By USALI Faculty Director Emeritus Jerome A. Cohen
Originally published April 15, 2020 in the South China Morning Post
Chinese and Americans have the same saying, “turn a vice into a virtue”. That’s exactly what China’s Communist Party is up to, seeking to conceal its repression of the country’s human rights lawyers.
With rights advocate Wang Quanzhang due to be released from prison on April 5 after serving 4½ years for “subversion of state power”, Beijing faced a worrisome prospect and a problem. How would it rationalise for propaganda purposes the embarrassing measures it was contemplating to ensure the lawyer’s continuing silence after his release?
Party leaders still hoping to attain soft power at home and abroad could not risk the possibility that Wang might use his regained freedom to reveal what had happened to him since his detention in the infamous “709” crackdown on human rights lawyers launched by the party on July 9, 2015. Yet they apparently could not agree on how to handle this thorny issue.
So they bought time, saying that after his prison release, Wang would have to be kept under strict surveillance for 14 days, far from his home and family in Beijing, because of the possibility that he might be infected with Covid-19.
As often occurs in the “non-release release” of China’s political prisoners, Wang was sent to his old home in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, ostensibly for quarantine but in police custody. This keeps him cut off from the world, except for calls to his wife. It is no ordinary quarantine.
Yet this excuse for further detention, which Wang’s wife decried as shameless, will expire on April 19. What will be the party’s next move then? Medical experts sometimes recommend an extra seven-day quarantine. That might be too brief for the party.
A longer-lasting solution may be to announce that Wang – who tested negative five times before leaving prison, according to his wife – has indeed finally tested positive for the novel coronavirus and must be hospitalised indefinitely. Some independent Chinese journalists have recently “disappeared” into supposed quarantine, after all.
Alternatively, the party might try a more legalistic charade. Wang was sentenced not just to prison, but also to deprivation of political rights for five years after his imprisonment. The party might therefore claim he must continue to be separated from all his contacts and society for that period.
Such a manoeuvre, while more inscrutable to the public, would stretch the meaning of deprivation of political rights far beyond even the party’s broad applications of that punishment to date. We should not underestimate the party’s inventiveness in adapting the “non-release release” and customising coercion to individual circumstances.
Yet the party often acts lawlessly. When the country’s most famous rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, caused endless trouble after previous prison releases, the party silenced him by banishing him to the remote village of his birth and keeping him under strict police control.
When the blind “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng emerged from four years in prison, all communication out of his village home was cut off, and he was watched around the clock by as many as 200 police-supervised thugs, who even blocked village entrances.
The party’s immense security apparatus more easily confines urban “non-release release” victims like Wang Quanzhang and rights lawyer Zheng Enchong. Once, six policemen in an apartment building’s courtyard in Shanghai stopped me from visiting Zheng after his three years in prison. When asked about their legal authority, they merely repeated: “We are police.”
What is the party afraid that Wang might tell the media? His years of being tortured in incommunicado confinement by officers hoping to force a confession? Compelled medications, for illnesses he did not suffer from, that have markedly diminished both his mental and physical capacity?
Wang might still be able to answer other important human rights questions. For example, China’s Criminal Procedure Law contains a notorious provision authorising police to impose, for up to six months, innocuous-sounding “residential surveillance at a designated location” on persons suspected of endangering national security.
In the case of Wang – whose trial took place more than three years after he disappeared in 2015 – was that feared provision imposed, then extended, before the normal criminal process began? Do China’s police have that discretion? If the public had been allowed to see the court’s judgment after Wang’s secret trial, we might already know the answer. Also, why didn’t he exercise his right to appeal conviction? And what use were the lawyers forced upon him by the government?
Covid-19 has outlived its use as an excuse for repression. This time the world is watching, so the party faces a challenge to its ingenuity, or at least its brazenness.
Jerome A. Cohen, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a law professor at NYU and founder of its US-Asia Law Institute