Legal Gadfly Bites Hard, and Beijing Slaps Him

Subject: Chinese Anti-Olympic Displacement Attorney Harassed
Date: 12/13/2005 4:12:06 A.M. Eastern Standard Time
From: kitchen@hellskitchen.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)

December 13, 2005

Rule by Law
Legal Gadfly Bites Hard, and Beijing Slaps Him
By JOSEPH KAHN
New York Times

BEIJING, Dec. 12 - One November morning, the Beijing Judicial Bureau
convened a hearing on its decree that one of China's best-known law firms
must shut down for a year because it failed to file a change of address
form when it moved offices.

The same morning, Gao Zhisheng, the firm's founder and star litigator, was
1,800 miles away in Xinjiang, in the remote west. He skipped what he called
the "absurd and corrupt" hearing so he could rally members of an
underground Christian church to sue China's secret police.

"I can't guarantee that you will win the lawsuit - in fact you will almost
certainly lose," Mr. Gao told one church member who had been detained in a
raid. "But I warn you that if you are too timid to confront their barbaric
behavior, you will be completely defeated."

The advice could well summarize Mr. Gao's own fateful clash with the
authorities. Bold, brusque and often roused to fiery indignation, Mr. Gao,
41, is one of a handful of self-proclaimed legal "rights defenders."

He travels the country filing lawsuits over corruption, land seizures,
police abuses and religious freedom. His opponent is usually the same: the
ruling Communist Party.

Now, the party has told him to cease and desist. The order to suspend his
firm's operating license was expanded last week to include his personal
permit to practice law. The authorities threatened to confiscate it by
force if Mr. Gao fails to hand it over voluntarily by Wednesday.

Secret police now watch his home and follow him wherever he goes, he says.

He has become the most prominent in a string of outspoken lawyers facing
persecution. One was jailed this summer while helping clients appeal the
confiscation of their oil wells. A second was driven into exile last spring
after he zealously defended a third lawyer, who was convicted of leaking
state secrets.

Together, they have effectively put the rule of law itself on trial, with
lawyers often acting as both plaintiffs and defendants.

"People across this country are awakening to their rights and seizing on
the promise of the law," Mr. Gao says. "But you cannot be a rights lawyer
in this country without becoming a rights case yourself."

Ordinary citizens in fact have embraced the law as eagerly as they have
welcomed another Western-inspired import, capitalism. The number of civil
cases heard last year hit 4.3 million, up 30 percent in five years, and
lawyers have encouraged the notion that the courts can hold anyone, even
party bosses, responsible for their actions.

Chinese leaders do not discourage such ideas, entirely. They need the law
to check corruption and to persuade the outside world that China is not
governed by the whims of party leaders.

But the officials draw the line at any fundamental challenge to their
monopoly on power.

Judges take orders from party-controlled trial committees. Lawyers operate
more autonomously but often face criminal prosecution if they stir up
public disorder or disclose details about legal matters that the party
deems secret.

The struggle of Mr. Gao and others like him may well determine whether
China's legal system evolves from its subordinate role into something
grander, an independent force that can curtail abuses of power at all
levels and, ultimately, protect the rights of individuals against the state.

"We have all tried to shine sunlight on the abuses in the system," says Li
Heping, another Beijing-based lawyer who has accepted political cases. "Gao
has his own special style. He is fearless. And he knows the law."

An Air of Authority

Mr. Gao can cite chapter and verse of China's legal code, having committed
it to memory in intensive self-study. He is an army veteran and a longtime
member of the Communist Party.

On a recent trip to rural Shaanxi Province, where he sneaked into a coal
mine to gather evidence in a lawsuit against mine owners, he wore a crisp
white shirt and tie and shiny black loafers, as if preparing for a day in
court.

He is also a flagrant dissident. Tall and big-boned, he has the booming
voice of a person used to commanding a room. When he holds forth, it is
often on the evils of one-party rule. "Barbaric" and "reactionary" are his
favorite adjectives for describing party leaders.

"Most officials in China are basically mafia bosses who use extreme
barbaric methods to terrorize the people and keep them from using the law
to protect their rights," Mr. Gao wrote on one essay that circulated widely
on the Web this fall.

After an early career that racked up notable courtroom victories, he has
plunged headlong into cases that he knows are unwinnable. He has done pro
bono work for members of the Falun Gong religious sect, displaced
homeowners, underground Christians, fellow lawyers and democracy activists.
When the courts reject his filings, as they often do, he uses the Internet
to rally public opinion.

His fevered assaults have a messianic ring. But although he became a
Christian this fall and began attending services in an underground church,
the motivation to pursue the most sensitive cases - and put his practice
and possibly his freedom at risk - began a couple of years earlier. It was
then that his idealistic beginnings as a peasant boy turned big-city lawyer
gave way to simmering rage.

Mr. Gao was born in a cave. His family lived in a mud-walled home dug out
of a hillside in the loess plateau in Shaanxi Province, in northwestern
China. His father died at age 40. For years the boy climbed into bed at
dusk because his family could not afford oil for its lamp, he recalled.

Nor could they pay for elementary school for Mr. Gao and his six siblings.
But he said he listened outside the classroom window. Later, with the help
of an uncle, he attended junior high and became adept enough at reading and
writing to achieve what was then his dream: to join the People's Liberation
Army.

Stationed at a base in Kashgar, in Xinjiang region, he received a
secondary-school education and became a party member. But his fate changed
even more decisively after he left the service and began working as a food
vendor. One day in 1991 he browsed a newspaper used to wrap a bundle of
garlic. He spotted an article that mentioned a plan by Deng Xiaoping, then
China's paramount leader, to train 150,000 new lawyers and develop the
legal system.

"Deng said China must be governed by law," Mr. Gao said. "I believed him."

He scraped together the funds to take a self-taught course on the law. The
course mostly required a prodigious memory for titles and clauses, which he
had. He passed the tests easily. Anticipating a future as a public figure,
he took walks in the early morning light, pretending fields of wheat were
auditoriums full of important officials. He delivered full-throated
lectures to quivering stalks.

By the late 1990's, though based in remote Xinjiang, he developed a winning
reputation. He represented the family of a boy who sank into a coma when a
doctor mistakenly gave him an intravenous dose of ethanol. He won a
$100,000 payout, then a headline-generating sum, in a case involving a boy
who had lost his hearing in a botched operation.

He also won a lawsuit on behalf of a private businessman in Xinjiang. The
entrepreneur had taken control of a troubled state-owned company, but a
district government used force to reclaim it after the businessmen turned
it into a profit-making entity. China's highest court backed the
businessman and Mr. Gao.

"It felt like a golden age," he said, "when the law seemed to have real power."

That optimism did not last long. His victory in the privatization case made
him a target of local leaders in Xinjiang, who warned clients and court
officials to shun him, he said. He moved to Beijing in 2000 and set up a
new practice with half a dozen lawyers. But he said he felt like an
outsider in the capital, battling an impenetrable bureaucracy.

The Beijing Judicial Bureau, an administrative agency that has supervisory
authority over law firms registered in the capital, charged high fees and
often interfered in what he considered his private business.

One of his first big cases in Beijing involved a client who had his home
confiscated for a building project connected with the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Like many residents of inner-city courtyard homes, his client received what
he considered paltry compensation to make way for developers.

When Mr. Gao attempted to file a lawsuit on his client's behalf, he was
handed an internal document drafted by the central government that
instructed all district courts to reject cases involving such land
disputes. "It was a blatantly illegal document, but every court in Beijing
blindly obeyed it," he said.

In the spring of 2003, Beijing was panicking about the spread of SARS, a
sometimes fatal respiratory affliction, and Mr. Gao was fuming about forced
removals. He gave an interview to a reporter for The China Economic Times
arguing that SARS was much less scary than collusion between officials and
developers.

"The law is designed precisely to resolve these sorts of competing
interests," he said in that interview. "But their orders strip away the
original logic of the law and make it a pawn of the powerful and the corrupt."

An Empty Promise

Mr. Gao is not the first lawyer to test China's commitment to the law. Even
in the earliest days of market-oriented economic reforms, when the legal
system was still a hollow shell, a few defense lawyers quixotically
challenged the ruling party to respect international legal norms.

One such advocate is Zhang Sizhi, a dean of defense lawyers, who has
accepted dozens of long-shot cases that he views as advancing the law. He
defended Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, when she faced trial after the Cultural
Revolution. He also represented Wei Jingsheng, perhaps China's best-known
dissident.

Mr. Zhang argues that lawyers have prodded the party to develop a more
impartial judiciary. But, he says, they must do so with small, carefully
calibrated jolts of legal pressure.

"The system is improving incrementally," he said. "If you go too far, you
will only hurt the chances of legal reform, as well as the interests of
your client."

That view may reflect a consensus among seasoned legal scholars. But Mr.
Gao is 37 years younger than Mr. Zhang, far less patient, and after his
initial burst of idealism, deeply cynical.

If Mr. Zhang's benchmark for progress is that every criminal suspect has
the right to a legal defense, Mr. Gao's became the 1989 Administrative
Procedure Law, which for the first time gave Chinese citizens the right to
sue state agencies. By his reckoning, it remains an empty promise.

"The leaders of China see no other purpose for the law but to protect and
disguise their own power," Mr. Gao said. "As a lawyer, my goal is to turn
their charade into a reality."

Following his defeat in the Beijing land dispute he plunged into the
biggest land case he could find, a prolonged battle over hundreds of acres
of farmland that Guangdong Province had seized to construct a university.
Legally, he hit another brick wall. But he fired off scores of angry
missives about the "brazen murderous schemes" of Guangdong officials. The
storm of public anger he helped stir up got his clients more generous
compensation.

Mr. Gao said he was told later that the party secretary of Guangdong, Zhang
Dejiang, had labeled him a mingyun fenzi, a dangerous man on a mission. "He
was right," Mr. Gao said.

This summer, a fellow lawyer-activist named Zhu Jiuhu was detained for
"disturbing public order" while representing private investors in oil wells
that were seized by the government in Shaanxi, Mr. Gao's home province.

Mr. Gao rushed to Mr. Zhu's defense with fellow lawyers, local journalists
and tape recorders. He camped out in local government offices until
officials agreed to meet him. He told one party boss that "he would forever
be on the wrong side of the law and on the wrong side of the conscience of
the people" unless he let Mr. Zhu go, according to a recording of the
conversation.

After the intensive publicity campaign, Mr. Zhu was freed this fall, though
under a highly restrictive bail arrangement that prevents him from
practicing law.

Most provocatively, Mr. Gao has defended adherents of Falun Gong, a
quasi-Buddhist religious sect that the party outlawed as a major threat to
national security in 1999.

Mr. Gao has been blocked from filing lawsuits on behalf of Falun Gong
members. But in open letters to the leadership, he said the secret police
had tortured sect members to make them renounce Falun Gong. He described a
police-run, extra-judicial "brainwashing base" where, he said, one client
was first starved and then force-fed until he threw up. Another of his
Falun Gong clients, he says, was raped while in police custody.

"These calamitous deeds did not begin with the two of you," he wrote in a
letter addressed to President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. "But
they have continued under your political watch, and it is a crime that you
have not stopped them."

The Police Circle

The crackdown came first as a courtesy call.

Two men wearing suit jackets and ties, having set up an appointment,
visited his office. They identified themselves as agents of State Security,
the internal secret police, but mostly made small talk until one of them
mentioned the open letter Mr. Gao had written on Falun Gong.

"They suggested that Falun Gong was more of a political issue than a legal
issue and maybe it was best left to the politicians," Mr. Gao recalled.
"They were very polite."

When they prepared to leave, however, one of them said, "You must be proud
of what you have achieved as a lawyer after your self-study. Certainly you
must be worried should something happen to derail that."

Mr. Gao said he talked to his wife and considered the future of his two
children. He wondered whether he could still afford his Beijing apartment
and his car if his business collapsed.

"Anyone who says he does not consider this kind of pressure is lying," Mr.
Gao said. "But I also felt more than ever that I was putting pressure on
this reactionary system. I did not want to give that up."

His resistance hardened. The Beijing Judicial Bureau handed him a list of
cases and clients that were off limits, including Falun Gong, the Shaanxi
oil case and a recent incident of political unrest in Taishi, a village in
Guangdong. He refused to drop any of them, arguing that the bureau had no
legal authority to dictate what cases he accepts or rejects.

This fall, he said, security agents have followed him constantly. He said
his apartment courtyard has become a "plainclothes policeman's club," with
up to 20 officers stationed outside. He and his wife bring them hot water
on cold nights.

On Nov. 4, shortly after being warned to retract a second open letter about
his Falun Gong cases, Mr. Gao received a new summons from the judicial bureau.

This time, the bureau provided a written notice that said it had conducted
routine inspections of 58 law firms in Beijing. Mr. Gao's, it was
discovered, had moved offices and failed to promptly register the new
address, which it called a serious violation of the Law on Managing the
Registration of Law Firms. He was ordered to suspend operations for a year.

When the requisite public hearing was held, Mr. Gao sent two lawyers to
represent him. But he boarded a plane for Xinjiang, where he had a medical
case pending and where he wanted to inquire about abuses against members of
an underground Christian church.

The edict was not only not overturned after the hearing, it was broadened.
By late November, the bureau issued a new notice demanding that Mr. Gao
hand over his personal law license as well as his firm's operating permit.
Both had to be in the hands of the bureau by Dec. 14. The authority would
otherwise "use force according to law to carry it out."

When he received that second order, Mr. Gao had escaped his police tail and
traveled to a location in northern China that he asked to keep secret. He
was conducting a new investigation into torture of Falun Gong adherents. A
steady stream of sect members visited him in the ramshackle apartment he is
using as a safe house. He tries to meet at least four each day, taking
their stories down long hand.

"I'm not sure how much time I have left to conduct my work," Mr. Gao said.
"But I will use every minute to expose the barbaric tactics of our leadership."