August 23, 2017
Changsha Intermediate People’s Court, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BEIJING — A Chinese human rights attorney, who rose to prominence defending other activists, confessed to trying to overthrow the Communist Party on Tuesday, in a trial reported across the country and choreographed as an attack on liberal political ideas.
The attorney, Jiang Tianyong, was well known for his vociferous support of dissidents amid a nationwide crackdown on dissent. But at his trial in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in southern China, which was streamed live on the internet and shown on television news, a soft-spoken Mr. Jiang appeared defeated.
He pleaded guilty to inciting subversion of the state, voiced contrition in a calm, practiced voice, and asked for mercy. His wife and supporters said his confession was forced and possibly the result of torture after nearly a year in secret detention.
At trial, Mr. Jiang said he had been led astray by indoctrination in Western notions of the rule of law.
“What was the contents of the training?” a prosecutor asked Mr. Jiang, in proceedings broadcast on Weibo, China’s hugely popular social media network.
“It was mainly about the bourgeois Western constitutional system,” Mr. Jiang said. “It certainly had a subliminal influence on me. It gave me ideas about overturning our country’s present political system and introducing their political system into our country.”
The trial was a vivid illustration of President Xi Jinping’s efforts to discredit domestic critics, especially human rights activists, by depicting them as members of a conspiracy whose goal is toppling the Communist Party.
The televised drama of this and similar trials served as a “shock and a warning” to other Chinese human rights advocates, said Eva Pils, a law scholar at King’s College London who studies China’s human rights lawyers.
“To a wider TV audience, it is meant to discredit human rights defenders as people who fabricate stories that smear the image of the motherland for their own personal gain or self-promotion,” Ms. Pils said by email. “Over all, it has the effect of giving one a sense that the authorities are in control of the truth.”
The party has long cast dissidents as puppets of shadowy, hostile forces backed by the West. But Mr. Xi has redoubled that effort. A few months after coming to power, he demanded a systematic offensive against Western liberal ideas such as constitutionalism, and show trials have been increasingly used to impress such warnings on the Chinese public.
“I hope that other so-called rights defenders and defense lawyers will draw lessons from my example and let this serve as a warning,” Mr. Jiang said in a statement to the Changsha Intermediate People’s Court. “Give me a chance to become a new person.”
The court said a verdict would be announced at a later hearing but did not set a date. As a result of his public confession, Mr. Jiang may earn a lesser prison sentence or even a suspended sentence.
Born in rural central China, Mr. Jiang, 46, had taken on contentious rights cases for more than a decade. His clients included Chen Guangcheng, the human rights activist who escaped house arrest and fled to the American Embassy in Beijing before receiving asylum in the United States. Mr. Jiang has also represented members of Falun Gong, a banned spiritual sect.
The government rescinded Mr. Jiang’s license to practice law in 2009, but he continued advising dissidents and activists. He was meeting clients even after July 2015, when the Chinese police began a widespread clampdown on rights lawyers and their associates. About 250 people were detained in that crackdown.
Most of those lawyers were released with warnings after a few days or weeks in detention, but a core group was picked out for prosecution. A week ago, Wu Gan, an activist associated with the Fengrui Law Firm in Beijing and known by his internet handle, “Super Vulgar Butcher,” also stood trial for subversion. That hearing was not broadcast.
At his trial, Mr. Jiang said he had taken up the cause of the detained lawyers to make trouble for the Chinese government.
He said he wanted to “achieve the goal of overturning the state and transforming the current political system by causing a fuss over these sensitive, hot spot incidents and vilifying and attacking our country’s government and legal organs.”
The Chinese government choreographed similar trials just over a year ago, when four lawyers and rights campaigners were shown on television confessing to subversion, and sentenced to prison terms of up to seven and a half years.
“No matter whether you forgive me or not, I am very sorry from the bottom of my heart,” Mr. Jiang told the court.
Mr. Jiang’s wife and supporters suggested the lawyer may have been tortured to obtain his confession, during his detention. International human rights groups denounced Mr. Jiang’s trial as a charade, because he had not been allowed his own lawyers, and was instead appointed lawyers by the court.
Three United Nations officials have denounced Mr. Jiang’s detention. One of them, Philip Alston, a former special rapporteur, visited Mr. Jiang just months before his arrest.
Mr. Jiang disappeared into custody in November 2016 when he was traveling to Changsha from Beijing to help Xie Yang, another Chinese rights lawyer held in detention. In January, Mr. Xie’s lawyers released detailed allegations that he had been tortured in custody, but at his trial in May he retracted those allegations and pleaded guilty to subversion and disrupting court proceedings.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Mr. Jiang said he had helped fabricate Mr. Xie’s claims of torture.
Before the trial, Mr. Jiang’s wife, Jin Bianling, who lives in California, wrote in an open letter that she believed her husband had been coerced.
“We’re convinced that Jiang Tianyong is innocent,” she said in the letter. “Even if Jiang Tianyong pleads guilty in court, that will certainly be under torture unimaginable to ordinary people.”
