In 2015, a nationwide campaign rounded up hundreds of rights advocates. Since then, suppression has become more systematic and less visible, lawyers say
Amy Hawkins in Beijing
Adecade on from China’s biggest crackdown on human rights lawyers in modern history, lawyers and activists say that the Chinese Communist party’s control over the legal profession has tightened, making rights defence work next to impossible.
The environment for human rights law has “steadily regressed, especially after the pandemic”, said Ren Quanniu, a disbarred human rights lawyer. “Right now, the rule of law in China – especially in terms of protecting human rights – has deteriorated to a point where it’s almost comparable to the Cultural Revolution era.” The Cultural Revolution was a decade of mass chaos unleashed by China’s former leader Mao Zedong in 1966. During that time judicial organs were attacked as “bourgeois” and the nascent court system was largely suspended.
Ren is one of hundreds of human rights lawyers to have been targeted since the “709 incident”, a nationwide crackdown on lawyers and activists that started on 9 July 2015. According to human rights groups and the US government, about 300 people from the loose collective of a burgeoning rights defence movement, known as weiquan, were targeted in the round-up. At least 10 were convicted of crimes such as “subversion of state power” and given jail terms, while dozens more have been subjected to surveillance, harassment and the revocation of their professional licences in the years since.
Modern China has never welcomed human rights lawyers. But in the relatively open years of the early 2000s, with the rise of the internet and China’s increasing desire for approval on the world stage, the space for civil society grew to a degree that is now almost unrecognisable. Lawyers scored wins for defendants in cases ranging from tainted baby milk formula scandals to the abuse of migrant workers….
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution
Book review: The State as Faction: Mao’s Cultural Revolution
Nationalism = Enforced patriotism
N.S. Lyons: The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
Prasenjit Duara – The Chinese World Order in Historical Perspective (2019)
How one man went from China’s Communist party golden child to enemy of the state
Ravi Bhoothalingam: Coronavirus and the Mandate of Heaven (March 13, 2020)
Roland Barthes in China; or how to plumb the depths of professorial vacuity…
After the truth-shower 