There’s surveillance and there’s surveillance.. China’s authorities have taken it to the n’th degree.
In a report yesterday in the LA Times detailing the trials and tribulations of lawyer Gao Zhisheng
We learn that security was so tight that police sometimes sat in the bedroom of their Beijing apartment, insisting the lights remain on all night so they could keep an eye on them.
In order to keep the family incommunicado, authorities forbade telephones or Internet access. When Gao’s 15-year-old daughter went to school, her classmates were not allowed to carry cellphones lest she borrow one to make a call.
Here’s the article in full http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-fg-china-lawyer5-2009may05,0,4105944,full.story
We just hope that one day China will remember him as we remember Thomas Paine .
Just look at his biography on wikipedia .. it is enough to make you cry…
Mr. Gao was born and raised in poverty in a cave dwelling in Shanxi Province with six siblings. He briefly worked in a coal mine and then joined the People’s Liberation Army, was stationed at a base in Kashgar, in Xinjiang region, and became a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
After being discharged, he took a self-taught course on the law and passed the bar exam in 1995. Taking one third of his cases pro-bono, he became known after winning a $100,000 medical malpractice suit in 1999. During his time in Xinjiang, he won a lawsuit for an entrepreneur whose business local officials reclaimed after he had revived it following privatization. Despite winning the case, Gao was forced to leave Xinjiang because harassment by local officials made his legal practice impossible.[4] In 2000, he moved to Beijing and established the Shengzhi Law Office with a half dozen other lawyers.
In 2001, he was voted as one of the 10 Best Lawyers in China, because of his professionalism and integrity, often helping poor people without fees to sue local Chinese government branches and officials.
In December 2005, he quit the Chinese Communist Party.[5] “This [Chinese Communist] Party has employed the most savage, most immoral, and most illegal means to torture our mothers, torture our wives, torture our children, and torture our brothers and sisters…Today, I, Gao Zhisheng… formally withdraw from this inhumane, unjust, and evil Party. This is the proudest day of my life.”
Since Gao’s disappearance, his wife and two children have been granted asylum in the United States, according to human rights activists.
