The New York Times reports…
HONG KONG — A book written by Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese human rights lawyer who spent years in prison, has made it out of China and been published in Taiwan.
In the 446-page book, Mr. Gao describes his time as a prisoner from 2009 to 2014, when he was released and sent to his home in the northwestern province of Shaanxi to live under round-the-clock police surveillance with his older brother, a farmer. The book was introduced in Hong Kong on Tuesday by his daughter, Grace Geng.
Mr. Gao, an army veteran, rose to fame taking on cases that pitted ordinary people against powerful interests, defending farmers from land seizures and suing the police for abuses. He became one of the best-known lawyers in the country, but his advocacy for practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement put him at odds with the government, which shut down his Beijing law firm in 2005.
Mr. Gao, 52, became increasingly critical of the Communist Party and renounced his membership. Detained in 2006, he recanted his confession upon release and described the abuse he received from the police. In early 2009, he disappeared, with the government providing no explanation of his whereabouts for more than a year, prompting international condemnation. After being briefly released from prison in 2010, he disappeared into police custody again, only to be released again in 2014 and transferred to house arrest.
Photo
Gao Zhisheng, a rights lawyer, in Beijing in 2010.
Credit
Gemunu Amarasinghe/Associated Press
Mr. Gao’s imprisonment was a prelude to the far more extensive crackdown on Chinese human rights lawyers under President Xi Jinping. The widespread detentions of rights lawyers last year, with the police this month asking to charge one with the serious crime of “subverting state power,” illustrates the gap in China between language promoting rule of law and its actual practice.
Mr. Gao devotes about half of the book, whose Chinese title translates to “The Year 2017, Stand Up, China,” to describing his treatment while he was detained and imprisoned. He writes extensively about how he was threatened, beaten and given electric shocks.
“He stepped on my shoulder, and the severe sound of an electric shocker burst out. He then placed it under my chin,” Mr. Gao wrote of one of his torturers. “I heard another strange sound. Without a doubt, that was from me. I can’t find a more apt description: It was like a sound a dog would make if stomped on its tail by its master, and other times it was as if the dog was being held upside down by its tail.”
A Christian and now a passionate anti-Communist, Mr. Gao spends the middle part of the book arguing why the Chinese Communist Party will collapse in 2017. For this, he appears to draw on a kind of numerology that came to him in a dream. He devotes the last part of the book to describing China after the fall of Communism, when the country will become democratic, led initially by a transition government.
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Asked whether the incendiary content might put Mr. Gao into more danger in China, or even result in his re-incarceration, Ms. Geng said her father was prepared to face the consequences.
“My father is already determined he won’t come to America,” she said. “He’s already made up his mind that whatever comes, comes.”
Ms. Geng said the family was concerned about her father’s health. His teeth are falling out, and he can only eat liquid food, she told reporters in Hong Kong. Ms. Geng has not seen her father since before his disappearance in 2009.
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Ms. Geng and Albert Ho, a lawmaker in Hong Kong who hosted the meeting with reporters, would not say how the manuscript for the book made it out of the country. Ms. Geng said she talked to her father by telephone about every two months and only when none of the several police officers who stand vigil over his home was present. Mr. Gao’s wife and children left China in 2009 and now live in the United States.
Mr. Gao published his memoir “A China More Just,” in Chinese and English, in 2007. The book introduced on Tuesday was in Chinese, but Mr. Ho said an English version would be published as well.
