July 31, 2017
Liang Xiaojun, a Chinese human rights lawyer, in front of a detention center where many of his colleagues have been imprisoned.
Liang Xiaojun had just finished breakfast when he received the first instant message: His friends were disappearing from their homes and offices. By itself, this news was unremarkable. As a human rights lawyer in China, Liang had come to accept that periodic spasms of repression were an unavoidable risk of his profession. He also had grown intimately familiar with the rituals of pressure and coercion by which China kept its dissidents in line — the meetings over tea with government minders, the frequent check-ins from the judicial bureau, the police harassment. But on the morning of July 10, 2015, Liang knew that something far graver was underway.
A disturbing event from the previous day, he now realized, had been merely a prelude. That morning, he awoke to startling news from a prominent rights lawyer named Wang Yu. After dropping her husband and son off at the airport for a red-eye flight, Wang returned to her apartment to find that the power and internet had been cut. In the early-morning hours, she sent out a frantic group message, describing how several men were trying to break in. Wang then dropped out of contact. That day, Liang and his colleagues in the human rights community circulated a petition, calling on the government to release her swiftly and without harm. But, he told me, ‘‘we didn’t think a lot about it. These things happen. We worried about her, but not about ourselves.’’
檢視大圖From left: Wang Qiaoling, whose husband, Li Heping, was detained during the 709 crackdown, and Li Wenzu, wife of Wang Quanzhang, with Wang Quanzhang’s parents, getting ready to protest in front of the prosecutor’s office in Beijing in June.
Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
From left: Wang Qiaoling, whose husband, Li Heping, was detained during the 709 crackdown, and Li Wenzu, wife of Wang Quanzhang, with Wang Quanzhang’s parents, getting ready to protest in front of the prosecutor’s office in Beijing in June.
The petition was published online the next morning, just as Liang’s phone was flooded with a new wave of panicked messages. The arrests began around 7:30 a.m., when three men snatched a prominent lawyer from a hotel on the edge of Beijing, rushing him through the lobby with a thick black hood over his head. Simultaneously, police officers raided Fengrui Law Firm, a legal nerve center of China’s human rights community. Staff members scrambled to spread the news on messaging apps, then dropped abruptly out of contact as officers stormed through the building.
Liang went to work, trying to pretend that it was a normal day even as desperate messages continued to spread across China — ‘‘Flee at once,’’ one of them read. By late afternoon, nearly 60 lawyers were either detained or unreachable. Accounts of ransacked law offices, of friends and colleagues in handcuffs and hoods, circulated online. Alone in his small office in western Beijing, Liang watched his cellphone rumble to life with each bleak new update. One by one, his colleagues were vanishing.
The sense of siege was compounded by a near-total communications blackout. Just as the raids began that morning, Telegram, a messaging app popular with rights activists in China, went offline. Service remained down throughout the day, a result of a sustained cyberattack targeting the company’s servers. The culprits were unknown, the company said, but the attack had been ‘‘coordinated from East Asia.’’
Not wanting to alarm his wife, Liang waited until he returned home that evening to tell her what was happening. Then he began to prepare. He took a shower, tidied up his room and hugged his wife and young son. Around 10 p.m., his cellphone rang. It was the police, instructing him to come immediately to a nearby cafe. ‘‘I told my wife and son that I would be back soon, it’s just a talk,’’ he told me. But privately, he knew the truth: They had finally come for him.
Life has never been easy for China’s criminal defense lawyers. Until 1979, the People’s Republic operated with virtually no criminal-justice system whatsoever: The Communist Party organized Soviet-style police and people’s courts to address petty crimes and local disputes, but their primary responsibility was to enforce absolute loyalty to the party. Even the Constitution, the ostensible basis of the law, was rudimentary at best, and served mainly to outline the means of ‘‘socialist industrialization and socialist transformation’’ in order to abolish ‘‘systems of exploitation.’’ The near-constant churn of intraparty purges, revolutionary campaigns and political mobilizations rendered law an afterthought at best and a tool of the bourgeois antirevolutionaries at worst.
The economic reforms of the late 1970s brought legal reform along with them. The legal profession and the criminal-justice system were built from scratch — Mao had purged and destroyed the nascent community of lawyers in one of his ideological campaigns — but there was trouble from the start. These new courts were envisioned not as independent arbiters but as the ‘‘knife handle of the proletarian dictatorship,’’ according to Sida Liu, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies law and society in China. Defense lawyers were often treated like criminals themselves, harassed and imprisoned for fulfilling the basic duties of their profession. Between 1997 and 2001, at least 143 lawyers were arrested, detained or beaten in China for working on criminal cases, according to the Chinese bar association. The threat of punishment — or the allure of a comfortable job at a government-friendly firm — persuaded many lawyers to avoid criminal cases altogether, or to simply accommodate the whims of the authorities.
By the early 2000s, the Chinese leadership under Jiang Zemin was taking a relatively soft approach to ideological conformity — in part because the country was petitioning for membership in the World Trade Organization, which required American approval at a time when United States officials were pressing China on its domestic policies. A new generation of Chinese lawyers was also entering the profession, students who ‘‘would read about constitutionalism, would read about liberal values,’’ says Eva Pils, a reader in transnational law at King’s College, London. ‘‘Students in those days were really studying the American Constitution as much as the Chinese one, and trying to think about ways of giving effect to the Constitution — to revitalize and breathe life into it.’’ A debate within the profession bubbled to the surface: Should lawyers operating in an illegal society follow the law? Faced with the slow strangulation of their rights and protections, some lawyers concluded that in an unjust system, extralegal methods — open letters, microblogs, protests and public advocacy — were the only way to uphold the true principles of the law.
Liang was making his name just as this newer, more radical movement of ‘‘rights protection lawyers,’’ weiquan lushi, was finding its voice. At first, the network was informal and uncoordinated; it grew through referrals, word of mouth and personal connections. From a core group of fewer than 20 people in the early 2000s, the movement expanded swiftly: By 2015, there were hundreds of lawyers practicing human rights law or engaged in online social groups. They were a fraction of a fraction — as of January 2017, China had 300,000 lawyers — but the rights lawyers were zealous, outspoken and willing to challenge the government in ways their predecessors would not have dared.
The movement scored notable victories. Rights lawyers helped draw national media attention to scandals involving tainted milk and vaccines, illegal land seizures and police brutality. But pragmatism was never their primary aim. To the new generation of lawyers, rights-defending was ‘‘a strict moral obligation toward the victims of abuses, as well as toward human society and toward oneself, ’’ Pils wrote in a legal journal in 2006. Compromise was neither tenable nor desirable. In a country where many political and social issues are taboo, and even certain kinds of thought are forbidden, the rise of rights lawyers was a precarious but hopeful development. ‘‘People developed a sense of purpose,’’ Pils says. ‘‘It’s a terribly hackneyed term, but there’s a sense of being empowered, of agency.’’ It was the allure, Pils says, of ‘‘living in truth.’’
But success eventually invited repression. The activities of rights lawyers inside and outside the courtroom ‘‘made them doubly obnoxious to the regime,’’ says Jerome Cohen, director of New York University’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute. In August 2013, an internal party memo was leaked online. It listed ‘‘seven unmentionables’’ that the party sought to stamp out. Among them was ‘‘Western constitutional democracy,’’ which included ‘‘independent judiciaries’’ and ‘‘universal values’’ like ‘‘human rights.’’
At the same time, the Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping began to place a new emphasis on ‘‘rule of law.’’ During the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress, in October 2014, the leadership devoted an entire plenary session to discussing and passing an ambitious slate of legal reforms. The participants declared that ‘‘the country should be ruled in line with the Constitution,’’ a constantly revised and modified document, which in its newest iteration guarantees such rights as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and of religious belief and, since 2004, ‘‘human rights.’’ The session followed similarly spirited exhortations by Chinese judges, diplomats and bureaucrats. Across every sphere of government activity, ‘‘rule of law’’ has become the phrase du jour. But in practice, ‘‘rule of law’’ has simply meant ‘‘rule of the party.’’
The government’s rhetorical shift came as the world was recalibrating its relationship with China and its conception of human rights. During his time in office, President Barack Obama de-emphasized human rights in the United States-China bilateral relationship; instead, he sought to cultivate China as a partner on issues like trade, climate change and North Korea. In meetings with President Xi, Obama claimed ‘‘frank’’ discussions of the countries’ divergent views on human rights, but he refrained from pressuring Beijing over its detention of political dissidents and human rights activists. The fate of Liu Xiaobo, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was imprisoned by the Chinese government on charges of ‘‘inciting subversion of state power’’ for his role in writing a pro-democracy manifesto, went largely unmentioned in Obama’s public comments. (Liu died earlier this month, from complications of liver cancer, while in government custody.) On the campaign trail and in office, President Trump has made explicit his predecessor’s shift: Today, China is too important and too rich to risk antagonizing over human rights issues. ‘‘I believe he is trying very hard,’’ Trump said of Xi, after the leaders met in April. ‘‘He certainly doesn’t want to see turmoil and death. He doesn’t want to see it. He is a good man. He is a very good man.’’
The last five years have brought severe setbacks for China’s lawyers — especially those who work on the rule of law. Sida Liu, the Toronto professor, has called this divergence the ‘‘dual-state model.’’ ‘‘They use one system for ordinary legal cases and use another, much harsher system for sensitive cases,’’ Liu told me. ‘‘They draw a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable.’’ When that line is crossed, ‘‘they can do anything to you.’’
Liang was initially drawn into the profession more by circumstance than by conviction. The son of a People’s Liberation Army officer and a manager at a library, Liang grew up in a comfortable middle-class household where the party’s dictates were treated as gospel. He drifted into commercial law but struggled with the work. ‘‘It was not what I wanted,’’ he says. ‘‘I felt to be a lawyer sometimes you have to speak against your will.’’ His turning point came in 2008, when he defended a man from Xinjiang, the restive Muslim-majority autonomous region in China’s far west. His client was accused of ‘‘splittism’’ and, eventually, of providing state secrets to foreigners. In reality, Liang believed, the man was imprisoned for converting to Christianity. A friend of Liang’s took the case initially, but the police refused to allow him to meet his client; frustrated, the friend asked Liang if he could help. ‘‘I said, ‘Yes, I can,’ ’’ Liang told me.
When I met Liang for the first time, on a late-February day last year, I pressed him to explain this decision. The case proved to be his first step onto a potentially dangerous path of confrontation with the Chinese state. Why had he done it? We were sitting in Liang’s modest, unadorned office, drinking tea, and as I spoke he cocked his head in apparent puzzlement. ‘‘I feel I must,’’ he told me. ‘‘People’s rights have been destroyed. Many times they have been tortured. Their families are broken. I cannot turn my back and ignore this.’’
He opened his own law firm in 2009 and started taking more human rights cases soon thereafter. He didn’t realize the work was dangerous — ‘‘the ignorant fear nothing,’’ he told me — until three months later, when the Ministry of Justice sent representatives to his office. By that point, he had accepted the risks. In the years that followed, Liang expanded his work to represent dissidents, human rights activists, petitioners and other persecuted groups across China. He took almost every case that came to him and quickly developed a reputation as a quiet but steadfast member of the burgeoning movement, working cases that had once seemed impossible or untouchable to him.
Then came July 9, 2015 — ‘‘709,’’ as it came to be known, the largest crackdown on Chinese lawyers in decades. All together, Chinese human rights observers estimated that fall, more than 300 rights lawyers and activists from across the country were targeted, with 27 forbidden to leave the country, 255 temporarily detained or forcibly questioned and 28 held in government custody. It was an attack not just on rights lawyers but also on the wider networks of civil and social activism. ‘‘The human rights lawyers play the most important role in civil society,’’ says Teng Biao, a rights lawyer who left China in 2014 and is now a visiting fellow at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute. ‘‘Whenever there is a blogger or a church leader or a journalist arrested, some courageous lawyers represent them.’’ Human rights lawyers are not just advocates for China’s dissidents but often the connective tissue among them. The 709 crackdown was intended to silence many voices in one stroke. ‘‘Kill one, intimidate 100,’’ Sida Liu told me.
Many of the lawyers and activists swept up in 709 faced possible sentences of life imprisonment. For six months, they effectively disappeared, under a provision of the Chinese criminal code that allows the police to hold suspects incommunicado for ‘‘residential surveillance in a designated location,’’ a practice that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has asked the government to end ‘‘as a matter of urgency.’’ In the aftermath of the crackdown, Liang — who avoided arrest himself — did his best to remain inconspicuous. It was a decision born of disposition as much as self-preservation: 45 years old, with boyish cheeks, kind eyes and short, graying hair, Liang is quiet and self-effacing, neither a natural advocate nor a zealous crusader. ‘‘He’s not someone you would find on a soapbox,’’ one friend told me.
Yet now, it was the lawyers themselves who needed defending. After 709, many of the remaining members of the legal community went underground or retreated from the work. Liang himself dared to write about the cases only under a pseudonym. His wife asked him to stop doing human rights cases when their first son was born, and again when Liang was nearly arrested in 2011.
Seven months after the crackdown began, as we spoke in his office, I watched Liang’s phone ping to life with a surprising message, delivered via a secure messaging app. ‘‘Hello, Liang,’’ it began. ‘‘I’m Xie Yanyi’s wife. You came to my house a few days ago. Now I need your help.’’
No further explanation was necessary. Xie Yanyi was his close friend and a venerated figure among his fellow lawyers: Bold, confident and uncompromising, Xie took cases no one else would, sued powerful government departments and spoke out openly in the press. The police came for him soon after the crackdown began, and he had been held ever since. The lawyer whom Xie’s wife, Yuan Shanshan, had hired to defend him was under too much government pressure to continue working on the case.
‘‘Can you suggest another lawyer?’’ Yuan asked in her message. ‘‘Or maybe, if possible, you could take the case.’’
