Rogue nation: UN tells China to release human rights activists and pay them compensation

Document rejects Chinese government claims that activists voluntarily confessed to their crimes at trials.

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Lawyer Xie Yang who has been detained by Chinese authorities as part of a crack down on human rights. 

The United Nations has demanded that China should immediately release prominent human rights activists from detention and pay them compensation, according to an unreleased document obtained by the Guardian.
The report, which has not been made public, from the UN’s human rights council says the trio had their rights violated and calls China’s laws incompatible with international norms.

Christian church leader Hu Shigen and lawyers Zhou Shifeng and Xie Yang were detained and tried as part of an unprecedented nationwide crackdown on human rights attorneys and activists that began in July 2015.
The operation saw nearly 250 people detained and questioned by police.
Hu was jailed for seven and a half years and Zhou was sentenced to seven years on subversion charges, while Xie is awaiting a verdict.
“The appropriate remedy would be to release Hu Shigen, Zhou Shifeng and Xie Yang immediately, and accord them an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations,” said the UN report seen by the Guardian, adding that Chinashould take action within six months.
The UN’s working group on arbitrary detention, which reviewed the case, rejected Chinese government claims the three men voluntarily confessed to their crimes at their trials and said their detentions were “made in total non-observance of the international norms relating to the right to a fair trial”.
The group is a panel of five experts that falls under the UN’s human rights council, of which China is a member.
While its judgements are not legally binding, it investigates claims of rights violations and suggests remedies.
China promised to cooperate with the group when it ran for a seat on the human rights council in August 2016, when it also pledged to make “unremitting efforts” to promote human rights.
The group’s report on the Chinese activists said the trio were subjected to a host of rights violations, including being denied access to legal counsel, being held in “incommunicado detention” and their families “were not informed of their whereabouts for several months”.
Their detentions were due to “their activities to promote and protect human rights“, the UN found, while the opinion also encouraged China to amend its laws to conform with international standards protecting human rights.
Although Xie was released on bail after a trial in May, his wife, Chen Guiqiu said her husband was far from a free man.
State security agents rented a flat across the hall from his and Xie has 12 guards stationed 24-hours a day outside his building.
Police follow him whenever he goes out and despite the constant surveillance, he has to prepare reports for state security agents every four hours on what he has done and who he has spoken to.
But Chen welcomed the UN’s report and said she felt vindicated.
“Of course, he didn’t commit any crime, his arrest was completely illegal and I’m glad the UN, a very objective party that represents the international community, can see that,” said Chen, who fled to the US earlier this year.
“I hope this will put pressure on China and make them think twice the next time they consider arresting people on political charges.”
“Paying compensation would show the government admits they harmed our family, that they were wrong to subject us to more than two years of continuous harm,” she added.

During his detention, Xie was beaten and forced into stress positions, with one interrogator telling him: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant.”
Ambassadors from countries including Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, wrote to China’s minister of public security in February, voicing concerns over the torture and calling for an independent investigation.
“The working group’s opinion cuts straight through the government’s lies and shows that the arrests were always about retaliation against lawyers for protecting human rights,” said Frances Eve, a researcher at the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
“The government put enormous resources into their propaganda campaign to smear human rights lawyers as ‘criminals’, deploying state media, police, prosecutors and the courts.”
During the course of the panel’s investigation, the Chinese government said the men were jailed not because “they defend the legitimate rights of others” but rather they have “long been engaged in criminal activities, aimed at subverting the basic national system established under the China’s [sic] constitution”.
The UN rejected this claim.
Hu was arrested for leading an underground church, which works outside the government-sanctioned system.
He previously spent 16 years in prison for distributing leaflets on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent bloody crackdown.
Zhou is a prominent human rights attorney who founded the Fengrui law firm that was at the centre of the 2015 government “war on law”.
His firm represented dissident artist Ai Weiwei, members of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong and a journalist arrested for supported protests in Hong Kong.
The UN’s working group on arbitrary detention previously told China to release Liu Xia, the wife of the Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died in detention in July.
Liu Xia has been under house arrest since 2010, when her husband won the prize, despite never being charged with a crime.

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.”

China lawyer’s family says US helped them flee

By Gerry Shih 

In this March 17, 2017, photo and released by China Aid, Chen Guiqiu, right, holds a “Welcome to America” sign with her daughters Xie Yajuan, 15, and Xie Yuchen, 4, after arriving at an airport in Texas. Chen whose husband, prominent rights lawyer Xie Yang, is held on charge of inciting subversion made a harrowing flight from China with her daughters chased by Chinese security agents across Southeast Asia. 

BEIJING — Stuck in a Bangkok jail with a deportation order against her, Chen Guiqiu waited with dread over what seemed certain to come next. 

A Thai immigration official showed her surveillance video of the jail entrance, where more than a dozen Chinese security agents were waiting.
Within minutes, Chen feared, she and her two daughters would be escorted back to China, where her husband, the prominent rights lawyer Xie Yang, was held on a charge of inciting subversion — and where punishment for attempting to flee surely awaited her.
After weeks on the run, Chen was exhausted, and so was her luck. 

A Christian, she prayed: “Don’t desert us now, not like this.”

Help arrived, from America.
U.S. Embassy officials managed to enter the facility just in time to whisk Chen and her daughters out a back door. 

The Chinese agents outside soon realized what had happened and pursued them, finally meeting in a standoff at the Bangkok airport where Chinese, Thai and U.S. officials heatedly argued over custody of the family.
Chen and her supporters disclosed details of her family’s March escape for the first time to The Associated Press. 

Their journey reveals the lengths that China’s government has been increasingly willing to go to reach far beyond its jurisdiction in the pursuit of dissidents and their families.
The saga also demonstrates that in at least some cases, American officials are willing to push back, even at a moment weeks before Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were to meet in Florida. 

The Trump administration has been criticized for downplaying human rights in foreign policy, but may have viewed Chen’s case as special — if not for herself then for her youngest daughter, a 4-year-old American citizen.
___
The family’s ordeal began July 9, 2015, when the Chinese government launched a nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers. 

Chen’s husband, Xie, a lawyer who represented evicted farmers and pro-democracy activists, was among dozens detained in the “7-09 crackdown” and, months later, charged with crimes against the state.
In January, Chen helped release her husband’s account of being beaten, deprived of sleep and otherwise tortured while in detention — drawing further condemnation of Beijing by Western governments. 

Police summoned Chen for hours-long meetings where, she said, they threatened to evict her, deny her children schooling and have her fired from her job as a professor of environmental engineering at Hunan University.
By early February, the pressure was becoming unbearable. 

Seemingly unable to extract a confession out of Xie, the authorities turned up threats against Chen and, increasingly, those close to her.
When police detained Chen’s 14-year-old daughter as she tried to board a train for Hong Kong, Chen knew a travel ban had been placed on their names.
That was when she decided to contact Bob Fu, a Christian rights activist based in Texas who has helped several high-profile dissidents flee China, including Chen Guangcheng, a blind rights lawyer whose 2012 flight to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing sparked diplomatic tensions.
___
“We’re going on a trip,” Chen told her daughters the morning of Feb. 19.
They headed south from their home in central China, then crossed into at least two countries without paperwork. 

There were nights, she said, when they had nowhere to sleep and days when they had nothing but a bag of chocolates to eat.
Traveling by foot and car for five days, they finally arrived at a safe house in Bangkok whose owners knew Fu.
Even though Chen took precautions, never turning on her phone or accessing the internet, Chinese authorities had gotten wind that she might be in Thailand. 

While she was in hiding, Chinese security agents forced her 70-year-old father, her sister, her university employer and other relatives and friends to fly with them to Bangkok in an unusual attempt to locate her.
Less than a week later, on March 2, Thai police, directed by a Chinese translator who Chen believed was from the Chinese Embassy, barged into the safe house, seized her belongings and sent the family to detention. 

It is unclear how they were located.
Chen appeared in immigration court the next morning. 

She was accompanied by the translator, who took away Chen’s phone and snapped pictures of Chen’s court documents with her own phone camera. 

A judge ruled that Chen had entered the country illegally and ordered her deported. 

The translator paid for her legal proceedings and fine.
An increasing number of Chinese in recent years have sought refuge in Thailand only to be sent back. In 2015, Thailand deported two Chinese dissidents who the United Nations recognized as refugees, a journalist who feared Beijing’s persecution and 109 minority Uighurs who said they had fled repression. 

Later that year, a Hong Kong publisher of books on Chinese political gossip vanished from his Thai home and into Chinese custody, alarming the international community.
As Chen was taken back to the jail to pick up her children and things, with Chinese officials waiting for her outside, she appeared likely to meet a similar fate.
___
In Texas, Fu was dumbfounded by news of Chen’s arrest. 

He sprang into action to alert the State Department, and his associates in Thailand, who quickly located her in the jail.
According to Fu, U.S. officials made it into the facility on March 3 while Chen was in court, found Chen’s daughters and stayed with them while they searched for the mother. 

Finally, through their Thai contacts in the jail, the Americans located her and convinced Thai officials to let them whisk her out the back, said Fu and another person with knowledge of the operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly.
The family piled into a car and sped through Bangkok’s congested streets headed for the airport while Fu, 12 time zones away, frantically tried to book flights and prepare the family’s requisite U.S. paperwork.
But the Chinese agents were not far behind.
Despite her deportation order, Chen was stopped at the airport by Thai immigration officials who explained that they were under immense Chinese pressure to prevent her departure. 

In an hours-long standoff at the airport, the person with knowledge of the operation said, the confrontation between the Chinese, American and Thai officials nearly boiled over into a physical clash.
Chen and Fu declined to explain what happened next, citing diplomatic sensitivities, other than that the family eventually made it to the U.S. on March 17.
It is unclear whether Chen was housed in the U.S. Embassy in the intervening weeks or whether and how a deal was negotiated to allow Chen’s departure from Thailand.
A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said Monday he was not aware of the matter. 

The Ministry of Public Security did not respond to faxed requests for comment. 

Thai and U.S. authorities declined to comment on Chen’s experience.
Justin Higgins, a State Department spokesman for East Asia, said that in general the U.S. “urges China to release all of the lawyers and activists detained in the July 9, 2015, crackdown and remove restrictions on their freedom of movement and professional activities.”
It’s unusual for U.S. officials to take such bold action to help Chinese citizens — in Chen’s family’s case, human rights workers say. 

But the citizenship of Chen’s younger daughter, who was born 4 years ago in the U.S. while Xie was studying in the country on a sabbatical, was likely a key factor.
Compared to previous years, when China’s diplomacy with its neighbors touched mostly on economic and national security issues, Beijing increasingly demands foreign governments’ cooperation when it hunts for fugitives, even those whom other countries may view as political dissidents.
“China is exporting its human rights abuses beyond its borders,” said Susan Shirk, chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia.
“The Thai government has always tried to maintain good relations with the U.S. and with China,” Shirk said, “but these kinds of cases make that balancing act very difficult.”
___
The U.S. may be changing its stance on China, given Trump’s effusive praise for Xi and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent remarks that Washington will not force human rights issues on other nations. 

Yet Chen’s case suggests that America is still willing to confront China on thorny rights issues, at least when U.S. citizens are involved.
“This administration appears to be more muscular, more assertive, and we’re seeing ‘Putting Americans First’ play out,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation in San Francisco who has advised U.S. administrations on Chinese human rights issues. 

“But what I’m hoping is that ‘Putting Americans First’ doesn’t mean putting other people last.”
Kamm noted that two U.S. citizens — Texas businesswoman Sandy Phan-Gillis and aid worker Aya Hijazi — were released by China and Egypt, respectively, in recent weeks in response to high-level pressure from U.S. officials. 

Yet the U.S. notably did not sign onto a letter from 11 Western countries who, spurred by Xie’s allegations, protested the torture of Chinese human rights lawyers.
Now safe in Texas, Chen said she wanted to thank the State Department and the Trump administration. 

But her sense of relief has been tempered by a painful reckoning of the ruin and chaos she left behind.
Xie’s trial began Monday and was expected to be completed by day’s end. 

A government-appointed defense lawyer is representing him.
Chen Jiangang, Xie’s former lawyer who helped release his account of torture, was detained last week in a Chinese province near Myanmar, human rights observers say.
The relatives of Chen who were pressed by the government to travel to Thailand have had their passports confiscated upon their return to China. 

They have been repeatedly interrogated, and their jobs have been threatened.
The electricity at Chen’s apartment has since been cut, forcing her elderly father to move back to his village. 

Authorities have emptied her Chinese bank accounts, she said.
For now, Chen and her daughters are living off the charity of her supporters. 

The former professor plans to seek a job, a home, and school for the girls. 

Chen said she was happy to start over in America. 

She has little money, but still has her voice.
“All the things we tried to expose, all the articles we used to write about the truth of 7-09 — the harassment, the torture, the denial of our children’s schooling, the forced evictions — we were always smeared so quickly,” she said.
“If I’ve escaped the country, they can’t control the situation anymore. Now, what can they do?”

Punches, Kicks and the ‘Dangling Chair’: Detainee Tells of Torture in China

Perched unsteadily on a stack of plastic stools in an isolated room, Xie Yang was encircled day and night by interrogators who blew smoke in his face, punched and kicked him, and threatened to turn him into an invalid unless he confessed to political crimes
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Xie Yang with his wife, Chen Guiqiu. Mr. Xie, a human rights lawyer who has been detained since July 2015, gave detailed accounts of torture in interviews transcribed by his attorneys.

BEIJING — Perched unsteadily on a stack of plastic stools in an isolated room, Xie Yang, a Chinese lawyer, was encircled day and night by interrogators who blew smoke in his face, punched and kicked him, and threatened to turn him into an “invalid” unless he confessed to political crimes, he has said.
Eventually, according to transcripts of meetings with Mr. Xie issued by his attorneys, the isolation, sleepless days and nights of abuse and threats to his family from the police investigators proved too harrowing. 
Mr. Xie said he had scribbled down whatever they told him to say about trying to subvert the Chinese Communist Party by representing disgruntled citizens and discussing rights cases.
“I wanted to end their interrogation of me as quickly as I could, even if it meant death,” Mr. Xie, anguished and often sobbing, told his attorneys, Chen Jiangang and Liu Zhengqing, according to the transcripts of the meetings this month that Mr. Chen released on Thursday.
“Later, I wrote down whatever they wanted.”
The records lay out the most detailed firsthand allegations thus far that torture has stained a crackdown on Chinese rights lawyers and advocates that began in July 2015.
The government detained almost 250 people in that operation, according to Amnesty International. Most were released, but four were tried and convicted last year on charges that they tried to subvert the one-party state, and about 13 are in detention and likely to face trial.
Mr. Xie, 44, a lawyer from the southern Chinese province of Hunan, is also likely to face trial in the coming weeks on subversion charges, according to his lawyers.
“These transcripts are totally authentic,” Mr. Chen said in a telephone interview on Friday, referring to two detailed records of pretrial meetings with Mr. Xie that were released on overseas websites focused on human rights in China.
“He’s suffered torment and abuse, and this was a call for help, because the internal mechanisms for preventing torture haven’t worked.”
Other defendants and suspects in the clampdown on rights lawyers have abjectly declared their guilt, either in court or in televised confessions.
Mr. Chen said that Mr. Xie wanted to release his account of his secretive detention to prove beforehand that he was innocent and that any admissions had been made under coercion.
“He was unbending. He refused all government lawyers. In the end, they had to let us see him,” Mr. Chen said, since he and Mr. Liu had been chosen by Mr. Xie.
“We all know this kind of case is about political persecution.”
Mr. Xie’s wife, Chen Guiqiu, had also approved releasing the transcripts, Mr. Chen said.
But Ms. Chen, an academic, did not answer repeated calls to her phone on Friday.
Mr. Chen, the lawyer, said she had been led away that morning by security guards at the university in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, where she works.
“Let the world know what forced confession through torture is, what shamelessness without limit is,” Ms. Chen said in a statement issued on Thursday.
Mr. Xie’s account of being locked away appeared after China's despot Xi Jinping sought this week to promote his government as open and mature.
On Tuesday, Xi told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that economic protectionism was like a country locking itself in a dark room.
Li Chunfu, a Beijing lawyer detained in the crackdown, was released early this month, emaciated and mentally shattered after nearly one and a half years in detention, according to his family and supporters.
“It’s ironic that the Chinese government is calling for openness in Davos when the Chinese government is doing the opposite domestically,” Maya Wang, a researcher on China for Human Rights Watch, said by telephone from Hong Kong.
“They say one thing in terms of rhetoric, to appeal and charm globally, but what they do is quite another thing. What they do is exactly the opposite.”
Human rights organizations and defense lawyers have said that other suspects caught in the crackdown have also been tortured while in secretive detention.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied such accusations.
The police in Changsha did not respond to multiple phone calls to find out whether they knew of Mr. Xie’s allegations of torture and were doing anything about them.
But Mr. Xie has gone to extraordinary lengths to back his claims: He named many of the officers he says perpetrated abuses. 
“If I stand trial, I’ll recount to the court just what happened in this case — that the records were the product of torture,” he told his lawyers.
Mr. Xie was taken away by the police in Hunan on July 11, 2015, and spent half a year in secretive detention in a retired military cadres’ hostel, kept from contact with the outside world.
In the first week, Mr. Xie said, he was questioned by rotating teams of officers who gave him no more than three hours of sleep between grueling rounds of questioning.
Often they made Mr. Xie sit on top of the “dangling chair”: several plastic stools without backrests that were stacked on top of each other.
“I sat on top so that my feet didn’t touch the ground and my legs were dangling there. They ordered me to sit there with my back straight,” he said.
He said that an officer warned him: “If you move, we can consider that you attacked a police officer, and we can take whatever steps to deal with you.”
In addition, the interrogators would not let him drink water, lit fistfuls of cigarettes and blew nauseating clouds of smoke in his face, and beat, kicked and head-butted him. 
They also indirectly threatened his wife, warning that she should be careful when driving, he said.
“We represent the party center in handling your case,” one police officer said, referring to China’s central leadership, according to Mr. Xie’s account.
“Even if we leave you dead, you won’t find any evidence to prove it.”
By mid-August 2015, Mr. Xie said, he was broken, and he signed documents put before him, but still he resisted the interrogators’ demands that he name and implicate other people. 
A year ago, he was formally arrested on a charge of inciting subversion of state power and was moved to a detention center.
But there, the abuses continued, and other detainees were used to bully him, Mr. Xie said.
Despite pressure from the police and prosecutors, Mr. Xie insisted on seeing his own lawyers.
On Friday, they asked prosecutors to examine his claims of torture, listing the names of 10 police officers they say should answer the accusations.
“I tell you now that my spirit is free,” Mr. Xie told his lawyers. 
“I declare that I, Xie Yang, am innocent.”