Gao Zhisheng, a fearless Chinese lawyer and activist, had disappeared the first time in February 2009. The Chinese secret police spirited him away and for months, no one knew anything of his whereabouts, least of all his wife and two children.
Seven months later, a policeman informed his brother that Gao had lost his way and went missing on September 25, 2009.
The authorities were cynically suggesting that they had played no role in his disappearance and knew nothing about it.
Yet, last January, a Foreign ministry spokesman told reporters that Gao was according to Chinese law, where he should be, presumably in secret detention, though no formal charges were ever brought against him.
Gao and his family had been under police surveillance for several years, particularly once the lawyer began representing members of the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement with millions of followers who have been brutally persecuted by the regime since 1999.
Gao’s wife, Geng He, succeeded in fleeing the country along with her two children shortly before her husband disappeared, in January 2009.
The police were harassing the family, and after the attempted suicide of her 15-year-old daughter who was prevented from attending school, Geng He could no longer bear remaining in China, we were forced to escape from China because of oppression and assault by the Chinese Communist Party. I couldn’t let it continue. I had to escape from China for the safety of my children, she told The Telegraph.
The family now lives in the US, after having fled to Thailand.
Then, on March 28, 2010, Gao notified friends that he was currently living on Wutai Mountain in Shanxi Province, a Buddhist retreat.
Yet, was he actually a free man?
Where is he? Under what kind of circumstances is he? Is he in jail? Is he in prison? Is he under some sort of house arrest? It is a relief to learn that Gao Zhisheng appears to be alive and healthy enough to talk on the phone. But the mystery of Gao Zhisheng remains. The Chinese government has yet to produce him, Phelim Kine, of Human Rights Watch, told TIME.
He was authorized to return to Beijing, where he gave an interview to AP.
The previously combative Gao seemed to yearn for a more peaceful life, I don’t have the capacity to persevere, he said. You know the main basis for choosing to give up is for the sake of family feelings. I hope I can reunite with them. My children need me by their side growing up… Everybody will be disappointed. Some people were really involved, concerned, supportive, making appeals. So when they read my words they will definitely feel disappointed. To them, I apologize. I’m extremely sorry, he added.
Was his renunciation genuine?
Was he really giving up the struggle against the thuggish regime in Beijing?
The authorities were clearly not convinced, for Mr. Gao has disappeared once again…
He was due to return to the capital on April 20, after a one week-long visit with his father-in-law in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, in western China. He did board the airplane, but never made it back to his Beijing apartment.
Now we understand that the freedom was arranged by the authorities just for a show. He is missing again; he is still under their control. We must continue to pay attention to his case,Jiang Tianyong, a lawyer and friend told the NYT.
Gao Zhisheng, 44, was not always a prominent lawyer.
Born in humble circumstances in Shanxi Province, he once was a coal miner and a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army.
It was only in 1991, once Deng Xiaping had undertaken to develop and modernize China’s legal system, that he began his study of law, passing the bar exam in 1995.
The Administrative Procedure Law, enacted in 1989, allowed for the first time Chinese citizens to sue government agencies in order to obtain redress.
Gao specialized in such cases, often politically sensitive, pitting the ordinary citizen against powerful and opaque state bodies, and entrenched interests.
He represented dispossessed landowners, striking workers and victims in malpractice suits, for example.
By the year 2000, he has established his own law firm in Beijing, the Shengzhi Law Office, and the following year, was designated by China’s Ministry of Justice, one of the country’s ten best lawyers.
Yet, it his work on behalf of persecuted religious minorities, and particularly the Falun Gong movement that exacerbated his confrontation with the regime, and enlightened him as to its true nature.
Falun Gong (Cultivation of the Wheel of Law), a spiritual movement founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992, aims for spiritual elevation and promotes the cultivation of virtue.
Although similar to other traditional Chinese qigong movements (meditation through breathing and physical exercises to promote physical and spiritual balance and harmony), it emphasizes self-purification through virtuous and ethical conduct, promoting the values of Truthfulness, Benevolence, and Forbearance.
By 1998, some seventy million Chinese were advocates of Falun Gong.
Clearly alarmed by the movement’s popularity (though it had no leadership, Li moved to New York in 1998, and no agenda of any kind, least of all political) the regime began banning their publications.
What sealed the movement’s fate was what followed: remarkably, over 10,000 protesters gathered peacefully at Zhongnanhai, the compound housing the Chinese leadership, in April 1999, in order to demand an end to the campaign against their movement.
After having discussed their grievances with a government representative, they all quietly dispersed.
Ten years after Tiananmen however, the regime was not about to tolerate the emergence of an independent organization with potentially mass appeal and that could easily fill the streets with demonstrators. It launched a brutal campaign against what it called a dangerous evil sect. Furthermore, it accused the movement of being an evil force which is anti-science, anti-humanity, anti-society and anarchistic, and a trouble-making group that attempts to challenge the [Communist] Party and the government.
This violent, hysterical reaction revealed the regime’s deep sense of insecurity, and its fear that such a movement could take advantage of the social instability that China’s rapid and uneven economic growth had spawned. Convinced that Falun Gong was part of a foreign conspiracy designed to destabilize the regime, the authorities arrested thousands, sending them to re-education camps in order to compel them to repudiate the movement and its tenets. Many others were dispatched to psychiatric hospitals, people are drugged with various unknown kinds of medication, tied with ropes to hospital beds . . . subjected to electro-convulsive therapy or painful forms of electrical acupuncture treatment, denied adequate food and water . . . forced to write confessional statements renouncing their belief in Falun Gong as a precondition of their eventual release, and then required to pay fines . . . for their board and treatment in the hospital, wrote Robin Munro, Senior Research Fellow at the Law Department and Center of Chinese Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, in 2000.
Over 50,000 were detained and tortured in various jails.
This ruthless campaign was clearly a violation of the Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both signed by China.
Gao Zhisheng was one of those rare lawyers in China who dared defend persecuted Falun Gong members, and underground Christian pastors.
The regime’s response was swift: it closed his law firm, revoked his license and placed him under surveillance around the clock.
Yet, in researching his cases, he discovered the treatment inflicted on those peaceful practitioners that he interviewed, and he was appalled.
Interviewing these victims led him to perceive the true nature of the regime, over a dozen days’ close touch with Falun Gong believers was a shocking experience to my soul, he wrote in December 2005.
On October 18, 2005, he wrote an open letter to Hu Jintao, the President of China, and Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, stop persecuting believers in freedom and mend your ties with the Chinese people, he urged them.
Gao Zhisheng was keenly aware of the risks he was taking, I will not avoid any of the real problems I saw, even if this means I may be immediately arrested when this letter is publicized, he wrote.
The truth must be told, he insisted.
The persecution of Falun Gong was orchestrated by the 6-10 Office, a powerful special department in the security apparatus. Dedicated exclusively to eradicating Falun Gong, transformation is one of its preferred tactics, in fact, forcing practitioners to engage in the “transformation” of their fellow practitioners is part of the regular routine. Transformation has finally been accomplished when the practitioner replaces truth, compassion, and tolerance with lies, brutality, and selfishness, when the practitioner is implicated in the persecution itself, according to The Epoch Times.
The Office has other tactics however. In his open letter, Gao relates the ordeal of several Falun Gong members tortured by the thugs of the 6-10 Office.
Here is one extract: in July 2002, Sun Shuxiang, from Changchu, told the lawyer,
I was in my father’s home. A plainclothes policeman suddenly broke into the house and asked if I was Sun Shuxiang. Before I answered him, I was kidnapped. The next day, police from the first section of Changchun Public Security Bureau put me in a car and drove me on a bumpy road for about two hours. Two policemen took me to a dark and terrifying basement, and took off the blindfold. Eight or nine policemen all rushed into the room. On a table there were three electric batons of large, medium, and small sizes and a bundle of rope, and on the other side were three tiger benches. Two policemen forced me on a tiger bench, and placed my hands on the armrests that each had a handcuff attached to it. My hands were locked in place with the handcuffs. The armrests on the tiger bench had a row of different size holes to fit different wrist sizes. The police skillfully fixed an iron rod as thick as the thumb on the two armrests, pressing against my chest and abdomen area and making it impossible for me to move. One policeman pointed at the torture tools and said to me, ‘Do you see that? If you cooperate, we can finish business in over an hour. Otherwise, we will have you taste all kinds of instruments. What happened to Liu Zhe and others [practitioners who were killed] ? Only a few can come out of here alive…
The other testimonies are equally harrowing and despicable…
Hundreds, if not thousands died due to the abuse.
The regime’s tactics and methods reveal its fundamental moral bankruptcy.
Power and the preservation of power is the sole guiding principle, justifying any means adopted to reach the ultimate objective.
Truth, justice and even common decency have been outlawed.
In China, the whole nation is subdued by a small group of hooligans who segregate and persecute people, one group after another, he wrote in a letter addressed to the Unites States Congress in September 2007.
Yet, the effects of such methods are corrosive, and led to the demise of morality. Furthermore, the regime can no longer command the respect of its people, only its allegiance extorted by intimidation and violence.
The people pretend the regime is legitimate and its rule enlightened and benign, because to reveal its true nature, and expose it publicly is too dangerous.
The people accept this fundamental lie because of the consequences of refusing to do so.
Thus, the regime rests and thrives on that apathy and fear, on that complicit indifference.
What can we do?
The regeneration of China depends on what Gao calls a moral awakening.
Changing China is so easy, that is, it can be done through a moral awakening in every person. A lot can be done in this regard, he wrote, both in China and in the West.
Ironically, he believes that it is by adopting an approach similar to Falun Gong’s, the evil sect denounced by the regime, based on ethics, truth and benevolence that China’s moral regeneration can take place. In contrast to the current situation where the humanity, conscience, morality, compassion, and responsibility of our society is suffering an overall deterioration, these cultivators, as a group reborn from the old nation, have impacted all of these areas in a positive way. One can feel the powerful way in which faith can change one’s soul. Indeed it has allowed me to see a spark of hope for rescuing our nation from its current depraved state, he wrote.
Having discovered the path that china must follow, a possible antidote to sixty years of cruelty and nihilism, Gao Zhisheng had to continue speaking out forcefully…
But still, I choose to express myself in a way that has almost led to the annihilation of my whole family…I choose to do so despite the danger I may bring to myself because I consider it my obligation as a human being and as a Chinese person, he wrote.
The regime must be denounced and its true nature publicly exposed. This has been Gao’s approach, and a very brave one: state the facts, reveal the truth, come what may.
The Chinese Communist Party is a criminal group that operates under the protection of state powers. It is essential to realize its criminal nature so that we can come to the objective conclusions and in turn make the right decisions, he added.
Our leaders can follow the same course at much less personal cost…
The regime will respond immediately and harshly because it cannot allow the truth to be disseminated openly. Fear is its last asset.
Should there be no consequences for those bent on telling the truth, then the regime would quickly collapse.
In 2005, Gao left the Chinese Communist Party, from now on, Gao Zhisheng, a Party “member” who hasn’t paid the membership fee for a long time and has been absent from the “Party activities” for many years, declares that he quits the cruel, untrustworthy, inhumane, and evil party.
This is the proudest day of my life, he wrote…
Gao never feared the confrontation with regime, they threaten to arrest me and I say, ‘Go ahead’. I am a warrior who does not care whether I live or die. Such a sacrifice will be nothing to me if it speeds the death of this dictatorship, he had earlier told The Guardian.…
If he does not fear the regime, the latter is clearly terrified of him.
If they have not killed him yet (as far as we know), they have not spared him either.
Arrested in 2006, he was charged with subversion and given a three-year suspended sentence.
In September 2007, he was abducted by the secret police, ostensibly to follow a re-education session.
Once inside a police locale, a thug screamed ,Gao Zhisheng! You mother
f******! Your date with death is today! Brothers! Let’s show the bastard how brutal we can get. Kill the bastard. A leader (I assumed) of the group screamed. Then, four men with electric batons started to beat my head and body with ferocity, he later wrote in Dark Night, Dark Hood and Kidnapping by Dark Mafia (My account of more than 50 days of torture in 2007).
He was subjected to electric shock prods all over his body…
Haven’t you…accused the Communist Party of using horrendous torture? Well, today, I want you to experience all of them. Yes, you are not incorrect in saying that we torture Falun Gong followers. That’s right, we do. The 12 courses we’re serving you were perfected on the Falun Gong followers. To tell you the truth, I am no longer afraid of you writing about this. There is zero possibility that you will leave this place alive. We can torture you to death and make sure nobody can find your body. Every time I think about you, it makes me steaming mad. Who do you think you are, the thug continued…
It went on for fifty days, but he survived…
Before his release, he was forced to sign a document stipulating that he had not been tortured during his detention, and threatened with retaliation should he divulge the conditions of his detention. I will make sure you are dead if you tell the outside world what happened inside here, he was warned…
And yet, that is precisely what he did…
The document was released on February 9, 2009…
Moreover, Gao Zhisheng is not the only activist currently being victimized by the regime.
In fact, all those brazen enough to seek justice are being persecuted.
An activist investigating whether shoddy construction work may have led to the deaths of scores of schoolchildren in their classrooms, during the 2008 earthquake, was convicted and sent to jail. An editor, Tan Zuoren, was convicted on subversion charges for his writings on the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
Liu Xiaobo, a leader of the Charter 08 democracy movement was sentenced to eleven years in jail on Christmas day last year for inciting subversion of state power.
Last July, the office of Gongmeng, the Open Constitution Initiative, a legal research organization that took on sensitive cases on a pro bono basis, was closed by the authorities.
In May 2009, the licenses of 53 Beijing lawyers were not renewed…
Certainly looking at it from the outside, at case after case of heavy sentences being handed down for things that should be constitutionally protected rights, it’s hard to come away from this and not see a hardening line, Joshua Rosenzweig, of the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights organization, told TIME.
Conventional wisdom has it that China is a vital economic and strategic partner and that we cannot afford to shun or alienates its leaders.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently went to China on a state visit, and the human rights issue was not high on his agenda.
It is pointless being aggressive or reproachful with China. It is absolutely counterproductive, he told Le Figaro.
Launching accusations against the other is counterproductive, he added in a speech during the state dinner on April 28.
If that is the case, then how do we go about helping and protecting activists like Gao Zhisheng?
Are democracies under the moral obligation to help activists who are defending the values of peace, justice and democracy that we espouse and pride ourselves on embodying?
Judging by our China policies, it seems that we are not…
Although it is true that our relations with China encompass much more than solely the human rights issue, are we doing enough help the Gaos of China?
In a recent editorial, the French daily Le Monde argued that the Chinese leadership only understands and respects those nations that vigorously defend their own interests and points of view, come what may (the Chinese approach, presumably), and do not cave in to foreign pressure…
Let us then vigorously defend the values that Gao Zhisheng takes so seriously and that we now tend to take for granted, and openly advise the Chinese that we are keenly interested in the fate of MM. Gao, Liu and others, that we hold them responsible for their welfare, that we shall not be blackmailed into relenting, and that there will be concrete consequences should any harm befall them.
Can we even muster the courage to say that to the Chinese, or are our investments and future trade deals too important?
Mr. Gao is not delusional, western governments are sacrificing ethics and values in exchange for political and economic benefits that are right in front of their eyes, he wrote.
Furthermore, he concluded his account of more than fifty days of torture thus,
Finally, I want to say one thing that won’t be pleasing to some folks. I would like to remind those so-called “good friends and partners” of the CCP around the world that the increasing level of confidence of the CCP in treating the Chinese people with increasingly cold-blooded brutality and cruelty is the direct result of appeasement by both you and us (the Chinese people)…
The well-being of Mr. Gao is the responsibility of the Chinese government and people.
Yet, it is also ours.
Article 33 of the Chinese Constitution asserts the following, the state respects and guarantees human rights.
We must not allow the Chinese authorities to ignore their own principles, nor permit our leaders to overlook them for short term, cynical economic benefits..
Mr. Gao is willing to pay any price to defend his values.
Are we?
Gao Zhisheng, a fearless Chinese lawyer and activist, had disappeared the first time in February 2009. The Chinese secret police spirited him away and for months, no one knew anything of his whereabouts, least of all his wife and two children.
Seven months later, a policeman informed his brother that Gao had lost his way and went missing on September 25, 2009.
The authorities were cynically suggesting that they had played no role in his disappearance and knew nothing about it.
Yet, last January, a Foreign ministry spokesman told reporters that Gao was according to Chinese law, where he should be, presumably in secret detention, though no formal charges were ever brought against him.
Gao and his family had been under police surveillance for several years, particularly once the lawyer began representing members of the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement with millions of followers who have been brutally persecuted by the regime since 1999.
Gao’s wife, Geng He, succeeded in fleeing the country along with her two children shortly before her husband disappeared, in January 2009.
The police were harassing the family, and after the attempted suicide of her 15-year-old daughter who was prevented from attending school, Geng He could no longer bear remaining in China, we were forced to escape from China because of oppression and assault by the Chinese Communist Party. I couldn’t let it continue. I had to escape from China for the safety of my children, she told The Telegraph.
The family now lives in the US, after having fled to Thailand.
Then, on March 28, 2010, Gao notified friends that he was currently living on Wutai Mountain in Shanxi Province, a Buddhist retreat.
Yet, was he actually a free man?
Where is he? Under what kind of circumstances is he? Is he in jail? Is he in prison? Is he under some sort of house arrest? It is a relief to learn that Gao Zhisheng appears to be alive and healthy enough to talk on the phone. But the mystery of Gao Zhisheng remains. The Chinese government has yet to produce him, Phelim Kine, of Human Rights Watch, told TIME.
He was authorized to return to Beijing, where he gave an interview to AP.
The previously combative Gao seemed to yearn for a more peaceful life, I don’t have the capacity to persevere, he said. You know the main basis for choosing to give up is for the sake of family feelings. I hope I can reunite with them. My children need me by their side growing up… Everybody will be disappointed. Some people were really involved, concerned, supportive, making appeals. So when they read my words they will definitely feel disappointed. To them, I apologize. I’m extremely sorry, he added.
Was his renunciation genuine?
Was he really giving up the struggle against the thuggish regime in Beijing?
The authorities were clearly not convinced, for Mr. Gao has disappeared once again…
He was due to return to the capital on April 20, after a one week-long visit with his father-in-law in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, in western China. He did board the airplane, but never made it back to his Beijing apartment.
Now we understand that the freedom was arranged by the authorities just for a show. He is missing again; he is still under their control. We must continue to pay attention to his case,Jiang Tianyong, a lawyer and friend told the NYT.
Gao Zhisheng, 44, was not always a prominent lawyer.
Born in humble circumstances in Shanxi Province, he once was a coal miner and a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army.
It was only in 1991, once Deng Xiaping had undertaken to develop and modernize China’s legal system, that he began his study of law, passing the bar exam in 1995.
The Administrative Procedure Law, enacted in 1989, allowed for the first time Chinese citizens to sue government agencies in order to obtain redress.
Gao specialized in such cases, often politically sensitive, pitting the ordinary citizen against powerful and opaque state bodies, and entrenched interests.
He represented dispossessed landowners, striking workers and victims in malpractice suits, for example.
By the year 2000, he has established his own law firm in Beijing, the Shengzhi Law Office, and the following year, was designated by China’s Ministry of Justice, one of the country’s ten best lawyers.
Yet, it his work on behalf of persecuted religious minorities, and particularly the Falun Gong movement that exacerbated his confrontation with the regime, and enlightened him as to its true nature.
Falun Gong (Cultivation of the Wheel of Law), a spiritual movement founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992, aims for spiritual elevation and promotes the cultivation of virtue.
Although similar to other traditional Chinese qigong movements (meditation through breathing and physical exercises to promote physical and spiritual balance and harmony), it emphasizes self-purification through virtuous and ethical conduct, promoting the values of Truthfulness, Benevolence, and Forbearance.
By 1998, some seventy million Chinese were advocates of Falun Gong.
Clearly alarmed by the movement’s popularity (though it had no leadership, Li moved to New York in 1998, and no agenda of any kind, least of all political) the regime began banning their publications.
What sealed the movement’s fate was what followed: remarkably, over 10,000 protesters gathered peacefully at Zhongnanhai, the compound housing the Chinese leadership, in April 1999, in order to demand an end to the campaign against their movement.
After having discussed their grievances with a government representative, they all quietly dispersed.
Ten years after Tiananmen however, the regime was not about to tolerate the emergence of an independent organization with potentially mass appeal and that could easily fill the streets with demonstrators. It launched a brutal campaign against what it called a dangerous evil sect. Furthermore, it accused the movement of being an evil force which is anti-science, anti-humanity, anti-society and anarchistic, and a trouble-making group that attempts to challenge the [Communist] Party and the government.
This violent, hysterical reaction revealed the regime’s deep sense of insecurity, and its fear that such a movement could take advantage of the social instability that China’s rapid and uneven economic growth had spawned. Convinced that Falun Gong was part of a foreign conspiracy designed to destabilize the regime, the authorities arrested thousands, sending them to re-education camps in order to compel them to repudiate the movement and its tenets. Many others were dispatched to psychiatric hospitals, people are drugged with various unknown kinds of medication, tied with ropes to hospital beds . . . subjected to electro-convulsive therapy or painful forms of electrical acupuncture treatment, denied adequate food and water . . . forced to write confessional statements renouncing their belief in Falun Gong as a precondition of their eventual release, and then required to pay fines . . . for their board and treatment in the hospital, wrote Robin Munro, Senior Research Fellow at the Law Department and Center of Chinese Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, in 2000.
Over 50,000 were detained and tortured in various jails.
This ruthless campaign was clearly a violation of the Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both signed by China.
Gao Zhisheng was one of those rare lawyers in China who dared defend persecuted Falun Gong members, and underground Christian pastors.
The regime’s response was swift: it closed his law firm, revoked his license and placed him under surveillance around the clock.
Yet, in researching his cases, he discovered the treatment inflicted on those peaceful practitioners that he interviewed, and he was appalled.
Interviewing these victims led him to perceive the true nature of the regime, over a dozen days’ close touch with Falun Gong believers was a shocking experience to my soul, he wrote in December 2005.
On October 18, 2005, he wrote an open letter to Hu Jintao, the President of China, and Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, stop persecuting believers in freedom and mend your ties with the Chinese people, he urged them.
Gao Zhisheng was keenly aware of the risks he was taking, I will not avoid any of the real problems I saw, even if this means I may be immediately arrested when this letter is publicized, he wrote.
The truth must be told, he insisted.
The persecution of Falun Gong was orchestrated by the 6-10 Office, a powerful special department in the security apparatus. Dedicated exclusively to eradicating Falun Gong, transformation is one of its preferred tactics, in fact, forcing practitioners to engage in the “transformation” of their fellow practitioners is part of the regular routine. Transformation has finally been accomplished when the practitioner replaces truth, compassion, and tolerance with lies, brutality, and selfishness, when the practitioner is implicated in the persecution itself, according to The Epoch Times.
The Office has other tactics however. In his open letter, Gao relates the ordeal of several Falun Gong members tortured by the thugs of the 6-10 Office.
Here is one extract: in July 2002, Sun Shuxiang, from Changchu, told the lawyer,
I was in my father’s home. A plainclothes policeman suddenly broke into the house and asked if I was Sun Shuxiang. Before I answered him, I was kidnapped. The next day, police from the first section of Changchun Public Security Bureau put me in a car and drove me on a bumpy road for about two hours. Two policemen took me to a dark and terrifying basement, and took off the blindfold. Eight or nine policemen all rushed into the room. On a table there were three electric batons of large, medium, and small sizes and a bundle of rope, and on the other side were three tiger benches. Two policemen forced me on a tiger bench, and placed my hands on the armrests that each had a handcuff attached to it. My hands were locked in place with the handcuffs. The armrests on the tiger bench had a row of different size holes to fit different wrist sizes. The police skillfully fixed an iron rod as thick as the thumb on the two armrests, pressing against my chest and abdomen area and making it impossible for me to move. One policeman pointed at the torture tools and said to me, ‘Do you see that? If you cooperate, we can finish business in over an hour. Otherwise, we will have you taste all kinds of instruments. What happened to Liu Zhe and others [practitioners who were killed] ? Only a few can come out of here alive…
The other testimonies are equally harrowing and despicable…
Hundreds, if not thousands died due to the abuse.
The regime’s tactics and methods reveal its fundamental moral bankruptcy.
Power and the preservation of power is the sole guiding principle, justifying any means adopted to reach the ultimate objective.
Truth, justice and even common decency have been outlawed.
In China, the whole nation is subdued by a small group of hooligans who segregate and persecute people, one group after another, he wrote in a letter addressed to the Unites States Congress in September 2007.
Yet, the effects of such methods are corrosive, and led to the demise of morality. Furthermore, the regime can no longer command the respect of its people, only its allegiance extorted by intimidation and violence.
The people pretend the regime is legitimate and its rule enlightened and benign, because to reveal its true nature, and expose it publicly is too dangerous.
The people accept this fundamental lie because of the consequences of refusing to do so.
Thus, the regime rests and thrives on that apathy and fear, on that complicit indifference.
What can we do?
The regeneration of China depends on what Gao calls a moral awakening.
Changing China is so easy, that is, it can be done through a moral awakening in every person. A lot can be done in this regard, he wrote, both in China and in the West.
Ironically, he believes that it is by adopting an approach similar to Falun Gong’s, the evil sect denounced by the regime, based on ethics, truth and benevolence that China’s moral regeneration can take place. In contrast to the current situation where the humanity, conscience, morality, compassion, and responsibility of our society is suffering an overall deterioration, these cultivators, as a group reborn from the old nation, have impacted all of these areas in a positive way. One can feel the powerful way in which faith can change one’s soul. Indeed it has allowed me to see a spark of hope for rescuing our nation from its current depraved state, he wrote.
Having discovered the path that china must follow, a possible antidote to sixty years of cruelty and nihilism, Gao Zhisheng had to continue speaking out forcefully…
But still, I choose to express myself in a way that has almost led to the annihilation of my whole family…I choose to do so despite the danger I may bring to myself because I consider it my obligation as a human being and as a Chinese person, he wrote.
The regime must be denounced and its true nature publicly exposed. This has been Gao’s approach, and a very brave one: state the facts, reveal the truth, come what may.
The Chinese Communist Party is a criminal group that operates under the protection of state powers. It is essential to realize its criminal nature so that we can come to the objective conclusions and in turn make the right decisions, he added.
Our leaders can follow the same course at much less personal cost…
The regime will respond immediately and harshly because it cannot allow the truth to be disseminated openly. Fear is its last asset.
Should there be no consequences for those bent on telling the truth, then the regime would quickly collapse.
In 2005, Gao left the Chinese Communist Party, from now on, Gao Zhisheng, a Party “member” who hasn’t paid the membership fee for a long time and has been absent from the “Party activities” for many years, declares that he quits the cruel, untrustworthy, inhumane, and evil party.
This is the proudest day of my life, he wrote…
Gao never feared the confrontation with regime, they threaten to arrest me and I say, ‘Go ahead’. I am a warrior who does not care whether I live or die. Such a sacrifice will be nothing to me if it speeds the death of this dictatorship, he had earlier told The Guardian.…
If he does not fear the regime, the latter is clearly terrified of him.
If they have not killed him yet (as far as we know), they have not spared him either.
Arrested in 2006, he was charged with subversion and given a three-year suspended sentence.
In September 2007, he was abducted by the secret police, ostensibly to follow a re-education session.
Once inside a police locale, a thug screamed ,Gao Zhisheng! You mother
f******! Your date with death is today! Brothers! Let’s show the bastard how brutal we can get. Kill the bastard. A leader (I assumed) of the group screamed. Then, four men with electric batons started to beat my head and body with ferocity, he later wrote in Dark Night, Dark Hood and Kidnapping by Dark Mafia (My account of more than 50 days of torture in 2007).
He was subjected to electric shock prods all over his body…
Haven’t you…accused the Communist Party of using horrendous torture? Well, today, I want you to experience all of them. Yes, you are not incorrect in saying that we torture Falun Gong followers. That’s right, we do. The 12 courses we’re serving you were perfected on the Falun Gong followers. To tell you the truth, I am no longer afraid of you writing about this. There is zero possibility that you will leave this place alive. We can torture you to death and make sure nobody can find your body. Every time I think about you, it makes me steaming mad. Who do you think you are, the thug continued…
It went on for fifty days, but he survived…
Before his release, he was forced to sign a document stipulating that he had not been tortured during his detention, and threatened with retaliation should he divulge the conditions of his detention. I will make sure you are dead if you tell the outside world what happened inside here, he was warned…
And yet, that is precisely what he did…
The document was released on February 9, 2009…
Moreover, Gao Zhisheng is not the only activist currently being victimized by the regime.
In fact, all those brazen enough to seek justice are being persecuted.
An activist investigating whether shoddy construction work may have led to the deaths of scores of schoolchildren in their classrooms, during the 2008 earthquake, was convicted and sent to jail. An editor, Tan Zuoren, was convicted on subversion charges for his writings on the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
Liu Xiaobo, a leader of the Charter 08 democracy movement was sentenced to eleven years in jail on Christmas day last year for inciting subversion of state power.
Last July, the office of Gongmeng, the Open Constitution Initiative, a legal research organization that took on sensitive cases on a pro bono basis, was closed by the authorities.
In May 2009, the licenses of 53 Beijing lawyers were not renewed…
Certainly looking at it from the outside, at case after case of heavy sentences being handed down for things that should be constitutionally protected rights, it’s hard to come away from this and not see a hardening line, Joshua Rosenzweig, of the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights organization, told TIME.
Conventional wisdom has it that China is a vital economic and strategic partner and that we cannot afford to shun or alienates its leaders.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently went to China on a state visit, and the human rights issue was not high on his agenda.
It is pointless being aggressive or reproachful with China. It is absolutely counterproductive, he told Le Figaro.
Launching accusations against the other is counterproductive, he added in a speech during the state dinner on April 28.
If that is the case, then how do we go about helping and protecting activists like Gao Zhisheng?
Are democracies under the moral obligation to help activists who are defending the values of peace, justice and democracy that we espouse and pride ourselves on embodying?
Judging by our China policies, it seems that we are not…
Although it is true that our relations with China encompass much more than solely the human rights issue, are we doing enough help the Gaos of China?
In a recent editorial, the French daily Le Monde argued that the Chinese leadership only understands and respects those nations that vigorously defend their own interests and points of view, come what may (the Chinese approach, presumably), and do not cave in to foreign pressure…
Let us then vigorously defend the values that Gao Zhisheng takes so seriously and that we now tend to take for granted, and openly advise the Chinese that we are keenly interested in the fate of MM. Gao, Liu and others, that we hold them responsible for their welfare, that we shall not be blackmailed into relenting, and that there will be concrete consequences should any harm befall them.
Can we even muster the courage to say that to the Chinese, or are our investments and future trade deals too important?
Mr. Gao is not delusional, western governments are sacrificing ethics and values in exchange for political and economic benefits that are right in front of their eyes, he wrote.
Furthermore, he concluded his account of more than fifty days of torture thus,
Finally, I want to say one thing that won’t be pleasing to some folks. I would like to remind those so-called “good friends and partners” of the CCP around the world that the increasing level of confidence of the CCP in treating the Chinese people with increasingly cold-blooded brutality and cruelty is the direct result of appeasement by both you and us (the Chinese people)…
The well-being of Mr. Gao is the responsibility of the Chinese government and people.
Yet, it is also ours.
Article 33 of the Chinese Constitution asserts the following, the state respects and guarantees human rights.
We must not allow the Chinese authorities to ignore their own principles, nor permit our leaders to overlook them for short term, cynical economic benefits..
Mr. Gao is willing to pay any price to defend his values.
Are we?
Source: http://plugin-wordpress.spyderlinks.net/one-who-insists-on-telling-the-truth-must-pay-the-price.html
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