-profile cases and news media pressure to call attention to social problems would “no longer be tolerated.”
The government has focused its ire on the Fengrui Law Firm in Beijing, which has represented the dissident artist Ai Weiwei; Ilham Tohti, the Uighur academic sentenced to life in prison last year for separatism; and Cao Shunli, a human rights campaigner who died after reportedly being denied medical care while in police custody.
The authorities have detained the director of Fengrui, Zhou Shifeng, at least four other lawyers in the firm and an administrative assistant. The 16-year-old son of a lawyer was seized and held for two days just before he was to fly to Australia to attend high school, and the lawyer’s husband was detained.
The police have accused Mr. Zhou and his colleagues of engineering courthouse protests and online uproars to discredit the government, intimidate judges and promote themselves. In a confession on national television last week, one of Mr. Zhou’s colleagues, Huang Liqun, accused him of embezzlement and described him as a womanizer who had repeatedly forced himself on female employees. Mr. Zhou was also shown admitting guilt.
Attacks in the state news media have been relentless and lurid. “There are always some ‘black hands’ adding fuel to the fire behind some sensitive incidents that attract attention,” said one commentary in a Communist Party paper last week. “But in these cases of so-called rights defense, a small number of lawyers have played an inglorious role as accessories to wrecking the rule of law and disturbing social order.”
More than 120 of those detained in the past two weeks were lawyers. The rest were members of support staff at law firms, family members of lawyers or unattached rights activists, according to a list compiled by Amnesty International. The government and the state news media have been mute about this broader sweep, but have lauded the charges against the Fengrui lawyers as an advance for clean justice and denounced critics of the detentions.
“Some Western media and political figures don’t respect China’s legal system and rules,” a commentary by Xinhua, the state news agency, said on Wednesday. The detentions were no different from cases in the United States involving legal representatives who broke the law, it said. “These lawyers sabotaged China’s legal order and so should face legal punishment.”
Since Mr. Xi came to power in November 2012, the authorities have imprisoned dozens of supporters of the rights defense movement. Another prominent lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang, has been detained since May 2014 and is likely to soon face trial and almost certain conviction, joining other prominent activist attorneys in prison. Other lawyers who challenge the government in politically contentious cases have experienced harassment, detention and loss of their licenses and clients.
Yet the ranks of lawyers willing to take on politically sensitive cases has only grown in recent years. They are a sliver of China’s 270,000 lawyers, but one with an outsize influence on public life.
