Suppresed Rights Lawyers in China

[Greg.D.]

This is a very well written but sad story of the government's quashing and imprisonment of rights lawyers in China. I repeat it is sad and might make your blood boil, so you might not want to read it.

 

But, at the same time, it is a story of the hero's, the high quality of some of the people and is another reminder that it is the people and not the political system in China that is so precious.

 

Some snippets:

 

 

The Lonely Crusade of China’s Human Rights Lawyers

 

As the global spotlight on the nation’s domestic policies has dimmed, lawyers for dissidents increasingly face a terrible choice: acquiescence or imprisonment.

 

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"Liang went to work, trying to pretend that it was a normal day even as desperate messages continued to spread across China — ‘‘Flee at once,’’ one of them read. By late afternoon, nearly 60 lawyers were either detained or unreachable. Accounts of ransacked law offices, of friends and colleagues in handcuffs and hoods, circulated online. Alone in his small office in western Beijing, Liang watched his cellphone rumble to life with each bleak new update. One by one, his colleagues were vanishing."

 

"The sense of siege was compounded by a near-total communications blackout. Just as the raids began that morning, Telegram, a messaging app popular with rights activists in China, went offline. Service remained down throughout the day, a result of a sustained cyberattack targeting the company’s servers. The culprits were unknown, the company said, but the attack had been ‘‘coordinated from East Asia.’’

 

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"At the same time, the Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping began to place a new emphasis on ‘‘rule of law.’’ During the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress, in October 2014, the leadership devoted an entire plenary session to discussing and passing an ambitious slate of legal reforms. The participants declared that ‘‘the country should be ruled in line with the Constitution,’’ a constantly revised and modified document, which in its newest iteration guarantees such rights as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and of religious belief and, since 2004, ‘‘human rights.’’ The session followed similarly spirited exhortations by Chinese judges, diplomats and bureaucrats. Across every sphere of government activity, ‘‘rule of law’’ has become the phrase du jour. But in practice, ‘‘rule of law’’ has simply meant ‘‘rule of the party.’’

 

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"Under President Xi, that pressure has ratcheted up across Chinese civil society. As part of a far-reaching campaign to stamp out ‘‘foreign hostile forces,’’ the government has detained and deported foreign activists, denied medical care to detainees and revived the practice of forced televised confessions, a throwback to the days of internal party purges. The campaign has been justified by a host of new legislation granting the government a free hand over almost any matter deemed relevant to national security."

 

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"In September, the Ministry of Justice announced new measures expressly targeting the types of extrajudicial activism that had made the rights defense movement so potent and powerful. Under the revised regulations, activities like ‘‘conducting sit-ins, holding banners or placards, shouting slogans’’ and ‘‘expressing solidarity’’ were all forbidden. So, too, was ‘‘generating pressure through public opinion’’ by ‘‘forming groups, organizing joint signature campaigns, issuing open letters’’ or ‘‘gathering online in chat groups.’’ Firms were expected to dismiss lawyers who disobeyed or risk having their licenses revoked. Later that fall, three more rights activists disappeared into state custody.

 

Then, in January, the first detailed account of a 709 lawyer’s arrest and detention became public. In transcripts released by his lawyers, Xie Yang — a human rights lawyer unrelated to Xie Yanyi with a history of working politically sensitive cases — described months of torture and mental abuse at the hands of a rotating cast of police officers, prosecutors and detention-center officials. During marathon interrogation sessions, Xie Yang said, his captors threatened his family — ‘‘Your wife and children need to pay attention to traffic safety when they’re out in the car; there are a lot of traffic accidents these days’’ — and told him that his detention had been authorized at the highest levels of the central government. If he wanted the interrogations to end, there was only one answer: ‘‘Let me tell you, filing a complaint will do you no good,’’ he was told. ‘‘This case comes from Beijing. We’re handling your case on behalf of Party Central.’’ When he refused, the torture began. ‘‘I’m going to torture you until you go insane,’’ one interrogator said. ‘‘You’re going to be a cripple..

[Randy W]

I'm afraid that under President Xi, China has simply taken several steps sideways.

 

This from the SCMP (although the author seems a little overly full of himself)

 

Why Xi Jinping must tackle the myth of princeling legitimacy to rule China

Lanxin Xiang says the damaging Mao-inspired campaign to establish the president’s authority and questions about the opaque anti-corruption drive indicate that, without serious reforms in the 19th party congress, Xi’s China Dream may be unsustainable

 

 

Xi’s approach apparently comes from the extreme fear of political disorder, a nightmare deeply rooted in his personal experience. Confucian political theory stresses stability and social order. Unlike his predecessors, who played cautiously during the initial period of power consolidation, Xi immediately launched an anti-corruption campaign, cleansing the party machine with the promise of a good and clean government, and hence of a “restoration” of traditional values.

 

By all accounts, Xi possesses a polarising thought pattern due to his unique life experience. He is a dreamer, a born-again red “princeling”, an amateur historian, and an insufficient scholar on Confucianism. A survivor from a tender age, he has developed the temperament of a cautious man. But as a rehabilitated red princeling, he is often over-confident in dealing with crisis, even at the risk of abandoning political acumen for adventurism.

 

. . .

 

The Chinese state has two absolute priorities: the perpetuation of the regime itself, and the protection of the country’s territorial integrity.

China under Mao Zedong (毛澤東) was a state with an ideological mission. Mao was prepared to defend this ideology to the extent of even destroying the party apparatus itself when he thought it might be deviating from its true purpose.

The current regime, by contrast, has turned away from ideology, leaving self-preservation as the only purpose of the state. This has in ­effect served to weaken the party-state’s legitimacy, despite its ­success in economic development.

. . .

So far, the party propaganda machine has damaged Xi’s reputation, rather than enhanced his status. It has given rise to an eerie and precarious political atmosphere, in which a tiny group of intellectual charlatans and sycophants, very much like Rasputin in the last years of the Romanov empire, have taken over the media. They have been using the Cultural Revolution language of the 1960s to help strengthen a 21st century leader’s personal authority, while the majority of real scholars, intellectuals and party rank and file prefer to stay away, totally disgusted by them.

Lanxin Xiang is a professor of international history and politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva , Switzerland