One November morning, the Beijing Judicial Bureau convened a hearing on its decree that one of China's best-known law firms must shut down for a year because it failed to file a change of address form when it moved offices.

 

The same morning, Gao Zhisheng, the law firm's founder and star litigator, was 2,900 kilometers, or 1,800 miles, away in the remote western region of Xinjiang. He skipped what he called the "absurd and corrupt" hearing so he could rally members of an underground Christian church to sue China's secret police.

 

"I can't guarantee that you will win the lawsuit. In fact you will almost certainly lose," Gao told one church member who had been detained in a raid. "But I warn you that if you are too timid to confront their barbaric behavior, you will be completely defeated."

 

The advice could well summarize Gao's own fateful clash with the authorities. Bold, brusque and often roused to fiery indignation, Gao, 41, is one of a handful of self-proclaimed legal "rights defenders." He travels the country filing lawsuits over corruption, land seizures, police abuses and religious freedom. His opponent is usually the same: the ruling Communist Party.

 

Now, the party has told him to cease and desist. The order to suspend his firm's operating license was expanded last week to include his personal permit to practice law. The authorities threatened to confiscate it by force if Gao failed to hand it over voluntarily by Wednesday. The secret police now watch his home and follow him wherever he goes, he says.

 

He has become the most prominent in a string of persecutions of outspoken lawyers. One was jailed this summer while helping clients appeal the confiscation of their oil wells. A second was driven into exile last spring after he zealously defended a third lawyer, who was convicted of leaking state secrets.

 

Together, they have effectively put the rule of law itself on trial, with lawyers often acting as both plaintiff and defendant.

 

"People across this country are awakening to their rights and seizing on the promise of the law," Gao said. "But you cannot be a rights lawyer in this country without becoming a rights case yourself."

 

The number of civil cases heard in China last year hit 4.3 million, up 30 percent in five years, and lawyers have encouraged the notion that the courts can hold anyone, even party bosses, responsible for their actions.

 

Chinese leaders do not discourage such ideas, entirely. They need the law to check corruption and persuade the outside world that China is governed by law, not the whims of party leaders. But they draw the line at any fundamental challenge to their monopoly on power. Judges take orders from party-controlled trial committees. Lawyers operate more autonomously, but often face criminal prosecution if they stir up public disorder or reveal details about legal matters the party deems secret.

 

The struggle of Gao and others like him may well determine whether China's legal system evolves from its subordinate role into something grander, an independent force that can curtail abuses of power at all levels and, ultimately, protect the rights of individuals against the state.

 

"We have all tried to shine sunlight on the abuses in the system," says Li Heping, another Beijing-based lawyer who has accepted political cases. "Gao has his own special style. He is fearless. And he knows the law."

 

Gao can cite chapter and verse of China's legal code, having committed it to memory in intensive self-study. He is an army veteran and a longtime member of the Communist Party.

 

He is also a flagrant dissident. Tall and big-boned, he has the booming voice of a person used to commanding a room. When he holds forth, it is often on the evils of one-party rule. "Barbaric" and "reactionary" are his favorite adjectives for describing party leaders.

 

"Most officials in China are basically Mafia bosses who use extreme barbaric methods to terrorize the people and keep them from using the law to protect their rights," Gao wrote in one essay that circulated widely on the Web this autumn.

 

After an early career with notable courtroom victories, he has more recently plunged into cases that he knows are unwinnable. He has done pro bono work for members of the Falun Gong sect, displaced homeowners, underground Christians, fellow lawyers and democracy activists. When the courts reject his filings, as they often do, he uses the Internet to rally public opinion.

 

Goa comes from a peasant family that lived in a mud-walled home dug out of a hillside in the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi, northwestern China. His father died at the age of 40. For years he climbed into bed at dusk because his family could not afford oil for its lamp, he recalled. Nor could they pay for elementary school for Gao and his six siblings.

 

But he said he listened outside the classroom window. Later, with the help of an uncle, he attended junior high and became adept enough at reading and writing to achieve what was then his dream: to join the People's Liberation Army.

 

Stationed at a base in Kashgar, in Xinjiang, he received a secondary school education and became a party member.

 

But his fate changed even more decisively after he left the service and began working as a food vendor. One day in 1991 he browsed a newspaper used to wrap a bundle of garlic. He spotted an article that mentioned a plan by Deng Xiaoping, then China's paramount leader, to train 150,000 new lawyers and develop the legal system.

 

"Deng said China must be governed by law," Gao said. "I believed him."

 

He scraped together the funds to take a self-study course on the law.

The course mostly required a prodigious memory for titles and clauses, which he had. He passed the tests easily.

 

By the late 1990s, though based in remote Xinjiang, he had developed a winning reputation. He represented the family of a boy who sank into a coma when a doctor mistakenly gave him an intravenous dose of ethanol. He won a $100,000 payout, then a headline-generating sum, in another case involving a boy who lost his hearing in a botched operation.

 

He also won a lawsuit on behalf of a businessman in Xinjiang. The entrepreneur had taken control of a troubled state-owned company, but a district government used force to reclaim it after the businessman turned it into a profit-making entity. China's highest court backed the businessman and Gao.

 

"It felt like a golden age," he said, "when the law seemed to have real power."

 

That optimism did not last long. His victory in the privatization case made him a target of local leaders in Xinjiang, who warned clients and court officials to shun him, he said. He moved to Beijing in 2000 and set up a new practice with half a dozen lawyers. But he said he felt like an outsider in the capital, battling an impenetrable bureaucracy.

 

The Beijing Judicial Bureau, an administrative agency that has supervisory authority over law firms registered in the capital, charged high fees and often interfered in what he considered his private business.

 

One of his first big cases in Beijing involved a client who had his home confiscated for a building project connected with the 2008 Olympics.

Like many residents of inner-city courtyard homes, his client received what he considered paltry compensation to make way for developers. When Gao attempted to file a lawsuit on his client's behalf, he was handed an internal document drafted by the Beijing government that instructed all area courts to reject cases involving such land disputes.

 

"It was a blatantly illegal document. But every court in Beijing blindly obeyed it," he said.

 

Gao is not the first lawyer to test China's commitment to the law. Even in the earliest days of market-oriented economic reforms, when the legal system was still a hollow shell, a few defense lawyers quixotically challenged the ruling party to respect international legal norms. One such advocate is Zhang Sizhi, a dean of defense lawyers who has accepted dozens of long-shot cases he views as advancing the law.

 

Zhang argues that lawyers have prodded the party to develop a more impartial judiciary. But, he says, they must do so with small, carefully calibrated jolts of legal pressure. "The system is improving incrementally," he said. "If you go too far, you will only hurt the chances of legal reform as well as the interests of your client."

 

That view may reflect a consensus among seasoned legal scholars. But Gao is about 35 years younger than Zhang, far less patient and, after his initial burst of idealism, deeply cynical.

 

If Zhang's benchmark for progress is that every criminal suspect has the right to a legal defense, Gao's became the 1989 Administrative Procedure Law, which for the first time gave Chinese citizens the right to sue state agencies. By his reckoning, it remains an empty promise.

 

"The leaders of China see no other purpose for the law but to protect and disguise their own power," Gao said. "As a lawyer, my goal is to turn their charade into a reality."

 

Following his defeat in the Beijing land dispute, he plunged into the biggest land case he could find, a prolonged battle over hundreds of acres of farmland in Guangdong Province seized to construct a university. Legally, he hit another brick wall. But he fired off scores of angry missives about the "brazen murderous schemes" of Guangdong officials. The storm of public anger he helped stir up got his clients more generous compensation.

 

Gao said he was told later that the party secretary of Guangdong, Zhang Dejiang, had labeled him a "mingyun fenzi," a dangerous man on a mission.

 

"He was right," Gao said.

 

Most provocatively, Gao has defended adherents of Falun Gong, which the party outlawed as a major threat to national security in 1999.

 

He has been blocked from filing lawsuits on behalf of Falun Gong members. But in open letters to the leadership, he alleged that the secret police tortured sect members to make them renounce Falun Gong. He described a police-run, extrajudicial "brainwashing base" where he said one client had been starved and then force-fed until he vomited. Another of his Falun Gong clients, he says, was raped in police custody.

 

"These calamitous deeds did not begin with the two of you," he wrote in a letter addressed to President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. "But they have continued under your political watch and it is a crime that you have not stopped them."

 

The subsequent crackdown came first as a courtesy call. Two men wearing suit jackets and ties, having set up an appointment in advance, visited Gao's office. They identified themselves as agents of State Security, the internal secret police, but mostly made small talk until one of them mentioned the open letter Gao had written on Falun Gong.

 

"They suggested that Falun Gong was more of a political issue than a legal issue and maybe it was best left to the politicians," Gao recalled. "They were very polite." When they prepared to leave, however, one of them said, "You must be proud of what you have achieved as a lawyer after your self-study. Certainly you must be worried should something happen to derail that."

 

"Anyone who says he does not consider this kind of pressure is lying,"

Gao said. "But I also felt more than ever that I was putting pressure on this reactionary system. I did not want to give that up."

 

His resistance hardened. The Beijing Judicial Bureau handed him a list of cases and clients that were off limits, including Falun Gong, the Shaanxi oil case and the recent incident of political unrest in Taishi Village, Guangdong. He refused to drop any of them, arguing that the bureau had no legal authority to dictate what cases he accepted or rejected.

 

This fall, he said, security agents followed him constantly. He said his apartment courtyard had become a "plainclothes policeman's club," with up to 20 officers stationed outside.

 

When he received the second order from the Beijing Judiciary Bureau, Gao escaped his police tail and traveled to a location in northern China that he asked to keep secret. He was conducting a new investigation into the torture of Falun Gong adherents. A steady stream of sect members visits him in the ramshackle apartment he is using as a safe house. He tries to meet at least four each day, taking their stories down by longhand.

 

"I'm not sure how much time I have left to conduct my work," Gao said.

"But I will use every minute to expose the barbaric tactics of our leadership."

 

http://uyghurcanadian.org/smf/index.php?topic=530.0

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/12/news/legal.php

 

 

 

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