Prominent Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng was once listed as being among China’s 10 best lawyers by the Ministry of Justice in 2001, but that would change as he began to take cases of people persecuted by the communist state, especially that of Falun Gong practitioners.
What would follow was Gao himself being targeted by the security organs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This would begin after Gao published his first open “Letter to the National People’s Congress” on December 31, 2004, which appealed to the central authorities to stop persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, wrote Human Rights Watch.
Falun Gong has been undergoing brutal persecution in mainland China since 1999. With meditation and slow-moving exercises, practitioners follow three main principles: Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance. The persecution has been overseen by a Gestapo-like organization known as the 610 office.
In part of his 8-page long open letter, Gao wrote: “The arbitrary sentencing of Falun Gong practitioners to labor camps has reached a painful level in some places, and the reasons used include ‘refusal to reform’ or ‘refusal to convert.’ As I write this letter, a woman from Wuhan, Ms. Du Wenli, who just gave birth to a child three months ago, sent me a fax, describing in desperation her husband Ni Guobin’s frightening experience. Ni was released after a three-year imprisonment, but on July 13 of this year, he was kidnapped on his way to work by some people whose identities were undisclosed. Ten days later, he was sent back with only one breath left.”
HRW said that on October 18, 2005, Gao “wrote a second letter to the central government calling on them to halt the continuing torture and ill-treatment of detained Falun Gong practitioners.”
“Afterward, Gao started receiving threatening phone calls and came under round-the-clock police surveillance,” HRW said. The Beijing Judicial Bureau then shut down his law firm.
“December 12, 2005: Gao wrote a third letter to the central government on the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners,” HRW said.
In August 2006, the state took away his personal permit to practice law and charged him with “inciting subversion of state power”.
On December 22, 2006, Gao was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended, and he was placed on probation for five years. The sentence given also deprived him of political rights, which forbade him from speaking out against the authorities for one year.
Gao Zhisheng tortured after letter to U.S.
Less than a year later, he sent a letter sent to the U.S. Congress condemning the human rights situation in China while calling on the United States to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Shortly after this: “Gao was disappeared for over fifty days. He later described being severely tortured by Chinese police during this period,” HRW said.
His wife, Geng He, later gave testimony in the United States about what torture he had been subjected to on this occasion.
“Policemen covered his head with a black hood and took him into a room, where they stripped him naked and beat him. They used electric batons to shock him all over his body, especially his private parts, which turned his skin totally black. It was so painful that Zhisheng was rolling around on the ground,” Ms. Geng told a hearing before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on February 14, 2012.
“After losing consciousness from the torture, he woke up covered in urine. Later, his captors used cigarette smoke to burn his eyes so severely that he could not open them. They even stabbed his genitals with toothpicks,” she said.
“Zhisheng asked them to lock him up in prison, but they refused. They said: ‘You are simply dreaming if you want to go to prison. We can make you disappear whenever we want to.’ That is what they have done. This torture lasted more than three days.”
Family flees to the U.S.
In January 2009, his family — his wife, their son, and their daughter — who had also been targeted, fled China for the safety of America. A month later, Mr. Gao was disappeared again by Chinese security officers, HRW said, adding that he was held incommunicado for more than a year.
Gao briefly reappeared and met reporters in March 2010. In the following month, he told a reporter from the Associated Press that police had repetitively tortured him during his 14-month disappearance.
He then he was disappeared, and his whereabouts were again unknown until December 16, 2011, when a report by state-run media said he had breached his probation rules and would serve prison time and was reportedly held in prison in the Xinjiang region.
He was released in 2014, but: “He was reportedly unable to speak when he left prison, had lost several of his teeth due to malnutrition, and had lost a significant amount of weight,” said Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
Gao was placed under house arrest in a village in Shaanxi Province where he was given limited food — a slice of bread and a piece of cabbage daily, reported the Wall Street Journal. Despite that, he secretly wrote a book, Stand Up China 2017 — China’s Hope: What I Learned During Five Years as a Political Prisoner, which was smuggled out of China and published in 2016 in Taiwan.
“In the book, Gao Zhisheng detailed his treatment while in detention from 2009 to 2014 and told of his life after he was released and sent to Shaanxi to live under round-the-clock police surveillance with his elder brother, Gao Yisheng. He wrote the book as a way of continuing his resistance against human rights violations perpetrated by the Chinese authorities,” Amnesty International said.
Letter Appeal for Gao Zhisheng
But Gao hasn’t been heard from since August 13, 2017, and currently, his whereabouts are unknown. Fears for his well-being and safety have prompted 35 organizations to call for his release in a letter published on August 11.
“We, the undersigned organizations, call on the Chinese authorities to immediately and unconditionally release prominent human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng ahead of the sixth anniversary of his disappearance on August 13,” said the letter.
The letter outlined more of how the state targeted him for his advocacy work following his open letters to the heads of the CCP.
“In 2006, Gao was sentenced to three years in prison on the charge of ‘inciting subversion of state power,’ and after being released on parole, he was repeatedly disappeared for extended periods and tortured by police between 2007 and 2011,” the letter said.
“In December 2011, state media reported that Gao had been imprisoned in the Uyghur region to serve out his sentence after violating terms of his parole. He was then released in 2014 but remained under house arrest.
“Gao’s relatives in China, as well as fellow rights lawyers and activists, who previously remained in contact with him, have not heard from him since August 13, 2017. Ever since then, Chinese authorities have, implausibly, claimed that Gao is not under any ‘criminal coercive measures.’
“Over the past six years, Gao has effectively remained in a state of enforced disappearance.”
International Day of the Disappeared
The letter said that Gao’s wife in the U.S. has continued to advocate for him, pleading with the Chinese authorities to allow the world to “see him if he’s alive, or see his corpse if he’s dead.”
“Most recently, she has demanded that he be put on trial if he is guilty, and at the very least, that his lawyers should be allowed to meet with him and family members should have videoconferences,” the letter said.
The letter added that on several occasions, United Nations bodies and human rights experts have sought information about his status, but the Chinese state has refused to clarify his situation.
“And as we near ‘The International Day of the Disappeared’ on August 30, we also condemn the Chinese government’s use of enforced disappearances as a tactic to silence and control activists, religious practitioners, Uyghurs and Tibetans, and even high-profile celebrities, entrepreneurs, and government officials,” the letter said.
The letter was cosigned by, in alphabetical order:
• ARTICLE 19
• Campaign For Uyghurs
• China Aid
• China Against the Death Penalty (CADP)
• Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD)
• Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW)
• Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation
• Dialogue China
• European Criminal Bar Association
• FIDH – International Federation for Human Rights
• Freedom House
• Friends of Falun Gong (FoFG)
• Front Line Defenders
• Hans Gaasbeek, Coordinator of the Foundation Day of the Endangered Lawyer
• Human Rights in China (HRIC)
• Human Rights Now
• Humanitarian China
• International Association of People’s Lawyers (IAPL) Monitoring Committee on Attacks on Lawyers
• International Observatory for Lawyers in Danger (OIAD)
• International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
• Judicial Reform Foundation
• Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada
• New School for Democracy Association
• PEN America
• PEN International
• Safeguard Defenders
• Symone Gaasbeek-Wielinga, President of the Dutch League for Human Rights
• Taipei Bar Association Human Rights Committee
• Taiwan Bar Association Human Rights Protection Committee
• Taiwan Support China Human Rights Lawyers Network
• Tencho Gyatso, President of The International Campaign for Tibet
• Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy
• The Rights Practice
• The World Uyghur Congress (WUC)
• Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP)
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