Rogue Nation

China’s massive attack on human rights and the rule of law continues
The Washington Post

Li Wenzu, the wife of imprisoned lawyer Wang Quanzhang, reacts before an interview at her home in Beijing on Monday. 

ON JULY 9, 2015, China launched its war on lawyers. 

Over the course of a few weeks, some 300 lawyers, legal assistants and other advocates for the rule of law were rounded up. 

One of the most prominent, Wang Quanzhang, disappeared into secret detention on Aug. 3, 2015; after being held incommunicado for nearly 3½ years, he was the last to go on trial. 

On Monday, he was sentenced to 4½ years in prison on charges of subversion, putting a punctuation mark on one of the principal means of repression used by Xi Jinping to consolidate power.
Since taking office six years ago, Xi has employed corruption investigations to purge rivals in the Communist Party; stepped up censorship of social media; and conducted a massive campaign against Muslims in the East Turkestan colony, hundreds of thousands of whom have been confined to concentration camps and forced to undergo “reeducation.” 

Meanwhile, he has sought to stifle dissent by targeting the lawyers who defend human rights activists and religious believers or bring cases against local authorities for corruption.
Most of the lawyers and activists detained in what became known (for its July 9 date) as the 709 campaign were held for a few weeks; a number were later stripped of their licenses or driven out of business. 

But at least four besides Mr. Wang have been sentenced to prison. 

In August 2016, lawyer Zhou Shifeng and activist Hu Shigen were given terms of seven and 7½ years, respectively; in November 2017, lawyer Jiang Tianyong was sentenced to two years. 

The next month, human rights activist Wu Gan was handed an eight-year term.
Mr. Wang’s trial may have come last because of his refusal to buckle under pressure — including physical torture. 

While some lawyers signed confessions or publicly confessed to plotting against the government, Mr. Wang resisted to the end. 

When his closed trial was held on Dec. 26, he threw a wrench into the proceedings by firing his government-appointed lawyer.
His wife, Li Wenzu, bravely advocated on his behalf, speaking out about his treatment and shaving her head in protest of judges’ refusal to uphold Mr. Wang’s rights under Chinese law. 

She was prevented from attending his trial and denied visitation rights, along with seven lawyers appointed by the family. 

One of those lawyers, Yu Wensheng, has himself been detained incommunicado for more than a year, according to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
The crackdown on lawyers has attracted some international attention and protests; the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Mr. Wang was being held arbitrarily and called for his release. 

For the most part, the Trump administration has been silent, as it is on most human rights issues involving China.

But the State Department issued a statement Tuesday calling for Mr. Wang’s release and expressing concern about “the deteriorating situation for the rule of law, human rights, and fundamental freedoms in China.” 

While that’s not likely to influence Xi, the United States should be heard on cases such as this. 

The courageous Chinese lawyers still attempting to enforce the rule of law deserve the support of the democratic world.

China Holds Secret Trial for Rights Lawyer After 3 Years in Detention

By Chris Buckley

Wang Quanzhang, left, and his wife Li Wenzu, with their child in eastern China’s Shandong Province in 2015.

BEIJING — Nearly three and half years after Wang Quanzhang disappeared in China’s fierce offensive against human rights lawyers, he faced charges of subversion in a closed trial on Wednesday, capping a year when the Communist Party redoubled efforts to stifle political and religious dissent.
Mr. Wang, 42, was the last to be prosecuted among the hundreds of rights lawyers and activists rounded up in a sweep that started on July 9, 2015. 

In a blaze of propaganda, the police accused him and other combative attorneys of disrupting trials, fanning discontent, and plotting to overthrow the Communist Party.
But while others detained in the crackdown were released with warnings, put on bail after making rehearsed confessions on television, or tried and sentenced, Mr. Wang remained held in secrecy. 

His trial was also swaddled in security to ward off protests.
“This whole process has been illegal, so how could I expect an open and fair trial?” Mr. Wang’s wife, Li Wenzu, said in a telephone interview before the hearing. 

“But my demand is still that he be freed as not guilty, because that’s what he is.”
The police and guards kept Ms. Li from leaving her apartment in Beijing to attend the trial in Tianjin, a port city about 65 miles southeast from her home in the capital. 

During Mr. Wang’s detention, the authorities rejected repeated attempts by her and a succession of attorneys to visit him or find out more about his status and health.
The mobile phone of Liu Weiguo, the lawyer who represented Mr. Wang at the trial was turned off on Wednesday evening, and it was unclear when the trial ended. 

But the Tianjin Second Intermediate People’s Court that heard the case said on its website that a verdict would be announced at a later date. 

“Because state secrets were involved, the court decided under the law not to hold a public trial,” the statement said.

Li Wenzu shaved her head earlier this month to protest the detention of her husband, Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer.

“This will be a show trial, carefully censored and tightly controlled,” said Terence Halliday, a research professor at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago who studies Chinese defense lawyers. “Through Wang Quanzhang’s protracted disappearance, China’s state security and public security have been sending a chilling message to activist lawyers — keep silent or this could be your fate too.”
Still, one detail slipped out from the secret proceedings that suggested Mr. Wang remained unbowed. 

While in the courtroom, he dismissed his lawyer, Mr. Liu, who was not chosen by his family, Ms. Li said, citing a message from Mr. Liu. 

That step may have forced an adjournment in the trial, but Ms. Li had no further details.
Mr. Wang’s case, though, has been overshadowed this year by other controversies in China as Xi Jinping, the party leader and president, has sought to extinguish potential threats to party rule.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims in East Turkestan, a northwest region, have been detained in concentration camps where they are forced to renounce their religious beliefs and pledge loyalty to the party. 

Several independent Protestant churches have been shut down, and an outspoken pastor of one was detained. 

Two Canadians have been detained and accused of threatening national security in what supporters say was reprisal for a Chinese telecommunications executive’s arrest in Canada.
The detentions of lawyers and advocates in 2015 were a turning point on the way to more hard-line policies, said experts and friends of Mr. Wang. 

His prolonged detention came to symbolize the Communist Party’s growing readiness to override promised legal protections if they got in the way of silencing perceived threats, they said.
“The mass detention and surveillance campaign and other persecution in East Turkestan are the worst examples we know of at the moment, but they are connected to what is going on more widely in China,” said Eva Pils, a professor of law at King’s College London who studies China’s human rights lawyers and knows Mr. Wang. 

“Human rights defenders are very openly characterized as enemies of the people, connected to other, outside enemies.”

Peter Dahlin, who was detained and then deported from China, at home in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2016.

In the face of official pressure and rebuffs, Ms. Li and the families of other detained lawyers coalesced into a determined and creative resistance.
They have protested using red buckets, attempted walking to the detention center where Mr. Wang was held, and this month they shaved their heads to protest what they said was judges’ failure to enforce Mr. Wang’s rights under Chinese law. (The Mandarin Chinese word for hair (fa) sounds similar to the word for law.)
“In Chinese, having no hair sounds like having no law,” Ms. Li said. 

“We meant that we can do without our hair, but we can’t do without law.”
The prosecutors’ allegations against Mr. Wang appeared to distill several themes that the government has used to attack China’s human rights lawyers as a whole.
They accused him of “stirring up trouble” by calling together lawyers and supporters to demand that detainees be freed; of maligning China’s legal system online while representing members of a banned spiritual movement, Falun Gong; and colluding with a foreign-funded group to “propagate methods and tricks for resisting the government,” according to a 2017 prosecutors’ document shared by Peter Dahlin, a Swedish rights advocate named in the allegations.
Mr. Dahlin, who was detained in Beijing for 23 days in 2016 and deported from China for his work helping rights activists, said he was sure the document was authentic and rejected the claim that Mr. Wang’s activities amounted to “subversion of state power.”

Police officers blocking the streets on Wednesday in front of the Number 2 Intermediate People’s Court in Tianjin, where Mr. Wang is being tried.

Mr. Wang was born in Shandong Province, east China, and was drawn to activism even before he had graduated from law school. 

Like many other Chinese attorneys who take on contentious cases, his clients were mostly ordinary citizens in disputes with officials over land seizures, detentions and police abuses.
Even more than most rights lawyers, he has a stubborn streak, his wife and friends said.
His unbending personality “kept him going through years of abusive, incommunicado detention and given him the strength to refuse a forced confession,” Michael Caster, a human rights advocate who formerly worked in Beijing with Mr. Wang, said by email. 

“He was never one to be intimidated by threats from judges or by the physical abuse of police.”
When asked about Mr. Wang and others detained in the 2015 crackdown, Chinese officials have said that they have been given all their legal rights. 

But legal experts have said that his long, secretive confinement and lack of access to his own lawyers flouted China’s laws. 

In October, a United Nations Human Rights Council group condemned the secretive detention of Mr. Wang and two other Chinese advocates as a violation of international laws.
Chinese courts come under the guidance of the Communist Party and rarely, if ever, find defendants innocent in politically charged cases. 

Some of his supporters said Mr. Wang could be given a suspended prison sentence like other some lawyers who were detained in 2015. 

But others were less hopeful of early release.
“Even though Quanzhang is innocent, the outlook is bleak,” said Xie Yanyi, a recently disbarred Chinese rights attorney who tried to attend Mr. Wang’s trial. 

“Wang Quanzhang’s wife and loved ones need to be mentally prepared.”
Mr. Xie said he was blocked by plain clothes officers from trying to reach the court in Tianjin and supporters who got near the courthouse were bundled away by the police, said reporters there.
Mr. Wang’s wife, Ms. Li, said that until he was detained she knew little about his work. 

But she has since become a savvy advocate for her husband while trying to protect their 6-year old son. 

In a public letter in July addressed to Mr. Wang, she said she told their son that his father had gone off to battle monsters.
“Let’s go help dad fight the monsters,” the son told a friend, Ms. Li wrote. 

“After they’re beaten, dad can come home.”

China's State Gangsterism

Barging into your home, threatening your family, or making you disappear: Here's what China does to people who speak out against them

By Alexandra Ma
The Chinese Communist Party has long sought to suppress ideas that could undermine the sweeping authority it has over its 1.4 billion citizens — and the state can go to extreme lengths to maintain its grip.
In just the past few years, the government has attempted to muzzle critics by making them disappear without a trace, ordering people to physically barge into their houses, or locking up those close to critics as a kind of blackmail.
Even leaving China isn't always enough. 

The state has continued to clamp down on dissent by harassing and threatening family members who remain in the country.
Scroll down to see what China can do to people who criticize it.

1. Make you disappear.Li Wenzu holds a photo of her husband, detained human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, while protesting in front of the Supreme People's Protectorate in Beijing in July 2017.
Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer who defended political activists in the past, has not been seen since he was taken into detention three years ago.
He was taken away in August 2015 alongside more than 200 lawyers, legal assistants, and activists for government questioning. 

Three years later, he remains the only person in that cohort who still isn't free.
Nobody has heard from him since. 

His lawyers, friends, and family have all tried contacting him, but have consistently been denied access, Radio Free Asia reported.
The lawyer's friends and family, and other lawyers, have tried visiting him, but to no avail. 

His wife, Li Wenzu, has been routinely harassed by Chinese police for protesting Wang's detention, according to the BBC.
His wife recently received a message from a friend saying that Wang was alive and "in reasonable mental and physical health," but was denied further information when she contacted authorities.

2. Physically drag you away so you can't speak to the media.

A woman being taken away by police after she tried sharing footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing on July 26.
A woman was dragged away by men in plainclothes after she tried to share footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing with journalists on the ground in July.
As the woman was trying to share images of the scene with journalists, a group of men took her across, claiming it was a "family matter," according to Agence France-Presse reporter Becky Davis who witnessed it.
The woman claimed she didn't know any of the men. 

You can watch the whole scene unfold in this video.
China was trying to cover up news of the explosion. 

Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, reportedly wiped all posts about it in the hours following the incident, before allowing some media coverage of it later on.
While it remains unclear who the men were and why they took the woman, Davis said it is common for plainclothes police to act as "family members" and take people away.
Read more: 'I do not know that man. I didn't do anything!': A woman who tried to share footage of the explosion near Beijing's US Embassy was forced into a car and driven away

3. Put your family under house arrest, even if they haven't been accused of a crime.Portraits of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia displayed at a protest in Hong Kong in June 2017.
China has kept family members of prominent activists under house arrest to prevent them from traveling abroad and publicly protesting the regime.
In 2010 Liu Xia tried to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of her husband, Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist who at the time was imprisoned for "inciting subversion" with his protests.
She wasn't allowed to go and was placed under house arrest with 24-hour surveillance. 

She had no access to a cell phone or computer, even though she hadn't been charged with a crime.
She was allowed to leave the house in 2017 to attend the sea burial of her husband after his death from liver cancer, before being sent to the other side of the country by authorities so she wouldn't see memorials held by supporters in Beijing.
Liu Xia was detained in her house for eight years in total. 

She was released to Berlin in July after a sustained lobbying effort from the German government for Liu's release.
Still, she is not completely free: Xia is effectively prevented from appearing in public or speaking to media for fear of reprisal from Beijing. 

She fears that if she does, the government will punish her brother, who remains in Beijing, her friend Tienchi Martin-Liao told The Guardian.

4. Threaten to kill your family and forbid them from leaving China.Anastasia Lin, whose family in China is being punished for her activism against China.

Even when dissidents leave China, they are not safe. 

Chinese expats and exiles have seen family members who remained in China pay the price for their protest.
One example is Chinese-Canadian actress Anastasia Lin, who repeatedly speaks out to criticise China's human rights record.
She told Business Insider earlier this year that her uncles and elderly grandparents had their visas to Hong Kong — a Chinese region that operates under a separate and independent rule of law — revoked in 2016.
Security agents also contacted Lin's father saying that if she continued to speak up, the family "would be persecuted like in the Cultural Revolution" — a bloody ten-year period under Mao Zedong when millions of Chinese people were persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured.
Shawn Zhang, a student in Vancouver who has criticized Xi Jinping online, told Business Insider earlier this year that police incessantly called his parents asking them to take down his posts.
The family members of five journalists with Radio Free Asia — a US-funded media outlet — were also recently detained to stop their reporting on human rights abuses against the Uighur minority in China's East Turkestan colony.
Read more: China uses threats about relatives at home to control and silence expats and exiles abroad

5. Take down your social media posts.

A woman surrounded by Chinese paramilitary police on a smoggy day in Beijing in December 2015.

Chinese tech companies routinely delete social media posts and forbid users from posting keywords used to criticize the government.
Censorship in China has soared under Xi Jinping's presidency, with thousands of censorship directives issued every year.
Posts and keywords are usually only banned for a few hours or a few days until an event or news cycle is over.
In February, popular chat and microblogging platforms WeChat and Weibo banned users from writing posts with the letter N when it was used to criticize a plan allowing Xi to rule without term limits.
Read more: Planting spies, paying people to post on social media, and pretending the news doesn't exist: This is how China tries to distract people from human rights abuses

6. Remove your posts from the internet — and throw you in a psychiatric ward.Dong Yaoqiong live-streaming herself defacing a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, China, on July 4.

In July, Dong Yaoqiong live-streamed herself pouring black ink over a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, while criticizing the Communist Party's "oppressive brain control" over the country.
Hours later, she reported seeing police officers at her door and the video — which can still be seen here— was removed from her social media account.
She has not been seen in public since, although Voice of America and Radio Free Asia reported that she was being held at a psychiatric hospital in her home province of Hunan, citing local activists.

7. Barge into your house to force you off the airwaves.Sun Wenguang in his home in Jinan in August 2013.
Sun Wenguang, a prominent critic of the Chinese government, was forced off air during a live phone interview with Voice of America in early August.
The 83-year-old former economics professor had been arguing that Xi Jinping had his economic priorities wrong, when up to eight policemen barged into his home, and forced him off the line.
His last words before he got cut off were: "Let me tell you, it's illegal for you to come to my home. I have my freedom of speech!" 

You can listen to the audio (in Chinese, but subtitled in English) here.
The father of Dong Yaoqiong, the woman who defaced the poster of Xi, was also interrupted while live-streaming a video calling for his daughter's release.
In the recording, which can be seen here, a man purporting to be a plain-clothed police officer can seen entering the premises, demanding to take Dong's father and his friend away, and ignoring their questions about whether the man had a search warrant.

8. Trap you in your house, and detain people who come to see you.

About 11 days after Sun Wenguang, the dissident Chinese professor, was interrupted on his call, he was found locked inside his own home.
Police had detained him in his house and Sun told two journalists who went to interview him that police forced his wife to tell people he had gone traveling to avoid suspicion.
He added: "We were taken out of our residence for 10 days and stayed at four hotels. Some of the rooms had sealed windows. It was a dark jail. After we were back, they sent four security guys to sleep in our home."
The journalists, from the US government-funded Voice of America, were detained immediately after the interview. 

Their whereabouts are not clear at this point.
Read more: A renegade Chinese professor who was forced off-air while criticizing the government was locked in his apartment and told to make up a story that he left town

9. Forbid you from leaving the country.Ai Weiwei in London in September 2015, two months after his release from China.
Ai Weiwei, the prolific Chinese artist and avid critic of the Chinese government, was blocked from leaving China for four years.
Authorities claimed he was being investigated for various crimes, including pornography, bigamy, and the illicit exchange of foreign currency.
He was detained for 81 days and charged with tax evasion, for which his company was ordered to pay 15 million yuan ($2.4 million). 

His supporters claimed the tax evasion charges were fabricated.
The government took away his passport in 2011 and refused to give it back until 2015. 

He then immediately flew to Berlin, where he now lives.

10. Intercept your protests before they even begin.Police surrounding a group of people preparing to protest in Beijing on August 6.
A group of protesters had been planning a demonstration in Beijing's financial district over lost investments with the country's peer-to-peer lending platforms.
Many of those platforms had shut down due to a recent government crackdown on financial firms, causing investors to lose some tens of thousands of dollars in savings.
But the demonstration, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on a Monday in front of China's banking regulatory commission, never materialized — because police had already rounded up the protesters and sent them home.
Many demonstrators who arrived in Beijing earlier that day found police waiting for them at their bus and train stations, before sending them away.
Peter Wang, who planned to take part in the protest, told Reuters: "Once the police checked your ID cards and saw your petition materials, they knew you are here looking to protect your [financial] rights. Then they put you on a bus directly."
Becky Davis, AFP's reporter in Beijing, described seeing more than 120 buses parked nearby to take the protesters away.
Other protesters seen traveling from their home towns to Beijing to take part in the demonstration were forced to give their fingerprints and blood samples, and prevented from traveling to the capital, Reuters said.
Activists told The Globe and Mail that the police found out about the protest by monitoring their conversations on WeChat.

Activists say we are now seeing 'human rights violations not seen in decades' in ChinaSurveillance cameras in front of a giant portrait of Mao Zedong in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 2009.

China has a long history of suppressing dissenting views and actions. 

But Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said the number of people being targeted and the extent of their punishment has worsened under Xi's rule.
"While life for peaceful critics in modern China has never been easy, there have been times of relative latitude," she told Business Insider.
"Eleven's tenure is most certainly not one of those times — not just in the numbers of people being targeted, but in the use of harsh charges and long sentences, and in the state's adoption of rights-gutting laws.
"Add to that the alarming expansion of high-tech surveillance and mass arbitrary detentions across East Turkestan, and you've got a scale of human rights violations we have not seen in decades."
The United Nations recently accused China of holding one million Uighurs in internment camps in the western colony of East Turkestan. 


Does the Chinese Communist Party care that people know what's going on?
Probably not.

Richardson said: "The Chinese communists will keep treating people however badly they want unless the price for doing so is made too high for them — clearly this calculus finally changed recently for them with respect to Liu Xia," referring to the activist's wife who was released to Beijing after eight years of house arrest.
"That's why relentless public and private interventions on behalf of those unjustly treated is critical — to keep driving up the cost of abuses many people inside and outside China find unacceptable," Richardson added.
But there's a catch, says Frances Eve, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders. 

While the Party has released political activists due to public pressure in the past, it has kept family members in China to make sure the activists don't speak out.
Eve told The Guardian in July: "The Chinese Communist Party has become more immune to international pressure to release activists and let them go overseas, coinciding with its growing economic clout.
"Nowadays, on the rare occasion it does allow an activist to go abroad, it's with the sinister knowledge that their immediate or extended family remains in China and can be used as an effective hostage to stifle their free speech."

Rogue Nation

Wife marches for 'vanished' husband
BBC News

Li Wenzu is walking from Beijing to Tianjin

The wife of a detained Chinese lawyer has begun a march of more than 100km (62 miles) to try to find answers about his fate.
Li Wenzu is walking from Beijing to Tianjin, where she thinks Wang Quanzhang may be being held.
She told the BBC she had heard nothing since his arrest 1,000 days ago and did not even know if he was still alive.
Mr Wang was held in August 2015 during a nationwide crackdown that detained more than 200 rights activists.
Activists say the "709" crackdown as it is now known -- a reference to 9 July, the date it began -- was a sign of the growing intolerance of dissent under Xi Jinping.

Li Wenzu, speaking last year about her husband's disappearance

The state-run People's Daily at the time called some of the leading detainees "a major criminal gang that has seriously damaged social order".
Ms Li is doing the 12-day walk to try to force the authorities to tell her what has happened to her husband. 

All she knows is that he was detained.
She asked whether China was following its policy of "ruling the country according to the law" if her husband's lawyer was not allowed to see him.
She also said she suspected her husband had been tortured.

Ms Li does not even know if her husband is still alive

Ms Li told Reuters: "[They have] abused all of our rights. Arresting an innocent person like this, locking him up for almost 1,000 days, I think this is cruel. It's heartless."
Mr Wang handled cases of complaints of police torture, and defended members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, which China calls an evil cult.
In this interview from 2015, he recounted being beaten in the basement of a court building for challenging the order of a judge.
Ms Li is being accompanied on her walk by Wang Qiaoling, wife of rights lawyer, Li Heping, who was given a suspended sentence for subversion last April.
Many of those held in the "709" crackdown were given jail terms, suspended sentences or house arrest.

Harassment and house arrest in China as Trump has 'beyond terrific' time

Human rights defenders and their families placed under heavy surveillance by Xi Jinping’s agents as US president is feted
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Li Wenzu, wife of lawyer Wang Quanzhang, during a protest in Beijing against the detention of human rights defenders. 

On day one of Donald Trump’s “state visit-plus” to China he was treated to a tour of the Forbidden City, a night at the opera and an intimate dinner with Xi Jinping. 

“Beyond terrific,” he boasted.

Trump's freak show

Li Wenzu got a loud knock at the door from a man claiming to represent the domestic security agency tasked with suppressing political dissent. 

“The US president is in town,” the 32-year-old mother-of-one says she was informed by the agent. “Do not go anywhere … you must cooperate with our work.”
Li is the wife of Wang Quanzhang, a crusading human rights lawyer whom she has not seen since the summer of 2015 when he was spirited into secret detention during a roundup of attorneys and activists known as Xi’s “war on law”.
With China’s leader out to impress his American guest, Li and dissidents like her say they have been placed under house arrest or heavy surveillance in a bid to stop them spoiling the show.
“[The authorities] are afraid of us meeting with foreign leaders, of our stories being heard by people all over the world, and of the truth being uncovered,” she said by phone on Thursday morning as Xi rolled out the red carpet for Trump in Tiananmen Square.
After the knock on her door at about 7am on Wednesday, Li said about a dozen plainclothes agents had camped outside her flat in west Beijing.

A photograph taken by Li Wenzu after plainclothes Chinese security agents were posted outside her flat.

When she tried to go out with her young son, she claimed one of the group “pushed me with his body and prevented us from going”.
“Shame on him!” Li said. 

“Just think about it, I don’t have the right to go anywhere in the country. It is ridiculous. I felt so powerless.”
Beijing-based activist He Depu told Radio Free Asia, a US-backed news website, other activists were also feeling the pinch because of Trump’s arrival: “All political dissidents are under surveillance right now.”

Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights activist who was expelled from China last year after 23 days in secret detention, said authorities saw Li – who has campaigned relentlessly on behalf of her imprisoned husband -- as a “constant thorn in their side”. 

He called her treatment “unusual even for China” and symptomatic of a wider breakdown in the rule of law under Xi.
Dahlin, a friend of Li’s husband, said Wang had spent so long in secret detention that “at one point people were seriously wondering if he was even alive any more”. 

He is now thought to be behind bars in the northern city of Tianjin.
Trump has enraged human rights activists by courting China’s authoritarian leader despite what they call the government’s worst crackdown in decades. 

Trump has called Xi a friend and recently praised his “extraordinary elevation” and “great political victory” after he was anointed China’s most powerful leader since Mao.
On Wednesday, Republican senator Marco Rubio rejected that description: “Xi’s further consolidation of power, in a one-party communist state, was not a political victory. It was a tragedy for human rights advocates, reformers and thousands of political prisoners,” he tweeted.
Li Wenzu, who has not seen her husband since he was seized, said: “I hope [Trump] can show concern for human rights issues in China … He should think carefully about dealing with a country that does not care about human rights, and violates the law.
“It’s just like when we are making friends, we must first look at character of the person [we are befriending].” 

China's war on law: victims' wives tell US Congress of torture and trauma

Women whose husbands were targets of Communist party crackdown on human rights lawyers call for US sanctions
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Chen Guiqiu (3rd L), the wife of detained human rights lawyer Xie Yang, with other wives of detained human rights lawyers wearing the names of their husbands on their dresses in 2016. 

The wives of some of the most prominent victims of Xi Jinping’s crackdown on civil society have stepped up their campaign for justice, backing calls for US sanctions against Chinese officials involved in barbaric cases of torture and abuse.
Addressing a congressional hearing in Washington on Thursday, the women, whose husbands were among the key targets of a Communist party offensive against human rights lawyers, detailed the physical and psychological trauma inflicted by China’s war on law.

Chen Guiqiu, who fled to the United States in March, told of how her husband, the attorney Xie Yang, had been imprisoned and brutally tortured because of his work defending victims of land grabs, religious persecution and dissidents.

She described her husband’s ordeal as an example of China’s lawlessness and claimed that at his recent trial Xie had been forced to refute detailed claims that he had been the victim of sustained and brutal campaign of torture.
Wang Yanfeng, the wife of Tang Jingling, a lawyer and democracy activist who was jailed in 2016 in what campaigners described as “a gross injustice”, said her husband had suffered repeated spells of abuse, threats and torture. 

“Today other [lawyers and political prisoners] are still suffering from such torture,” Wang said, calling on Donald Trump to challenge China over such abuses.
In a video message, Li Wenzu, the wife of lawyer Wang Quanzhang, said she had heard nothing from him since he was seized by police at the start of the campaign against lawyers in July 2015. 

“I am deeply concerned about my husband’s safety. I don’t know how his health is. I don’t know whether he has been left disabled by the torture. I don’t even know whether he is alive.”
Wang Qiaoling, whose husband, Li Heping, recently emerged from a 22-month stint in custody, said he returned home looking “20 years older” and had told of being forced to sit for hours in stress positions and being shackled with chains. 

“He suffered from very cruel and sick torture,” Wang added.
Also giving testimony was Lee Chin-yu, whose husband, the Taiwanese human rights activist Lee Ming-che, vanished into Chinese custody in March after travelling to the mainland. 

“I stand alone before you today to plead for your help for my husband,” Lee said, calling on Washington to pressure China to end her husband’s “illegitimate detention”.
Since China’s crackdown on lawyers began almost two years ago, its victims’ wives have emerged as a relentless and forceful voice of opposition, often using humorous online videos and public performances to champion their cause. 

They say they have done so in defiance of a campaign of state-sponsored intimidation that has seen them trailed by undercover agents, struggle to enrol their children into schools or be evicted from their homes.
Terry Halliday, the author of a book about China’s human rights lawyers, said the lawyers’ wives had opened up “a new line of struggle that we have not seen before in China”.
“These women have become a very powerful and visible public presence both of criticism of the government, of appeals for the release of their loved-ones but also impugning China in the eyes of the world. It is remarkable.”
“It’s a whole new front,” Halliday added. 

“It is not so easy for the government to silence wives and daughters.”
Thursday’s hearing was part of a push by human rights groups to convince the Trump administration to use a law called the Magnitsky Act to bring sanctions such as travel bans or property seizures against Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses.
“We should be seeking to hold accountable any Chinese officials complicit in torture, human rights abuses and illegal detentions,” said Chris Smith, the Republican congressman who chaired the session and said he was compiling a list of potential targets.
Smith said he hoped such action could help end the “shocking, offensive, immoral, barbaric and inhumane” treatment of Chinese activists that has accelerated since Xi Jinping took power in 2012.
“While Xi Jinping feels feted at Davos and lauded in national capitals for his public commitments to openness, his government is torturing and abusing those seeking rights guaranteed by China’s own constitution,” Smith said.

When Chinese Rights Activists Were Jailed, Their Wives Fought Back

By CHRIS BUCKLEY and DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

In Beijing last year, the wives of human rights lawyers who were detained in 2015, from left, Wang Yanfang, Li Wenzu, Chen Guiqiu, Fan Lili, Liu Ermin, and Wang Qiaoling. 

BEIJING — Before her husband disappeared into detention, Chen Guiqiu did not ask him much about his risky work as a Chinese human rights lawyer. 

Before word crept out that he had been tortured, Ms. Chen trusted the police. 

Before she was told she could not leave China, she never expected she would make a perilous escape abroad.
Ms. Chen and her two daughters reached the United States in March after an overland journey to Thailand that almost ended in their deportation back to China. 

Her husband, Xie Yang, was tried and convicted this month of subversion and disrupting a court. 

But Ms. Chen said her escape was the culmination of a personal transformation that began after he was detained almost two years ago.
“It was because of all the pressure from all sides — from state security police, my employer — and slowly I lost commitment and hope,” Ms. Chen said in a telephone interview from her temporary home in Texas. 

“I was always being followed. I felt I was living without freedom.”
Ms. Chen’s evolution was part of a startling outcome of China’s crackdown on outspoken rights lawyers and advocates that began in July 2015 — the spouses who resisted. 

She and other wives of rights advocates held in China described their experiences to a congressional subcommittee in Washington on Thursday.
After their loved ones disappeared in the wave of arrests, some family members, especially the wives of the detained lawyers, overcame their fear and fought back, often in a theatrical fashion. 

They used online appeals and visits to jails, prosecutors and courts. 

They gathered in bright red clothes and with red buckets to publicize their demands for information and access to the prisoners.
Their tongue-in-cheek slogan became “Leave the dressing table and take on the thugs,” said Li Wenzu, whose husband, Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer, has remained in secretive custody 21 months after he was detained in August 2015.
“The story of the wives is one of the great stories of the whole crackdown — it is a brilliant adaptation by the activists to repression,” said Terence Halliday, a researcher at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago who has written a book on Chinese criminal defense lawyers. 

“My goodness, the attention they have brought to bear, not just for their husbands, but also the state of the crackdown.”
Chinese state investigators have long applied pressure on detainees’ families to win cooperation and confessions. 

But this time their tactics seemed more systematic, said Wang Qiaoling, the wife of a detained lawyer, Li Heping. 

Mr. Li was recently released after being tried and receiving a suspended prison sentence.
“They can treat you like hand-pulled noodles, squeeze you into any shape,” Ms. Wang, 45, said in an interview. 

“If you’re isolated and scared, it’s hard to resist.”
Some wives of detainees said they had been forced to move from rented apartments after the police warned landlords. 

Some were prevented from enrolling their children in school. 

And the police recruited relatives to beg them to stay quiet and compliant. 

The families described these tactics as “lianzuo” or “zhulian,” old Chinese terms for the collective punishment of families.

Wang Qiaoling, the wife of the detained lawyer Li Heping, in Beijing last year. Mr. Li was recently released after receiving a suspended prison sentence. 

Some families buckled. 

But others protested and filed petitions about the secretive detentions and trials. 

Ms. Wang encouraged a tight circle of women who rallied the relatives of detainees, arguing that silence would only encourage courts to hand down stiffer sentences.
“If you want to protect your family, you can’t stay silent,” Ms. Wang said. 

“It’s been crucial that we’ve been able to stick together.”
But for Ms. Chen, 42, the journey to defiance was especially wrenching.
While many of the detained lawyers lived in Beijing, she lived in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, about 800 miles to the south. 

And she had a secure, state-funded job as a professor of environmental engineering at Hunan University, studying ways to remove heavy metal and organic pollution from water.
While Mr. Xie traveled relentlessly, she cared for their two daughters, now ages 4 and 15. 

And when Mr. Xie was home, they barely discussed his contentious legal cases. 

“It never occurred to me that he could get into serious trouble for being a lawyer,” she said. 

“The children kept us busy enough.”
Initially, when the police took Mr. Xie away, Ms. Chen thought he would be freed quickly once investigators found that he had committed no crime. 

She kept quiet, heeding the advice of the police that silence would buy him lenience.
“Under heavy pressure and ignorant, I chose to accept the police’s illegal orders and went along with them for nearly nine months,” she wrote last year in an essay about her experiences. 

“I heeded the advice of the state security: no media interviews, no going abroad, no contact with other families involved in the case.”
But like other family members, she ran up against an opaque legal system that held detainees in secrecy for many months with no visits by relatives or access to lawyers.
“Not one office followed the law, not one gave us a legal response,” she said in the interview. 

“That was totally different from what I expected. This was a legal case, and I wanted to defend my husband by using the law, but it was impossible to use the law.”
Her growing frustration led her to speak up and contact other wives of detainees, including Ms. Wang, who offered advice and encouragement.
Ms. Chen was spared some of the intimidation that other families described. 

Her children were not singled out at school, she said. 

But other wives of detainees said their children had been denied access to schools or kindergartens in Beijing after officials warned principals or refused to process paperwork.
But Ms. Chen felt a shock in April last year when she tried to take her daughters on a trip to Hong Kong, a self-governed city that mainland Chinese must get a special pass to enter. 

The police stopped her from taking the train across the border on the grounds that she was a security risk.
Chen Guiqiu, right, with her daughters after arriving at an airport in Texas in March.

“I woke up to the fact that I was being treated as guilty by association,” she said. 

“They told me I was deemed a threat to national security, and if I was already regarded as guilty, then Xie Yang was, too.”
In touch now with a circle of wives of detainees, she occasionally took part in their demands for access and information when she visited Beijing. 

Partly inspired by feminist protests in China in 2015, they took to carrying red buckets and displaying red slogans on their dresses as a display of defiance, especially when visiting Tianjin, the port city near Beijing where many of their husbands were held.
“We developed a headstrong mentality,” Ms. Wang said. 

“The more they wanted to make us feel like heinous criminals, the more we kept up a relaxed, casual attitude.”
But staying upbeat was not easy. 

Ms. Chen began to hear that her husband had been tortured in Hunan, where he was held. 

At first, the accounts came indirectly. 

Then, when Mr. Xie was allowed to see his lawyers in January this year, he spilled out a description of abuses, including beatings and deprivation of sleep. 

Ms. Chen decided to release the transcripts online, hoping that the publicity would help end the abuses.
“Let the world know what forced confession through torture is, what shamelessness without limit is,” Ms. Chen said in a statement at the time.
The government has denied those claims of torture, and at his recent trial, Mr. Xie also retracted them and pleaded guilty, after his own lawyers were replaced by ones chosen by the authorities. 

But many family members of detained lawyers say that the evidence points to widespread abuses, including the forced taking of drugs that made the detainees docile and submissive.
By February, Ms. Chen lived under stifling surveillance, she said. 

Constantly monitored at home and work, and warned by the police, university officials and relatives not to speak out more about her husband, she decided to escape.
She gathered up her daughters, confided her plan to the older one and told the younger one they were going on a trip. 

The security officers who followed her had become used to her driving away to work each day, but Ms. Chen and her daughters quietly walked out, evading the watchers.
Ms. Chen declined to describe the details of how she and her children made the journey to Thailand, fearing that would endanger people who helped her. 

She kept her cellphone turned off, but the Thai police tracked her to a safe house — she believes with help from Chinese security officers alerted to her disappearance.
After a court appearance, Ms. Chen and her children were taken to a detention center and told they would be sent back to China. 

Officials from the United States Embassy in Bangkok stepped in and secured her release after haggling with the Thai authorities, she said. 

On March 17, Ms. Chen and her children arrived in Houston, after a standoff with Chinese and Thai officials at Bangkok International Airport.
Mr. Xie was given a suspended prison sentence, but he remains cut off from normal contact, apparently under police guard outside Changsha, Ms. Chen said.
“I hope that one day Xie Yang can join us here,” she said. 

“But we might have to wait a long time to see him. We’ve already waited a long time.”

Rogue Nation

Human rights lawyers in China beaten, arrested
By NOMAAN MERCHANT

Lawyers who defend human rights activists and dissidents targeted by China's communist government have increasingly themselves become subject to political prosecutions, violence and other means of suppression, according to a report released Thursday.
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of groups working within and outside China, identified six occasions last year that lawyers were beaten by plaintiffs, police officers or assailants hired by authorities. 

In more than a dozen cases, the report found, detainees were pressured to fire their own lawyers and accept government-supplied attorneys.
"The government is trying to give this impression that it's abiding by the rule of law," said Frances Eve, a researcher for the network. 

"In fact, it's just legalizing repressive measures."
Under Xi Jinping, China has widely suppressed independent organizations and dissenters, as well as lawyers defending people caught in its crackdown. 

The report says 22 people have been convicted since 2014 of subversion or other crimes against state security, including 16 last year alone.
Dozens of lawyers have been questioned or detained in an ongoing campaign against dissident lawyers known as the 709 crackdown launched in July 2015.
Wang Quanzhang, who defended members of the Falun Gong meditation sect banned by China, was charged with subversion of state power in January 2016 after previously being beaten and detained. His wife, Li Wenzu, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Wang is now under indictment and being held without access to family or lawyers.
"We have to wait until the sentencing to see him in jail," she said.
Four people associated with Wang's law firm, Fengrui, were convicted in August of charges that they incited protests and took funding from foreign groups.
China last year also passed a law tightening controls over foreign non-governmental organizations by subjecting them to close police supervision, a move critics called a new attempt by authorities to clamp down on perceived threats to the ruling Communist Party's control.
NGOs can be blacklisted if they commit violations ranging from illegally obtaining unspecified state secrets to "spreading rumors, slandering or otherwise expressing or disseminating harmful information that endangers state security."
Ordinary Chinese who share audio or video of a protest or other news event may be detained, and authorities can shut down phone and Web networks in response to perceived threats to "national security" and "social order".
Chinese Internet censors already exercise tight control with the so-called "Great Firewall" that blocks many foreign news sites and social media platforms.
Prominent activists have frequently been taken into custody without notice to their family or legal teams. 

One was Liu Feiyue, the founder of a website that detailed local corruption cases, veterans' issues, and allegations that perceived troublemakers were being detained in mental hospitals. 

After his disappearance in November, Liu's family was told he was charged with subversion.
Despite its well-publicized record, China was re-elected last year to the United Nations' Human Rights Council. 

But even as China reported its membership on the council through state media, it refused to let banned activists attend United Nations events, the report said.
When Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur for human rights, visited China in August, authorities forbade him from meeting several activists and tightly controlled his schedule. 

One activist who did meet with him, lawyer Jiang Tianyong, was arrested three months later and charged with inciting subversion of state power.
Eve, the researcher for Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said some activists believed after Xi became president in 2013 that they might find common cause over his stated goals of rooting out government corruption. 

But those limited hopes have not come to fruition, she said.
"It's gone completely the opposite direction," she said. 

"And it's a tragedy, because those are the kinds of alliances that can make real impact."
The Chinese foreign ministry did not respond to faxed questions.