U.N. rights experts urge China to provide care for rights lawyer

By REUTERS

GENEVA – United Nations experts called on China on Friday to provide medical care to Jiang Tianyong, a prominent human rights lawyer jailed for inciting “subversion”, amid reports of his deteriorating health.
In a rare joint statement on China, six independent human rights experts voiced deep concern at the condition of Jiang, sentenced to two years jail last November after being found guilty of inciting subversion of state power.
“Mr. Jiang’s health has apparently deteriorated dramatically in recent months. He is reportedly weak and suffers from severe memory loss, and it is suspected that he may have been drugged,” the experts said. 

“This raises fears of torture or ill-treatment in detention, without access to adequate medical care.”
Xi Jingping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on human rights activism in China since 2015 that has seen hundreds of rights lawyers and activists detained, dozens arrested and some handed lengthy prison sentences.
Jiang, who provided legal defence for some of the lawyers arrested in the crackdown, had already been disbarred in 2009 and disappeared in November 2016. 

He was held in secret detention for more than nine months, the experts said.
Many of the nearly 250 lawyers and defenders arrested remain in detention and are “often held incommunicado”, they added.
“We appeal to the Chinese government to provide the detainees at a minimum with access to their families, lawyers of their own choosing and adequate health care,” they said.
The U.N. experts included Philip Alston, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who met Jiang during an official visit to China in August 2016. 

Alston has voiced concern at the Human Rights Council that Jiang’s subsequent disappearance and arrest may be in part a reprisal for that contact, calling it “the equivalent of a legal sledgehammer”.

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.”
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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?”

Trickle-Down Censorship in China

An Interview with JFK Miller
By Susan Blumeberg-kason

I first became acquainted with JFK Miller through Whyiwrite.net, a site he founded and curates of interviews with authors who mainly write about China. 

Miller, an Australian, is a former expat of Indonesia, Singapore, and most recently, Shanghai, where he was editor-in-chief of an English magazine for more than six years. 

He returned to Brisbane in 2015 and recently published his first book, Trickle-Down Censorship: An Outsider’s Account of Working Inside China’s Censorship Regime (Hybrid Publishers, 2016). 

I recently asked him via e-mail about his years in China, censorship, and publishing.

SUSAN BLUMBERG-KASON: You mention in your book that many former expats in China have published memoirs after leaving the country. When you first thought about writing a memoir, was censorship the topic you wanted to tackle, or did you have other ideas? How did you decide to write about censorship?
JFK MILLER: Censorship was the only aspect of China on which I felt I could offer a perspective. 

I don’t speak terribly much Chinese — it’s quite pitiful actually — so I’m not acculturated in that sense. 

But with censorship I was immersed in it for six years. 

So I felt I knew it, in as much as you can know the rules of a system they go out of their way to keep secret. 

Though never for a moment did I think my situation was in any way comparable to that of a Chinese editor. They have to suffer censorship. 

For me, a foreigner, it was a lifestyle option. 

And not altogether a bad one because it afforded me a certain view of the country, to see it through a certain prism. 

In my part of the world [Australia] there’s no subject that’s taboo. 

We do have our sacred cows, but there’s nothing that can’t be spoken about. 

But the list of what’s verboten in China is extensive. 

Understanding what can’t be talked about is one way of understanding the place.

It’s fascinating to read about your meeting with your censors and how you suspect they might want China to open up, but all in due time. Does that give you hope, or do you think it will be too little, too late?
I have less hope today than when I lived there during the Hu-Wen administration, which seems a kinder, gentler time compared to now, imprisoned Nobel laureates notwithstanding. 

Xi Jinping’s quest to be the second coming of Deng Xiaoping must give serious pause to anyone hopeful of seeing a pluralist China in their lifetime. 

Today’s China is an ugly place if you’re a rights lawyer, grassroots activist, outspoken scholar, feminist or NGO worker. 

But, as Li Datong says, if you take into account 2,000 years of autocratic rule then to wait another 30 or so years for political reform isn’t so long a wait, particularly when you see how far China has progressed in this regard since it opened up. 

I hope he’s right, but I’m not so sure. 

The party has been remarkably effective at stymying calls for political reform. 

When Wen Jiabao made some promising remarks in this regard in the dying days of the last administration, state censors moved in to redact him. 

And he was the then premier no less.

You write briefly of the Hong Kong booksellers case. What were your first impressions when you heard about the booksellers? What is your prognosis for Hong Kong?
I don’t think it surprised anyone. 

The CCP is a practiced hand at intimidation. 

It should be — it has been silencing its critics this way for almost 70 years. 

And on that score you’d have to concede it’s been remarkably effective, both in Hong Kong and abroad. 

What interests me is how much we’ve all become like Hong Kong in that we self-censor for fear of upsetting Beijing. 

A good example is my own country’s 2013 Defense White Paper, which played down China’s growing militancy in our region. 

Quite a comedown from the previous 2009 paper, which had realistically acknowledged the threat. 

In journalism, there was Bloomberg’s self-censorship scandal of 2013, though I’m sure it’s not unique in this regard. 

I know the impulse to self censor all too well — I did it for six years. What has surprised me though is how far this impulse has spread abroad. 

As Orville Schell says, “We are all Hong Kong now.”

You didn’t write about foreign journalists and how in recent years many haven’t been able to renew their visas. But did you ever worry your visa wouldn’t be renewed?
Not really. 

Foreign journalists were in a different class from us low-rent scribes working for expat rags. 

None of us were employed as editors in any official capacity. 

Although I was editor-in-chief in every practical sense, the honorific title was held by my top censor. 

They didn’t have to worry about controlling us with visas because they controlled us with censorship. 

But foreign journalists write for foreign news outlets and are free to write what they like (self censorship permitting). 

So the only way to control them is to make the visa process bureaucratically hellish. 

And no one does red tape like the CCP.

It’s fascinating to read in your book that China has banned certain films and books, yet still allows those filmmakers and authors to speak at festivals on the mainland. What do you make of that? If China really wanted to censor them, wouldn’t they not permit them to speak at festivals and roam around China?
If they were serious undesirables there’s no way they would get a visa. 

I can’t imagine that anyone who’s even looked favorably in the direction of the Dalai Lama in living memory will be headlining a festival in China any time soon. 

But someone like Qiu Xiaolong, for instance, who writes detective fiction in which he often paints an unflattering portrait of the party and the society it has created, would occasionally fall foul of my censors. 

But I don’t think they mind — or perhaps even care — that he comes to town to appear at a few literary events attended mainly by foreigners. 

I also think it’s a matter of the left hand perhaps not knowing what the right hand is doing. 

Someone like Qiu might be on my censors’ radar, but not necessarily on immigration’s radar.

Your description of foreigners in China resonated with me. Why do you think some foreigners self-censor and don’t seem to acknowledge that, like most places in the world, unsavory things sometimes happen there?
I simply never understood those foreigners who saw the place through rose-colored glasses. 

China is a contradictory place, and I have contradictory feelings about it. 

I suspect most foreigners do. 

Mainlanders on the whole have an ambivalent view of foreigners, so it’s hardly surprising that foreigners might hold ambivalent views of them and their country.

You title a chapter, “This is China,” which is a common term to explain the unexplainable in China. It seems this concept is unique to China and maybe Vietnam 25 years ago, but can’t be applied to other countries with authoritarian governments like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Do you think this concept will still apply to China once it opens up, or is it more a cultural phenomenon and less a political one?
I open that chapter with a quote from Valentin Chu, a little known Chinese journalist who wrote, for my money, one of the best books about the CCP in the early ’60s [Ta Ta, Tan Tan: The Inside Story of Communist China]. 

He articulates a character profile of the Chinese in that book which I’m sure would resonate with many foreigners who have lived there for any length of time. 

For me, it’s the perfect encapsulation of the Chinese and China as I see it — which is as the world inside out, back to front and upside down. 

I can’t see China’s fundamental character changing, whether the polity stays the same or not. 

As far as cultures go, I think China has a better claim than most to immutability. 

Even Mao, who tried to reformat China’s hard drive with the Cultural Revolution, admitted to Nixon that he’d only managed to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.

How long did it take you to write your book and can you describe your publishing process?
It took four years: one year writing and three years procrastinating. 

I’m afraid I’m one of those people who will find any reason not to write. 

The downside is prolonged periods of inactivity. 

The upside is a very tidy home and a very well ordered music collection. 

I learned the hard way that the writer of a book is faced with one of two choices: be occupied writing it, or be preoccupied with not writing it. 

Eventually I reasoned that I may as well be occupied with it because at least then there was a chance the day would come when I would no longer be preoccupied with it.
As for publishing, I despaired for a short while and then came two offers and one “let’s keep talking” in the space of a month. 

I was fortunate to find the publisher I did. 

Anna Rosner Blay and Louis de Vries of Hybrid Publishers in Melbourne were a pleasure to work with. 

It’s very encouraging to find a publisher who likes your work enough to want to publish it. 

Anna is an author herself and understands the sort of thin-skinned creatures we writers are. 

Her editorial guidance was collaborative and she didn’t suggest I change terribly much which is really more editorial freedom a first-time author could possibly hope for.

Have you returned to China since you left? Do you plan to do any book events there?
I haven’t and since I finished the book my area of interest has shifted somewhat to Indonesia, that other great behemoth of my region, where I’ve had the chance to live for a couple of years. 

The comparison has been interesting. 

Both countries have national psyches traumatized by colonialism. 

But there are more distinguishing features than parallels. 

China is authoritarian; Indonesia is democratic. 

China has a predominant ethnicity — Han, over 90 percent — whereas in Indonesia the largest of its 300 or so ethnicities is Javanese at 40 percent. 

China is largely atheistic; Indonesia is deeply religious. 

I’m an outsider in both cultures — a laowai in China, a bule in Indonesia. 

It’s always reassuring, I think, to know one’s place.