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This is a monthly round-up of all news related to Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) in China. It includes updates on victims, legal developments and commentary on China’s legalized practice of “Enforced Disappearances.”
Verdicts for two more 709 lawyers
Wang Quanzhang, the last lawyer left
Taiwan NGO worker Lee gets five years
Xi proposes new anti-corruption super agency with RSDL powers
Concerns for Liu Xia's mental state
On 26 December, the trials of lawyer Xie Yang and human rights activist Wu Gan, two of the more prominent victims of RSDL and the 709 crackdown (a politically-motivated purge of human rights lawyers that began in summer 2015), were finally held, 2.5 years after they had first been disappeared. While Wu was handed a harsh sentence of eight years for subversion, widely thought to be punishment for ridiculing officials and his strident refusal to confess, Xie Yang, accused of the lesser crime of incitement to subversion, was released without punishment because he had earlier confessed. Wu Gan’s eight-year sentence is the harshest handed down so far to the victims of the 709 crackdown; according to an eyewitness he mocked the court after the verdict.
I am “grateful to the Party for granting me this lofty honor… I will remain true to our original aspiration, roll up my sleeves and make an extra effort,” Wu reportedly said, a sarcastic reference to Xi’s frequent overtures to Party members.
While Xie’s sentencing was broadcast on the court’s Weibo (watch it here), Wu’s was a closed trial and no live video was released. Chinachange noted that a short clip released later of Wu's trial had been doctored with footage from a hearing recorded in the summer, testament to their inability to control the outspoken activist.
For China Law & Policy, Elizabeth Lynch points out after Xie and Wu there is still one more lawyer unaccounted for, Wang Quanzhang.
Neither his wife, family, nor the lawyers hired by his family have been able to meet with him and no trial has been set for Wang... While Wu Gan and Xie Yang’s fates will be known tomorrow, it is the unknown of what is happening to Wang Quanzhang – and why – that is most alarming. Denied access to lawyers, unable to meet with family, no speedy trial, how is this a country with a rule of law?
Radio Free Asia reported on 6 December that two lawyers appointed by his family were not allowed to visit him at his Tianjin detention centre. As Wang languishes in detention, he was one of three finalists for the Dutch government’s Human Rights Tulip Award for individuals or organizations that use innovative ways to promote human rights. He has also been nominated for the Frontline Defenders 2018 Human Rights Award. Meanwhile, Wang’s wife, Li Wenzu was awarded the 2017 Outstanding Citizen Award on 9 December for continuing to campaign for her husband inside China. Our book, The People’s Republic of the Disappeared, is dedicated to Lawyer Wang.
At the end of November, a Chinese court sentenced Taiwanese NGO worker, Lee Ming-che, to five years for “subverting state power.” Lee was kidnapped by Chinese security back in March as he crossed from Macau into the mainland, but he was not formally charged until May and had no access to his family members until his trial in September. It was the first time that a Taiwanese national was prosecuted on this charge in China and was widely interpreted as a threat both to Taiwan and overseas NGO workers in the country.
Also at the end of November, the New York Times reported that Chinese president Xi Jinping was proposing to set up “a new anticorruption agency with sweeping powers to sidestep the courts and lock up anyone on the government payroll for months without access to a lawyer ” – a kind of special RSDL for officials. The move looks odd when just a month ago, Xi had pledged to scrap a similar secretive security system, called shuanggui which oversees Party members. Xi’s new anti-corruption agency would have jurisdiction over the whole public sector, the newspaper added, of up to 62 million people, many of whom are not Party members.
Returning to the theme of non-mainland victims of RSDL, in One Country, Two Prison Systems, Hong Kong Free Press focused on Hong Kongers caught up in China’s murky legal system. Two RSDL victims, bookseller Lam Wing-kee and journalist Ching Cheong told the website about their horrific experiences of RSDL. Lam said the constant interrogations and berating made him “contemplate suicide,” while Ching was kept in “solitary confinement, in a room sealed with black curtains for 100 days.”
There have been mounting concerns over the health of Liu Xia, the widow of Nobel Prize wining dissident Liu Xiaobo. On 17 December, The Guardian reports that she sent a letter in the form of a poem to writer Herta Mueller in which she says she is “going mad.” Liu Xiaobo himself was a victim of an earlier form of RSDL, while for years Liu Xia was kept a virtual prisoner even though she was never charged with a crime and since her husband’s death this summer, she has effectively been disappeared by the Chinese state.
“I have not the right to speech To speak loudly I live like a plant I lie like a corpse.” Liu Xia.