IN DECEMBER 2005 Asia Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine in Hong Kong, put 14 Chinese civil-rights advocates on its cover. It hailed them and their brethren in the cause of weiquan, or rights protection, as “men of the year” for their brave efforts to advance the rule of law in China. The cover might as well have been a “most wanted” poster. Since then authorities have turned the lawyers into a gang of “criminals” and fugitives.
All of the activists pictured on the magazine’s cover have since been imprisoned, detained, beaten or threatened, except for one lawyer who had already fled the country into exile in Canada. The most vocal among them were, as their sympathisers like to put it, “disappeared” by party-hired thugs in extralegal abductions.
It has been a long and hard fall that says much about the Communist Party’s chosen path of evolution. Activists seeking to protect the legal rights of ordinary citizens rose to prominence in the early 2000s. At the time the party was trying to professionalise its legal system, to encourage people to seek redress through the courts and...Continue reading
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