August 1, 2017
Xie Yanyi, one of the lawyers detained in the 709 crackdown.
The Lonely Crusade of China’s Human Rights Lawyers
Over the next two weeks, Liang went back and forth about Yuan’s plea. ‘‘I knew how much pressure there was — this is a serious case,’’ Liang told me later. ‘‘I tried to think which lawyers were fit to defend Xie. But I have so many friends who are suspects themselves. There were not enough people left to defend all of them. Xie needed help and support.’’
On March 4, Liang wrote back to Yuan. He would take the case.
On a brisk, cloudless day in late March, I joined Liang as he visited Yuan at her family’s apartment on the outskirts of Beijing. As we drove past glittering shopping malls and rows of tall, identical housing blocks, Liang told me about the first time he met Xie, in 2009. At the time, Liang had only recently begun to self-identify as a human rights lawyer; Xie, by contrast, was already something of a legend among his peers, having challenged the president in spectacular fashion years earlier. The men became fast friends and allies.
After nearly two hours we reached Miyun, a district in northeast Beijing abutting the dimpled mountains that ring the city. We wandered through a sprawling residential complex and arrived outside the Xie family apartment, where a rack overflowing with children’s shoes crowded the landing. Liang knocked quietly, and Yuan, in black sweatpants, a gray sweater and flip-flops, answered the door and invited us inside.
Before discussing business, Liang asked to see the Xies’ new daughter. The child was born just a week earlier, almost nine months to the day after Xie’s arrest. In a cramped, makeshift nursery, the baby was asleep, with Yuan’s younger sister keeping a dutiful watch. ‘‘What’s her name?’’ Liang whispered. ‘‘She doesn’t have a name yet,’’ Yuan replied quietly, eyes fixed on her newborn. ‘‘I’m waiting until her father returns home to give her one.’’
Yuan ushered us into the living room, and Liang took a seat on a low brown couch. Drawings of ghosts and fall landscapes by the couple’s two sons hung on string across the window. Liang pulled a stack of papers from his backpack and began sorting through them as Yuan, in the kitchen, stood over a copier, scanning the identification documents that Liang would need in order to defend her husband. Though they had been colleagues for years, Liang had never inquired about his friend’s background, and as Yuan brought out the documents — lawyer’s license, marriage certificate, ID card and more — she began to tell her husband’s life story.
Xie Yanyi was born in 1975, the son of a military officer turned factory boss and lawyer. He was stubborn from an early age, Yuan told me. Despite their age difference, Xie loved to challenge his older brother to wrestle and fight. He never won, she said, but the defeats did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm.
In 1997, Xie’s mother, a lawyer herself, sent Xie to Singapore to study law. In addition to his classes, Xie interned at a local law firm, where he was exposed to human rights law and theory for the first time. When Xie returned to his hometown, he rented a small apartment, locked the door and asked a friend to bring him food twice a week. Six months later, he passed the bar. He practiced for several years before making his name in spectacular fashion in 2003, with a case that became a sensation in the Chinese media.
That year, Jiang Zemin ended his second term as president of the People’s Republic of China. Despite officially retiring from public life, Jiang retained his role as chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission. ‘‘Yanyi said that violated the Constitution, so he sued,’’ Yuan told me with a rueful smile. Xie called his challenge to the ex-president ‘‘the first constitutional lawsuit’’ in Chinese history.
It was a courageous gesture, but also a foolhardy one. ‘‘I was young — I was very naïve,’’ Xie told an interviewer years later. ‘‘I thought, The law provides this channel, and I’m going to use it. I believed in the protection of the law.’’
A Beijing court summarily dismissed Xie’s challenge, but the complaint brought notoriety to the 28-year-old lawyer — as well as intense scrutiny from the state security apparatus. He moved to Miyun in hopes of escaping some of the pressure, but wherever he went, the young lawyer remained under constant surveillance.
From the start, Yuan said, she was conflicted about her husband’s work. She found it difficult to fully support him. Why risk everything for a cause that had never returned anything to him? The couple married in summer 2006 and came to a compromise: She would take care of the home, and he would keep his work as a human rights lawyer away from the family.
That compromise crumbled on July 11, 2015, two days into the wave of arrests. At 8 p.m., Xie received a phone call instructing him to come to an interrogation session. Xie knew that many of his friends and colleagues had been taken already. Yuan urged him to leave immediately, to go hide at his brother’s factory until the situation cooled down. But Xie refused to flee. At the interrogation, five police officers asked Xie about a letter he had written in support of Wang Yu, the lawyer whose detention signaled the start of the crackdown. Xie replied that he was friends with Wang, as well as with many of the other captured human rights lawyers. The police asked Xie’s opinion of the Chinese Communist Party. Xie replied that he was not a Communist and didn’t need to be loyal to the party. The police instructed Xie to write a guarantee promising that he would not speak out about the captured human rights lawyers. He refused.
Xie returned to his apartment at 1 a.m. on July 12. Six hours later, the police knocked at his door and told him that he was to come immediately for a meeting with their superior officer. He never returned. At 2 p.m., 20 policemen, some in uniform and some in plainclothes, swarmed into the apartment, confiscating Xie’s registration papers, books, bank cards, case files and cellphone. Yuan managed to hide her husband’s laptop before the police arrived. In their search for it, the officers tried to enlist the couple’s two sons, ages 11 and 8. ‘‘Where’s your father’s laptop?’’ the officer asked, squatting down to eye level. ‘‘Where does he like to keep it?’’ After three hours, the police left.
It was only days later, in a news broadcast, that Yuan learned that her husband was being investigated for the crime of ‘‘inciting subversion of state power,’’ which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. No one had seen or heard from Xie since July 12. The communications blackout meant that Xie was unaware of anything that had happened since his arrest, including his mother’s death from a heart attack on Aug. 22. Yuan traveled to the Tianjin police bureau, where Xie was reportedly being held, to ask permission for Xie to attend his mother’s funeral. She stayed on a chair in a waiting room for three days, pleading her case. The police refused her request.
Xie was also unaware of his wife’s pregnancy. At the time of her husband’s arrest, Yuan didn’t know about the baby, either. Two days before her due date, she returned to the Tianjin police bureau, trying to get Xie’s signature for a hospital form. Again, the police refused. ‘‘They wouldn’t even tell him about the baby,’’ Yuan said.
Liang finished preparing the papers for Yuan to sign. She dropped gracefully to one knee in front of a low green-glass table and signed the forms, sliding them back toward Liang, who added his signature beside hers.
Outside, Liang was in a quiet mood. As we approached his car, he began talking, as if to no one in particular, about what actually happened during his own meeting with the police during 709. ‘‘They asked me the same questions they asked Xie,’’ he confessed. ‘‘They told me not to get involved with the captured lawyers, not to talk to journalists or write articles. I said O.K. They forced me to write a guarantee. I wrote it.’’ He paused and smiled weakly. ‘‘I guess I am not as firm as Xie.’’ We drove back to Beijing in silence.
One week after the visit to Yuan’s apartment, Liang traveled to Tianjin, a bland industrial port city just southeast of Beijing, to try to meet his new client. Like many of the lawyers detained during 709, Xie was being held at Tianjin Detention Center No. 2. Liang’s plan was to visit the detention center and confirm his status as Xie’s lawyer. That sounded simple enough, but as we prepared to leave on the train from Beijing, Liang was not optimistic. ‘‘All the lawyers who went to Tianjin said a special policeman came out and told them they couldn’t see their client because he or she had refused a lawyer.’’
He was determined to press the issue. ‘‘It isn’t legal for the police to tell us our client’s will,’’ he said. The visit in itself was valuable, he added. ‘‘It’s pressure from lawyers and the suspect’s relatives on police that changes things. We must keep up the pressure. If we don’t, the policemen will think we don’t care about the case.’’
An Army soldier in camouflage and flak jacket remained motionless as we entered the detention center, following our movement only with his eyes. The local police, in varying degrees of armament, augmented the security. Behind the guards was a window onto the detention center’s interior courtyard, neatly trimmed and ringed by stone arches, like a college quad.
Liang presented his papers and asked to see his client. We watched as guards gathered at a desk behind a glass partition, peering at us and mumbling among themselves. Liang was calm but wary. I asked if he was nervous. ‘‘No,’’ he said, and paused. ‘‘I’m just not sure what they’re going to do with you.’’ I thought back to my visits to Liang’s office in Beijing: When it came time for me to leave, he would peek his head out the door, ensure that no one was keeping watch and only then let me go. It was only after several such goodbyes that I noticed the pattern and realized that he was protecting me.
The wait was brief. A few minutes after we arrived, a thick metal door beside the glass partition swung open. Two men emerged. The first was young and crisply dressed, with short black hair and an enigmatic smile. The second man was older and less imposing. He had stooped shoulders, a thinning comb-over and a tired, distracted mien. The younger man turned to Liang and called him inside. Liang handed me his cellphone and disappeared with the men behind the heavy metal door.
The meeting lasted less than four minutes. Liang emerged alone and headed directly for the exit. As we walked back along the rutted dirt track toward the subway, he narrated the encounter for me.
The younger man, he explained, was an officer named Li Bin, who had been tasked with meeting the relatives and lawyers of all the 709 detainees. Liang had heard of Li, but Li clearly knew Liang intimately: He began the meeting by ticking off a list of Liang’s previous cases and his encounters with the police and judicial bureau. Then he turned to Xie’s case. ‘‘We can’t accept your power-of-attorney form,’’ he said. ‘‘Xie already has two defense attorneys.’’ Liang asked who these lawyers were. Li replied that he was not required to answer. Liang asked if the other lawyers had visited Xie to prepare his defense. Li said again that he was not required to answer.
Liang continued to press. How could he confirm that Xie had hired these lawyers? How could Xie have hired his own lawyers while incommunicado in detention? Li replied each time that he was not obliged to say; Liang was not Xie’s lawyer and had no official connection to the suspect. The second officer said nothing.
As Liang got up to leave, Li offered a comment. ‘‘I’m surprised you’re not defending Wang Quanzhang,’’ he said. Wang was one of Liang’s closest friends and, like Xie, he was being held somewhere inside Tianjin Detention Center No. 2. No one had heard from him in eight months. ‘‘I know he’s a good friend of yours.’’ Then Li smiled, handed back Liang’s papers, and showed him out.
