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.

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.”

Rule by Fear and Torture: China's War on Law

Chinese lawyer wore torture device for a month
By John Sudworth

A picture of Mr Li from 2012 and one taken after his release

It's a form of restraint that would be more in keeping with the practices of a medieval dungeon than a modern, civilised state.
But the device -- leg and hand shackles linked by a short chain -- is a well-documented part of the toolkit that the Chinese police use to break the will of their detainees.
And it is one that they forced one of this country's most prominent human rights lawyers to wear, for a full month.
Li Heping was finally released from detention on Tuesday and his wife Wang Qiaoling has now had time to learn about the treatment he endured over his almost two-year-long incarceration.
"In May 2016 in the Tianjin Number One Detention Centre, he was put in handcuffs and shackles with an iron chain linking the two together," she tells me.
"It meant that he could not stand up straight, he could only stoop, even during sleeping. He wore that instrument of torture 24/7 for one month."
She adds: "They wanted him to confess."

China's war on law
In one sense, Mr Li was lucky.
A 2015 investigation by Human Rights Watch into the use of torture by the Chinese police revealed the case of a man who was forced to wear this type of device for eight years.
In 2014 an Amnesty International report documented the supply and manufacture of torture equipment by Chinese companies, including the combined hand and leg cuffs.

Torture devices like the one used on Li Heping are readily available online

"The use of these devices causes unnecessary discomfort and can easily result in injuries," William Nee, China Researcher at Amnesty International, tells me.
"Such devices place unwarranted restrictions on the movement of detainees and serve no legitimate law enforcement purpose that cannot be achieved by the use of handcuffs alone."
Li Heping is one of a group of human rights lawyers who were detained in July 2015, in a crackdown since referred to as China's war on law.
Of course, threats, intimidation and violence have always been part of the risks for any lawyer daring to take on the might of the Communist Party in its own courts.
But Xi Jinping has made it clear that he sees the ideal of constitutional rights, guaranteed by independent courts, as a threat to national security.
So his war on law sends a clear message.

For those like Mr Li, representing the victims of China's illegal land grabs, religious persecution or political repression, the threat is not just from corrupt local officials or powerful businessmen, but from the state itself.

The before and after photos offer a visual clue to his time in detention.
One taken in 2012 shows an assured, cheery lawyer.
The one taken on his release shows him noticeably thinner and looking older than his years.
Wang Qiaoling tells me she barely recognised him.
And she tells me about the other forms of ill-treatment that her husband has described to her since his release.
"He was forced to take medicine. They stuffed the pills into his mouth as he refused to take them voluntarily," she says.
"The police told him that they were for high blood pressure, but my husband doesn't suffer from that.
"After taking the pills he felt pain in his muscles and his vision was blurred."

Gruelling questioning
"He was beaten. He endured gruelling questioning while being denied sleep for days on end," she goes on.
"And he was forced to stand to attention for 15 hours a day, without moving."

Amnesty International's William Nee tells me that each of these methods of ill-treatment could be considered torture by themselves.
"Cumulatively, they would demonstrate a clear intent by the authorities to inflict physical and mental torture with the goal of getting Li Heping to confess," he says.
"Since China is a party to the Convention against Torture, these serious allegations should prompt the Chinese authorities to immediately launch a prompt, effective and impartial investigation to assess whether this torture took place."
Despite the prolonged and extreme nature of the torture, Ms Wang tells me her husband never did confess.
"He was worried that he might be tortured to death in the detention centre and he wouldn't make it to meet his family again, so he reached an agreement with the authorities that the trial would be held in secret.
"He would be given a suspended sentence but he never admitted guilt or confessed that he had subverted state power."

Barred from the media
At that secret trial, the details of which were released by China's state-controlled media afterwards, the court ruled that Mr Li had "repeatedly used the internet and foreign media interviews to discredit and attack state power and the legal system".
As a result of his conviction, he is now unable to practise law and has also signed an agreement that he will not carry out any further media interviews.
But his wife, despite constant intimidation, refuses to be similarly constrained.
Plain-clothes policemen still surround the family home and she was followed to our agreed interview location.
Wang Qiaoling's account tallies with that of other lawyers caught up in the crackdown, including Xie Yang, whose court case was heard this week.
He had alleged similar abuses during his interrogations -- including shackling, beatings and being made to remain in the same position for hours on end.
We called the Tianjin Number One detention centre to ask about the allegations that Li Heping was tortured there.
"We don't do any interviews," came the reply. 

"If you want to do an interview, please go through the legal and proper channels."

Rule by Fear and Torture

'Emaciated, unrecognisable': China releases human rights lawyer from custody
Li Heping was held in secret for two years and deprived of all contact with his family

By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Chinese human rights lawyer Li Heping (right) is released from custody after two years in which he was tried in secret.

The last time Terry Halliday saw Li Heping, just a few days before he was snatched by police in the summer of 2015, he remembers sitting down to lunch with a stimulating, thoughtful and physically fit man.
“Slim, yes, but not emaciated. A man clearly in his 40s … A man who was fully present,” the American Bar Foundation scholar recalled.
Just days later Li, a crusading Chinese human rights lawyer, was spirited into secret custody at the start of an unprecedented government crackdown on his trade that has drawn widespread international condemnation.

'I want to rescue my dad': children's heartbreak for the lawyers China has taken away

On Tuesday afternoon, after almost two years languishing behind bars, Li finally emerged, having been secretly tried and handed a suspended sentence for “subversion of state power” at the end of last month.
Photographs and a brief video clip posted online showed the Christian attorney, now 46, being reunited with his wife and daughter, Wang Qiaoling and Li Jiamei, at their family home in Beijing.
“I have to say I didn’t recognise him in the [photo],” said Halliday, the author of a book on China’s human rights lawyers, who like many was disturbed at the toll incarceration appeared to have inflicted on his friend.
“[He looked] very thin. He’s aged about 20 years. His hair has gone grey. He’s gone through a torturous time, I would say,” Halliday added. 

“I would defy anybody ... to imagine that so much transformation could have occurred over two years.”
“The only thing that I recognised was his smile: that wonderful smile of his that has always been a reflection of his warmth and his kindness.”
As news of Li’s release spread on social media, friends and supporters expressed a similar mix of relief and outrage.
“This is Li Heping? Almost unrecognizable!” Liu Xiaoyuan, a prominent rights lawyer who clients have included the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, tweeted alongside an image of the lawyer’s homecoming.
“Hair completely white,” tweeted Zhang Dajun, a Chinese legal scholar.
“Visibly emaciated,” tweeted human rights researcher Ye Shiwei alongside footage of Li’s first hug with his wife and daughter in more than 600 days.

A photo of a printed family photo of Li Jiamei, 6, her father and imprisoned lawyer Li Heping and her mother Wang Qiaoling at home in Beijing, China. 

Zhong Jinhua, a former judge and government critic, wrote: “Thank God!” Li Heping finally [back] home.”
Halliday said he was delighted, relieved and gratified by Li’s release despite his obvious physical deterioration.
“Friends and supporters and NGOS and governments and churches have been hoping and praying for this since [he was taken on] 10 July 2015,” he said.
“I think this demonstrates how sensitive China’s government is to the unrelenting pressure that has come from all sides,” over its so-called “war on law” crackdown.
However, Halliday cautioned against interpreting Li’s release as a sign that Beijing was showing leniency or mercy to a man who has been held without charge for nearly two years on what supporters and diplomats believe were politically-motivated charges.
“We have got to be very sober that this is no release by the standards of any rule-of-law country. He is going to be ... quarantined with his family. There will be cameras outside his building and outside his apartment. There will be security people on mattresses or chairs sitting outside his front door. They may be under audio or video surveillance inside their apartment. They won’t be able to go anywhere at all without having security people accompany them, whether it is to the grocery store or the park.”
Halliday added: “He’s lost his income and his living. He’ll be kept away from his church. He will be shielded from other lawyers, from his Christian friends. So while I’m very glad that he is no longer in a formal jail, many of us who watch this … believe that China has substituted the formal jail for an invisible prison in the hope that the optics will be better for international audiences.”
Chinese authorities claim that at his secret trial Li pleaded guilty to using social media and interviews with foreign media to attack China’s political and legal systems and having colluded with “individuals engaged in illegal religious activities”.
In the nearly two years since her husband was seized, Li’s wife Wang Qiaoling has emerged as a feisty and sharp-witted campaigner who has refused to be cowed into silence by pressure from China’s security services.
During a meeting with the Guardian last May she burst into laughter when asked what she most missed about her husband. “What do you think I most miss about my husband?” she replied.
On Wednesday morning, Wang again appeared in high spirits although she said she had been shocked when she first set eyes on her husband who she hardly recognised.
“He has changed completely, his appearance, his physical looks... [he is] so different from the husband I remember,” she said by phone.
Wang said her husband seemed “fine mentally” but had “wasted away”. 

She said he had told her of the “sufferings” he had endured while in prison. 

“I am pretty sure he was treated with great cruelty.”
Despite his release, Wang said her husband was “absolutely not free” and could not be interviewed at this stage.
“We are now being followed by six or seven tall, burly men. They simply follow us wherever we go,” she complained.

The victims of China's War on Law crackdown

By John Sudworth

There are plenty of places from which a piece of journalism could be written to mark United Nations Human Rights Day.
But the raising of concern by the UN this week over the case of the missing lawyer Jiang Tianyong makes Beijing as good a choice as any.
Chen Guiqiu was the one of the last known people to see Mr Jiang, in November.

Ms Chen (far right) is seen here with Mr Jiang (second from left) and other local lawyers in this photo taken last month

"He came to my home in Changsha to learn about my husband's case," she tells me.
"We went to the detention centre together. After he left, he just went missing. We haven't heard from him since."
Ms Chen is herself a powerful illustration of what is widely regarded as a deteriorating human rights situation in China.
Her husband, Xie Yang, disappeared in July 2015 along with dozens of other lawyers, legal assistants and activists as part of a sweeping crackdown against human rights advocates.
"It's because he worked on lots of sensitive cases, demolition, forced relocation, that kind of thing," she says.
"All cases in which people are trying to fight against the government."
It was more than a year before any lawyer was given access to Mr Xie, reportedly finding him to be suffering from head wounds as a result of beatings by guards.

Xie Yang went missing in July 2015

Now Jiang Tianyong, the man who was hoping to help with the case, is also feared to have disappeared into a legal black hole -- becoming the latest victim of China's so-called War on Law.
UN Human Rights Day falls on 10 December, commemorating the date on which the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Mr Jiang had often found himself devoid of that protection over the years, tortured on occasion by state security services as a result of his work defending high profile and sensitive human rights cases.
This time, the UN suspects, he has been detained because of it.
In August he met the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, during his visit to China.
Earlier this week Mr Alston expressed concern that the disappearance might be linked to that meeting.
"The international standards are clear: states must refrain from and protect all persons from acts of reprisal," the UN quotes Mr Alston as saying.
Despite legal protections written into Chinese law for detained suspects, there are wide loopholes in cases involving "national security."
It means the authorities are able to hold suspects for months on end, without access to lawyers or family members.
And when those family members attempt to seek justice on their behalf, they too run the risk of punitive reprisals.

Li Heping is among several lawyers who have been detained

Seeking answers
In a restaurant in Beijing I meet with three other wives also campaigning for news of their detained lawyer husbands.
Wang Qiaoling, Li Wenzu and Yuan Shanshan have not seen their husbands, nor had any direct contact with them, since last July's crackdown.
"We've heard nothing since he was arrested," Ms Li says of her husband Wang Quanzhang.
"He was denied rights to meet his lawyer, we've had no information and we couldn't even write letters to him."
"They've chased us out of rented flats," she goes on. 

"All my local kindergartens have been instructed not to take my four-year-old child."
"We've been detained and beaten and our activities are being monitored."

Li Wenzu (left) spoke of how her family was harassed after her husband's disappearance

After a quick breakfast they walk to the Supreme Prosecutor's Appeals and Petitions Office to submit a formal request for answers about their husbands' cases and to plead for due process to be followed.
We follow them but are soon stopped from filming, so we meet up with the women a short time later outside a subway station.
They have submitted their petitions -- although supporting documents were rejected -- and they hold out little hope.
"They told us to trust the justice system," Wang Qiaoling says.
"The security guards treated us very rudely," Yuan Shanshan tells me. 

"They treated us like enemies, taking off our hats, scarves and coats, and inspecting us very carefully."
China, in its evidence to the UN, has denied allegations of torture.
It specifically denied one such allegation of torturing Jiang Tianyong during a hearing last year.
And it often appeals to the argument that it is wrong to judge it by the "Western" concepts of human rights, pointing to the huge strides that have been made in tackling poverty over the past few decades.
But while China's rapid development has indeed produced many winners, there are many losers too.

'War on Law'
As the three wives arrive at the petitions office there are, as always, large numbers of other aggrieved individuals, clutching bundles of paper, hoping to seek redress for their own injustices that are often years old.
One man shows me his claim for compensation as the result of an industrial accident.
A mother burst into tears while showing me a photo of her son who she claims was killed in police custody.
And as China continues to grow richer, critics attempt to turn the Communist Party's argument on its head.
As the world's second largest economy plays an increasing role on the global stage, they suggest, it is more important than ever that it develops a system whereby the arbitrary use of authority can be held to account.
Which is why, on UN Human Rights day, it is worth pausing to reflect on China's so-called War on Law.
"Our economy is growing fast," Chen Guiqiu, wife of the detained lawyer Xie Yang tells me.
"But the problems that exist at the bottom of the society still need attention from people like our husbands. The government should see this as helpful for society."
"Unfortunately, they don't."