Over the next several days, Chen said, he planned to meet with more lawyers and try to persuade them to join the case. About a half dozen of those who had already agreed to help were at the table with us, among them an attorney named Li Heping, whom I had met years earlier. Li had handled the defense of Yang Zili, a computer programmer jailed in 2001 on subversion charges for setting up a study group to discuss political reform. At the time, Li had struck me as a particularly nervous and frightened man. (When I showed up at his office to ask about that case, he had started sweating and refused to talk to me.) But he was a different person now. He had converted to Christianity and become one of the more prominent weiquan, or “rights defense,” lawyers in Beijing. His firm had already filed several of the lawsuits on behalf of Linyi residents. He told me it would be nearly impossible to persuade the courts to allow a class-action or collective case. That’s why Chen needed to recruit more lawyers—to help file more individual lawsuits. Chen himself hadn’t given up on the idea of a class-action case, but he agreed he needed more legal help. Li and his colleagues were working pro bono, and they could only do so much.
I asked Chen if he had considered seeking help from the National Population and Family Planning Commission, the agency that had announced an investigation into the Linyi crackdown. He replied that he would try but that he was unsure how to get in touch with officials there and worried he might end up getting arrested outside their offices. He still believed the courts were his best option for seeking justice. He had had some success in the legal system, after all, and he was familiar with the process. “Everyone has to be held accountable under the law,” he told me. “These officials broke the law, and they have to take responsibility.”
Four days later, the men from Linyi caught up with Chen again, ambushing him outside the apartment building where he was staying. Chen tried to resist, shouting for help as they dragged him across a parking lot and bundled him headfirst into an unmarked car. A friend who was with Chen at the time called me and I rushed over from the other side of the city. By the time I arrived, a crowd of Beijing residents, upset at seeing such rough treatment of a blind man, had surrounded the car and were preventing it from driving away. Behind dark-tinted windows, I saw two beefy men in the rear of the sedan but no sign of Chen. The people in the crowd told me to look again, and I pressed my nose on the window. Then I realized Chen was indeed in the car. The two men had pinned him facedown to the floor of the vehicle, and I could hear muffled screaming. Some of the angry onlookers said the men had hit him a few times. Residents called the Beijing police, and eventually two uniformed officers arrived. They consulted with the Linyi men, and then cleared a way through the crowd for the car to leave.
As I watched them drive off, I was reminded of something Chen had said while we were in Linyi a few weeks earlier. I had asked one of the villagers we were interviewing whether she was afraid that local officials might punish her for speaking out about the abuses. Chen interrupted and said the authorities wouldn’t do anything to the villagers. “If anything,” he said, “they’ll go after me.”
IN THE TWO years since the Southern Metropolis Daily published its report about the death of Sun Zhigang, prompting the party to abolish the shourong detention system, a loose collection of lawyers, journalists, and activists had coalesced around the weiquan, or “rights defense,” concept—the idea that citizens could bring about gradual political change by fighting for legal rights one case at a time, without directly challenging the authoritarian system. But the fledgling movement was divided from the start over what to do about Chen Guangcheng and the abuses he exposed in Linyi. The journalists were on the defensive after the arrests at the Daily and unwilling to break the long-standing taboo against coverage of the negative effects of the one-child policy. The lawyers were in a stronger position but also hesitant. Among the most prominent of them were Xu Zhiyong and Teng Biao, the young scholars who had called for a constitutional review of the shourong regulations. Former classmates at Beida and now lecturers at different universities in Beijing, the pair had set up a legal institute to take on cases they believed had the potential to highlight wider problems and promote change. They had helped defend the newspaper executives at the Daily, tried to stop the closure of a popular Internet bulletin board site, and represented private entrepreneurs who ran afoul of party bosses. When the two men heard about the crackdown in Linyi, though, they had reacted differently. Teng had agreed to help Chen, but Xu was worried the one-child policy was still too sensitive to take on in court.
The dynamic changed after Chen’s public abduction in Beijing. The image of hoodlums from Linyi coming to the capital and snatching a blind person off the streets—along with later reports that they had beaten him—galvanized the community. Xu and other weiquan lawyers who had been reluctant to get involved now rallied to Chen’s defense. Chen didn’t have a law degree and he wasn’t a lawyer, but the weiquan attorneys considered him one of their own—a rights defender. The big Internet firms Sina and Sohu were ordered by censors to keep news about Chen off their sites, but the lawyers and others posted a flurry of open letters condemning the Linyi officials elsewhere on the Web. Meanwhile, officials confined Chen to his farmhouse again, and the government investigation into the abuses in Linyi seemed stalled. The birth planning agency confirmed it had found misconduct, but provincial authorities closed ranks around the Linyi officials and no specific punishments were announced. A series of weiquan lawyers and activists traveled to Dongshigu and tried to visit Chen, but local officials and their enforcers blocked the entrance to the village and roughed up those who insisted on trying to get in.
After a while, the lawyers backed off. Chen had not yet been charged with a crime, and they didn’t want to escalate the conflict with the Linyi officials and force their hand. At the same time, the movement had turned its attention to a series of clashes in the countryside between peasants and local officials who had seized farmland from them for development. The case that attracted the most attention involved an attempt by residents of Taishi Village in Guangdong Province to impeach their local leaders. But as weiquan lawyers and activists traveled to Taishi and other villages to provide the peasants with legal services, a disturbing trend emerged. With increasing frequency, local party bosses resorted to the use of violence against them, often hiring thugs like the men posted around Chen’s village to do their dirty work. The violence put the “rights defense” movement in a difficult position. These lawyers wanted to force the government to live up to its own laws, one case at a time, without directly challenging the party’s authority. Each case that they won would bring China a step closer to the rule of law, and each case that they lost would damage the party’s reputation. But violence was an outcome they had not fully contemplated, and it left them divided about how to respond. Some said they should back down, arguing that by resorting to violence, the party had already exposed the nature of its political system and damaged itself. Refusing to retreat would change nothing and only get more people hurt. But other lawyers were uncomfortable abandoning the people they were trying to help, and argued that they should stand their ground. They believed in nonviolent resistance, even if it meant that local officials had forced them into a more direct confrontation.
The debate would eventually focus on one of the lawyers who spoke out in Chen’s defense, Gao Zhisheng. A former soldier who passed the bar after taking night classes and studying on his own, Gao first made a name for himself protesting the mass evictions of homeowners in Beijing and other cities by corrupt officials and private developers who refused to pay market rates for land they seized. He was enough of a concern that China’s richest woman, Chen Lihua, tried to buy his silence. He later emerged as one of the most outspoken of the weiquan lawyers, and he was the first of them to agree to defend victims of the party’s brutal crackdown on Falun Gong, the popular spiritual movement that the party had banned as a political threat. The government retaliated by shutting down Gao’s law firm in la
te 2005. A few months later, as the attacks on weiquan lawyers grew, Gao launched a “relay hunger strike to oppose violence.” The plan was for individuals across the country to refuse food for one day at a time and share their views online. It immediately attracted support among a diverse collection of people with grievances against the state, from Falun Gong practitioners to residents in Shanghai who had lost their homes to corrupt developers.
The hunger strike seemed relatively harmless, but it split the group campaigning on Chen’s behalf as well as the larger community of people working for political change. The critics argued that Gao was politicizing the “rights defense” movement because the hunger strike amounted to a direct challenge to the party’s authority. The most visible proponent of this view was Ding Zilin, the historian who had lost a son in the Tiananmen massacre and organized the families of other victims to demand redress. She posted an open letter to Gao on the Internet arguing that the party was bound to overreact to his hunger strike just as it did to the 1989 democracy movement. The security services had already begun arresting and beating participants in the strike, and she blamed Gao, saying he shouldn’t have encouraged others to participate in the strike if he couldn’t protect them. Other critics were less strident, but agreed with Ding’s basic point: the hunger strike could provoke a backlash from party hard-liners, jeopardizing the entire “rights defense” movement and the gains it had achieved. Without coverage in the mainstream media and with only limited support from the general public, the strike would have no impact on the party’s willingness to use violence. On the other hand, they hoped, a steady, moderate approach to “rights defense” would foster civil society and build momentum for gradual political change, both inside and outside the party.
The activists who supported Gao, though, argued that he and the others participating in the hunger strike were doing nothing illegal. They were merely protesting injustice, and doing so in a quiet, nonviolent fashion. Among those who sympathized with Gao’s cause was a network of Christian lawyers, including Li Heping, who worshipped in underground churches and made up a growing wing of the “rights defense” movement. They likened the hunger strike to the nonviolent campaigns led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mohandas Gandhi, and argued that it was unfair to blame Gao for the government’s response, just as it was unfair to blame the students for the Tiananmen massacre.
The dispute spilled into Chen’s case after Gao declared that one of his days of fasting was intended to protest Chen’s treatment at the hands of the Linyi officials. Chen reciprocated while under house arrest, announcing in late February that he had joined the relay hunger strike for a day. He fasted another day in support of the hunger strike in early March. Just days later, after months of simply holding him in his farmhouse, the police suddenly decided to take Chen into custody. He was later charged with disturbing public order and disrupting traffic.
The key figures in the “rights defense” movement quickly met to discuss Chen’s case. The room was divided roughly into two camps: pragmatists and purists. The pragmatists believed the only way to help Chen was to persuade party leaders in Beijing to intervene on his behalf. The best way to do that, they argued, was to rally public opinion against the Linyi officials and show the leadership that the interests of the Communist Party would be better served if it sided with Chen instead of its local apparatchiks. In the party’s flawed legal system, the men on the Politburo Standing Committee were the ultimate judges and jurors, they said, and local officials were no doubt trying to present Chen to them as a subversive troublemaker, perhaps someone allied with “overseas, anti-China forces” because of the interviews he had given to foreign journalists. It was critical, they said, not to do anything that would alienate the leadership or allow Linyi officials to cast Chen in a negative light. They pointed to the timing of his arrest and argued that these officials had been emboldened by his participation in Gao’s hunger strike. But the purists were skeptical. They argued that it was useless to speculate about the party’s internal politics and foolish to count on a benevolent leader to step in and help them. That kind of thinking would not promote rule of law but instead further entrench the rule of party officials. The better approach, they said, was to stick to the law and take any action permitted by law to help Chen. It was more important to stand up for justice, they argued, than to be worrying all the time about offending party leaders.
The debate stretched on for hours, but eventually a rough consensus emerged. “Localize and depoliticize” was the motto coined by Xu Zhiyong, the young legal scholar. The campaign would focus its attacks on local officials in Linyi, not the one-child policy, party leaders, or the political system. Xu would coordinate the effort, and his colleague Teng Biao would be responsible for disseminating information. A veteran AIDS activist in the room, Wan Yanhai, agreed to help mobilize nongovernmental organizations. As for Gao, the lawyers decided that he should stay out of Chen’s case.
Chen’s actual courtroom defense was left to a “rights defense” lawyer named Li Jinsong. A soft-spoken, mild-mannered man, Li once worked as a tax official in his native Jiangxi Province, and he had originally obtained his law license as a way to expand his accounting practice. Like many others in the “rights defense” movement, he was a Christian, but he had come to his religion much earlier than most of the others, and he worshipped in a state-sanctioned church, not an underground one. In the 1990s, he gained notoriety by filing lawsuits against government agencies in Guangdong Province, suing a local labor bureau for failing to protect a worker’s rights, for example, and a state transportation company for raising ticket prices before the Spring Festival holiday. Once, he even sued a local court, accusing it of failing to pay overtime to one of its security guards. The court put him in jail for fifteen days.
Li had met Chen only once, the day before he was abducted in Beijing. Chen had asked him to help with the Linyi lawsuits, and he had declined. Given the sensitivity of the one-child policy, he thought the cases would be too difficult to pursue without stronger evidence of the abuses, such as video or audio recordings. But he had been impressed enough by Chen to promise to defend him if the police attempted to prosecute him. Now he was keeping that promise.
On his first trip to Linyi, Li was harassed by thugs, threatened with arrest, and blocked from visiting Chen’s wife. Some of the lawyers who accompanied him were beaten. Li was allowed to see Chen in prison, but the guards refused to let them even discuss the case. Other attempts to collect evidence in Linyi were equally fruitless, and with each visit the authorities ratcheted up the violence against the lawyers. On one trip, the thugs overturned Li’s car and rolled it into a ditch while he was still in it.
As the trial date approached, the public campaign on Chen’s behalf was also faltering. All of the lawyers believed public opinion was critical to saving Chen, and they agreed it was necessary to shine a light on his case, exposing injustice and putting pressure on the leadership to respond. But the mere act of speaking out on Chen’s behalf could be viewed as a challenge to the party, or presented as such by the Linyi officials, and even the pragmatists disagreed among themselves about how to handle that problem. The lawyers tried to hold a press conference about Chen’s case, but police in Beijing shut it down, and some of the pragmatists argued that it had been a mistake to try at all. Others objected when Chen’s supporters printed t-shirts and buttons with photos of him on them, saying that would anger party leaders, and they complained that the near-daily reports that Li wrote about the case and posted on the Internet were counterproductive. Still others objected when activists who directly challenged the party leadership, including dissidents overseas, issued statements to support Chen. The problem for the pragmatist camp was that it was impossible to know for certain what kind of advocacy would help Chen, and what kind of advocacy might be used by the Linyi officials against him. At the same time, it was easy to disagree and criticize one another.
Tensions over these questions came to a head in late July,
when the courts abruptly postponed Chen’s trial a day before it was scheduled to open. Gao Zhisheng and a crowd of activists, villagers, and people with disabilities showed up outside the courthouse anyway, many of them wearing the t-shirts with Chen’s photo. Local thugs quickly attacked them, injuring several people and scattering the crowd. After the clash, the split in the “rights defense” movement widened further. The purists defended Gao and the others, saying they had done nothing illegal and were just trying to show their support for Chen. The pragmatist were furious. They argued that the incident had given local officials the excuse they needed to persuade the leadership to imprison Chen. A few suggested that some of those who had gone to the courthouse were sacrificing Chen to further their own political agendas. Chen’s lawyer, Li Jinsong, was stuck in the middle, awkwardly arguing that he didn’t support such aggressive campaigning for his client while also insisting that he was powerless to stop it and defending the flood of statements he himself had issued about the case.
Another trial date was set a few weeks later. The legal scholar Xu Zhiyong planned to represent Chen in court, but on the eve of the trial, police in Linyi detained him on trumped-up theft charges. Li then refused to attend the trial, in protest. None of the “rights defense” lawyers were in the courtroom when Chen was tried, convicted, and sentenced to four years in prison.
Less than a year later, the party quietly rewarded the man behind the birth planning crackdown in Linyi. Li Qun, the party chief who once served as an assistant to an American mayor, was promoted and named the provincial director of propaganda.
EPILOGUE
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 38