Tom Phillips - The day Zhao Wei disappeared: how a young law graduate was caught in China's human rights dragnet
NB: When I was a young communist in the late 1960's and 70's, we comrades believed passionately in the indivisible character of human rights, of solidarity across national frontiers, in proletarian internationalism. I gave up stalinist and maoist politics decades ago, but the ideal of cross-national human solidarity is still with me, and I remain a socialist. However, the experience and small knowledge I have gained about the nature of communist regimes convinced me that unless socialists transcend their nationalist vision and focus, as well as their (apparent) unconcern for HR defenders in 'socialist' countries, our chances of defending democracy will diminish rapidly.
Zhao Wei is facing political subversion charges in
China - Photo: The Guardian
The onslaught on human rights in countries that were once socialist (Russia and the ex-Soviet republics) and China - still under the totalitarian authority of the CCP - is a blot on the name of socialism. Whether we notice it or not, our failure to defend democratic activists like Zhao Wei will undermine left politics as a whole. I salute this brave young woman, imprisoned by the Chinese authorities for supporting human rights. I hope more of us will learn about her and people like her and defend them in public, in our writings and speeches across the world. DS
Here is a short list of journalists, bloggers and freedom loving people murdered in the past few years: (Aasia Bibi is the only exception - she remains in jail)
(see also Committee to Protect Journalists)
(see also Committee to Protect Journalists)
Dr. Rajani Thiranagama shot dead by Tamil
Tigers, 1989
Shankar
Guha Niyogi murdered in Bhilai, Chattisgarh September 28, 1991 (24 years ago)
Rachel
Corrie, buried alive by an Israeli army bulldozer in Nablus, March
16, 2003
Anna
Politkovskaya, Russian journalist, shot and murdered on Oct 7, 2006
Lasantha
Wickramatunga, Sri Lankan Editor, shot and murdered on Jan 8, 2009
Stanislav
Markelov, Russian HR lawyer, shot and murdered on Jan 20, 2009
Aasia
Bibi, Dalit brick-kiln worker jailed in 2010 on a charge of insulting the
Prophet
Anti-superstition
activist Narendra Dabholkar shot
dead in August 2013
Lawyer Rashid Rehman
shot in May 2014 for defending blasphemy accused Junaid Hafeez
RTI activist Sanjay Tyagi
shot dead in Meerut 26 May, 2014
Pakistan HR activist Sabeen
Mahmud shot dead in Karachi April 2015
Avijit Roy, Bangladeshi
blogger murdered in February 2015 (wife also attacked)
CPI leader Govind Pansare shot dead in February 2015
(wife also attacked)
Washiqur Rahman Bangladeshi
blogger murdered in March 2015
Ananta Bijoy Das, Bangladeshi
blogger murdered in May 2015
Niloy Neel, Bangladeshi
blogger murdered in August 2015
Former VC & Kannada
scholar MM Kalburgi shot dead in Dharwad August 2015
At least 39 RTI activists murdered in India since 2005; over 250
threatened
1148 journalists killed since 1992 (56 in
Russia) in the past 23 years
Globally, 71 Journalists killed in 2015 - 221 Imprisoned in 2014
It was a warm summer’s day when Zhao Wei, a 23-year-old
legal assistant, kissed her parents goodbye and set out in search of her
dreams. She left her small-town home in central China and headed
east to the train station past a Communist party propaganda poster in which
president Xi Jinping posed
beside the slogan: “If the people have faith … the country will be strong”.
From there Zhao caught a bullet train to the Chinese capital
where she planned to sit the national bar exam she hoped would pave the way for
her to become a top human rights lawyer. “She looked well,” her tearful mother, Zheng Ruixia, recalls
of their final moments together, in May last year. “She was so happy when she
got on that train.” Seven months later the would-be lawyer’s dreams are in
tatters.
Zhao Wei – who relatives and friends describe as a bubbly
and kind-hearted young woman – is behind bars facing trial on political
subversion charges that could see her jailed for the rest of her life. And each day her grief-stricken mother sinks into her
daughter’s unmade bed, her hands trembling and tears streaking her face as she
leafs through family photo albums chronicling happier times. “Every day I cry,” says Zheng, 61, sobbing as she reflects
on the misfortune president Xi’s rise to power has unleashed on her family. “I
just lie on this bed and I cry.”
The story of China’s dramatic lurch back towards repressive
dictatorship under Xi is often told on the macro-level: the tale of an
unexpectedly authoritarian leader’s do-or-die struggle to preserve the
Communist party’s near seven-decade reign by stifling any and all dissent. But at the ground level, the story is not one of political
ideology or the corridors of power but of empty bedrooms and broken homes
created by Xi’s intensifying assault on anyone his regime deems a threat.
Since
he became the Communist party’s general secretary, in November 2012, Xi’s
dragnet has sucked in activists, bloggers, journalists, lawyers and liberal
academics. Now, Zhao Wei – a fan of slushy Korean soap operas and
online chat groups, whose gentle manner earned her the nickname “Koala” – has
found herself in the crosshairs.
Born in 1991, the second of two children, Zhao was raised in
a middle-class home in Jiyuan, a small city about 740km southwest of Beijing,
in Henan, one of China’s most deprived regions. Growing up, “Weiwei” was a vivacious and outgoing tomboy who
expressed a desire to help the less fortunate, her mother says. “She is someone
who hates injustice like poison. Even as a child she was like this.”
That idealism initially drew Zhao towards a career in
reporting. In 2009, aged 18, she left home to study journalism at Jiangxi
Normal University in the eastern city of Nanchang. She threw herself into social work and campaigned on issues
including LGBT rights and HIV awareness. “She saw so much inequality in
society,” her mother remembers. “She wanted to help the vulnerable.” As Zhao entered her final year – and a biting political
chill set in with Xi’s elevation to commander-in-chief – Zheng cautioned her
daughter against becoming too involved in activism. “I told her, ‘You are very
young still.’”
But Zhao was unmoved. “I am here to change society, not to
get used to it,” she replied.
At the same time she was showing a growing interest in the
work of China’s “weiquan” or “rights defense” attorneys - a
community of outspoken activist-lawyers famed for daring to take on
politically sensitive cases that often brought them into conflict with the
government. She decided she would try to join their ranks.
In August 2014, having graduated from university and spent a
year working for a website in south-east China, Zhao moved to Beijing and
quickly found work with Li
Heping, a respected Christian lawyer known for defending dissidents,
persecuted religious groups and environmental activists. At the time Zhao could not have known it but when, on 8
October 2014, she started work at Li’s Beijing law practice, she placed herself
at the eye of a rapidly intensifying storm that would soon pulverise her
ambitions to follow in her employer’s illustrious footsteps.
Just over nine months later, on 10 July 2015, as an
unprecedented government crackdown was launched against Li and
his fellow human rights lawyers and dozens were hauled off into
custody, 10 unidentified men would appear at Zhao’s front door in Beijing. After ransacking her home, they spirited the young legal
assistant off into secret detention. Zhao has not been seen since.
Beijing has used state media to defend its roundup of the
supposedly “rabble-rousing” human rights lawyers as well as the decision to
hold Zhao Wei. In
a recent editorial the party-controlled Global Times argued: “[T]here
is no logic that this young lady ... definitely has not committed actions that
harm national security. A few people are trying to instigate public opinion by
stressing her ‘innocence’.” Some of those in custody had received “special attention
from overseas forces”, the newspaper alleged.
But the ferocity with which Xi’s Communist party has decided
to pursue and punish those at the centre of its crackdown has
shocked activists, diplomats and veteran observers of China. Many say they are surprised at the pace at which Xi’s China now appears to be
sliding back towards a far more unforgiving form of authoritarianism than has
been seen in recent years.
“The perverse genius of terror is what we are witnessing,”
says Terry Halliday, an American Bar Foundation scholar who studies China’s
human rights lawyer community and knows several of those detained, including
Zhao Wei’s boss, Li Heping. “Essentially, the party hierarchy has just taken off the
gloves. It is no longer exercising power through velvet gloves. It has now got
knuckledusters on.” Word that Zhao had fallen victim to what activists call Xi’s
“war on law” reached her mother by way of a telephone call from a friend at
about 11pm on 10 July.
Earlier that day Zhao had failed to reply to a video her
mother had sent her over WeChat, the social messaging service, showing her four-year-old
niece dancing on a bed. Zheng assumed she had been busy swotting up for her
exam and thought little of it. In fact the plainclothes officers had already knocked on
Zhao’s door and she was in secret detention. When her two flatmates returned to
the property they found it had been turned upside down. Papers, documents and
clothes were strewn all over the floor.
For the next six months, Zhao’s parents heard nothing. A
group of human rights lawyers set off on a fruitless quest for information, visiting
detention centres and police stations in northern China where they believed the
missing lawyers – and Zhao – might be being held. By 19 October, the day before her daughter’s 24th birthday,
Zheng was so desperate for news that she boarded a train for Tianjin, a city to
the east of Beijing, where the lawyers suspected Zhao was in custody.
With her she took a bag of winter clothes and the faint hope
that she would be allowed to spend just a few brief moments with her daughter. But police officers turned her away. “I felt so cold,” Zheng wrote
of the experience in open letter that was published on the internet in
an attempt to draw attention to her daughter’s case. “I cried so much.”
Deprived of answers, Zheng now has nightmares about her
daughter’s plight. “I think they must be torturing her,” she says, clenching a
wad of tissues in her fist as she battles to hold back the tears. “Why won’t
they let me see her? They must be torturing her. I suspect she is badly injured.
That is why they don’t want me to see her. Otherwise what possible reason could
they have for forbidding us from seeing her for six months?”
With the arrival of the new year, Zheng felt renewed
optimism that her daughter might soon be freed, following an initial six-month
period of detention after which prisoners must be released or charged. But on 11 January at 5.30pm those hopes were crushed when a
postman arrived at the door of the family home in Jiyuan bearing an official
arrest notice from public security authorities. “My heart was pounding when I saw it,” Zheng remembers. “I
was hoping for and expecting good news. But when I opened the letter ...”
Inside the envelope was a terse, boilerplate statement from
authorities addressed to Zhao’s 61-year-old father, Zhao Yonghong. “With the approval of the Number Two Branch of the Tianjin
Municipal People’s Procuratorate, our bureau arrested Zhao Wei at 6pm on 8
January on suspicion of the subversion of state power,” it read. “She is now
being held in custody at the Tianjin No.1 detention centre.”
Zheng says she has hidden the severity of that charge –
which potentially carries a life sentence – from her husband who was left badly
debilitated by a series of strokes before his daughter’s detention and speaks
with a slur. So as not to weep in front of him, Zheng now sleeps in her
daughter’s empty bedroom beneath a black-and-white portrait of their absent
child. “I’m afraid that if he knows all the details he will get worse,” she
explains.
Zhao was a firm believer in ideas such as democracy, freedom
and justice, her mother says, but she rejects the implication that her daughter
had been conspiring to destabilise the government. “She did not do it for sure. Zhao Wei loved this country,”
she says, adding: “The government has broken the law. I feel helpless.” Halliday said he believed the Communist party’s decision to
target not only prominent human rights lawyers but also their young staff was
designed to induce fear in anyone considering opposing its rule.
That it was destroying a young woman’s life and dreams in
the process, “is not, of course, lost on the regime,” Halliday added. “I am
sure it is part of the calculus of terror.” That calculus has taken a devastating toll on Zhao Wei’s
family. “The past week has been so hard. I can’t sleep. I can’t
eat,” her mother sobs, as she sits alone in the family’s dimly lit sitting
room. “We want to appeal but I don’t know who to appeal to.” “The Communist party is in charge. Whether you have
committed a crime or not all depends on what the Communist party decides,” she
says.
“Even if you didn’t commit a crime, if [the party] says you
did, then you did. End of story.”
See also
Tom
Phillips - Beijing shuts down art exhibition on violence against women
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
