Interview: Eva Pils (Munich 2019)

IW: Eva, please let me get straight to the point: 1989, 4th June, and the fact that everything was actually different to what people initially thought. Basically, people didn’t really know what happened on 4 June 1989. You said it was a very important experience for you back then?

EP: I was at school in Stuttgart at the time and simply found it interesting, but also shocking when it failed. At the same time, so much was changing here in Germany and Eastern Europe was suddenly opening up. For me, this meant that China was still an open question and that was another reason why I was interested in it and learnt Chinese. And then during my studies, especially the PhD I did in London, I went back to China and studied the law and the concept of individual rights in China.

It was during the PhD, during the NYU-China exchange programme in 2003, that I got my first contact with some of the human rights lawyers through a mentor, Professor Jerome A. Cohen from New York University (NYU). I then decided to write my first article , based in part on interviews, on the human rights lawyers in 2006. That was when I met Mr Gao, Gao Zhisheng (高智, pictured left), perhaps one of the first really important human rights lawyers in China, who has been fighting with incredible courage for the rights of the followers of a spiritual group called Falun Gong (法轮功).

Falun Gong has been severely persecuted in China since 1999 and Falun Gong practitioners who have been arrested have either been put through the criminal process or sent to labour camps and tortured, severely tortured. Mr Gao was actually the first human rights lawyer to bring this problem, this issue to the public.

Let’s go back to 4 June. I think that for many, for the generation that was practically directly involved in 4 June – people like Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), the Nobel Peace Prize laureate – they were actually the generation just before the human rights lawyers. A few years older than these lawyers and that has to do with China’s history. In 1989 there were demands for democracy, for political change, for opening up, and also for human rights. But I don’t think many of the students and the university that was involved, and the workers who were also involved on 4 June, realised what was actually meant by that. China had only just begun to open up again ten years before 4 June, after the Mao era with the Cultural Revolution, in other words after a decade of extreme persecution and oppression and great chaos had ended in China. Under Deng Xiaoping (邓小平), the leader who succeeded Mao Zedong (毛泽东), there was a gradual opening up, but many lawyers have told me that as young people they didn’t really know what was meant by the term ‚law and order‘, by falü (Chinese: 法律). Because the practice of law had been pushed out of society and politics to such an extent under Mao Zedong. There was then practically a revival of the legal system, a re-establishment of the legal system in China. As a result, young, newly trained lawyers gradually understood that it was possible to use the law against the state and against the government in defence of individual rights.

IW: I think individual rights in particular were probably completely alien in this way, weren’t they? For Chinese legal practice and in a one-party state system? How could there be any hope of changing that with such a protest action?

EP: Well, at least there was the constitution. The subsequent constitutions of the People’s Republic of China since 1954 had actually always said something about individual rights, like many constitutions of many authoritarian states, of course. Basically, I think that this was a kind of promise that was then realised by lawyers as soon as there were institutional possibilities, for example to bring a case of land seizure or a wrongful conviction to court to complain about it. This opportunity arose because, as part of China’s opening up, the so-called gaige kaifang (Chinese: 改革开放), reform and opening-up phase, the state, the party, actually wanted to establish a legal system that met the requirements of a modern state. That also made it possible for citizens to insist on the legality of the state’s actions.

IW: In other words, it was already possible to sue for individual rights before 1989?

EP: Okay, that was, so to speak, the promise of the constitution and perhaps also of this entire legal reform that was started to be implemented in the 1980s. For example, it was only in 1989 that the creation of administrative court proceedings made it possible to take the state directly, the government, to court in certain contexts. In other words, this was the first institutionalised way of doing so. So that was something that was still quite alien at the time of 4 June. There were and still are huge restrictions, very huge restrictions on legal defence, on individual legal defence.

For example, according to the prevailing opinion in China, it is not possible to bring the constitutional guarantee of an individual right directly to court. You have to rely on simple laws. It is therefore not possible, at least not effectively, to really insist with any prospect of success that the constitutionally protected freedom of expression is actually implemented in the legal system. But the fact that the constitution guaranteed these individual rights and the fact that Deng Xiaoping and the party leadership of the time invoked the idea of legality, of the rule of law, in order to create new foundations for the legitimacy of the party state after the Mao era, which had failed to a certain extent, was important. And after 4 June 1989 – political scientist Andrew J. Nathan from Columbia University has described this as one of the paradoxical consequences of 4 June – it became all the more important for the Chinese government to say and promise to the outside world that it wanted the rule of law. That they also wanted an improvement in the human rights situation. This means that while it was still completely clear in the Mao era that human rights and individual rights were part of the bourgeois revisionist world view and were therefore completely rejected, it was practically from the early 1990s, after 4 June 1989, that the government suddenly began to talk about its progress in the realisation of human rights.

IW: China then published a white paper.

EP: Exactly.

IW: The White Paper „Human Rights“.

EP: 1991, yes.

IW : But it was also widely criticised, and justifiably so.

EP: Absolutely.

IW : So how can you actually categorise it? Is it progress or is it a step backwards? This relativistic view of history and human rights, which actually corresponds to tradition?

EP: Well, I think it was certainly seen by many at the time as a small step forward. The fact that human rights were officially recognised meant that people could talk about human rights. That you could do human rights courses at universities. And these were the courses that these young people, the 15 to 18-year-olds who were streaming out of secondary school into universities and starting to study law, were given. They became the generation of human rights lawyers. From the 1990s until the middle of the last decade, until 2004/05 I think, there was a phase of acceptance of the idea of constitutional jurisprudence, of individual rights defence, of civil society, of legal clinics . A concept of a practice adopted from the Anglo-American world. And a fairly open-minded, albeit still repressed, group of academic lawyers who are really throwing themselves into this task of conveying the idea of the rule of law to a young generation.

IW: So there was a discourse on human rights within China?

EP: Exactly, and paradoxically this was made possible by the absolute disaster and massacre of 4 June 1989.

IW: Yes, and at the same time many people, minorities were persecuted, you mentioned Mr Gao’s enemies and the group he represents, which is still being persecuted.

EP: Absolutely. There is oppression and persecution in some ways during this pre-4 June reform era, maybe even more so after 4 June. There is also exploitation. Which means that many different human rights are affected and violated, and systematically violated, if you go through the catalogue of human rights. Of course, we can’t do that completely, but I think that perhaps the most obvious thing is that there is no freedom of expression, that there is no real freedom of science. That as far as these intellectual freedoms exist, as far as they can be realised, that actually only happens because individual people enforce them.

We were left with the paradoxical consequences of 4 June. The idea, I think, for Deng Xiaoping and the party leadership at the time was that they now had an additional reason, after this catastrophe of 4 June, which had also led to strong, harsh criticism and certain sanctions from Western countries, to clearly and publicly emphasise recognition of the value of the rule of law and human rights. And that led to this white paper in 1991, which I think inspired the university teachers, the academics, as well as all these budding lawyers and solicitors. I think many judges, many civil servants in the party-state were also really infected by this idea. For a certain time, many organisations, governments and academics in liberal countries believed that China’s gradual opening up would also lead to a gradual strengthening of the rule of law. And that the human rights movements, including the lawyers‘ movement together with parts of civil society, could possibly contribute to a gradual reform, a gradual opening and possibly a gradual transformation into a more liberal and democratic society.

IW: Now you have always spoken in the past.

EP: Yes, exactly, I was speaking in the past because, from my point of view, there were many reasons for scepticism. Even when I first started working with human rights lawyers. That was still a time, around 2005/06/07, when the mainstream opinion, the main opinion really was that…

IW: …sorry, when was the Olympics, 2008, right?

EP: …2008, that was still the time when everyone actually thought: Sure, China is opening up. It’s all going really well. The story has ended. A world story has ended. Everything is turning towards liberal democracy. So China will also turn to liberal democracy and we’re all going along with it somehow, we’re supporting China. We support the government, we support Chinese civil society and academics through our foundations and our human rights dialogues and our rule of law dialogues and all sorts of other efforts and experiments. And gradually that will definitely work.

EP: The attitude of facilitating gradual change has also meant that people like Mr Gao – whose story I started to tell – were almost seen as a bit disruptive in a way because he was so „impatient“. Internally, in the internal civil society discussion in China, he was seen as quite a „radical“ lawyer because he pushed forward and insisted that even a group like the Falun Gong practitioners were entitled to human rights protection right now, at this moment. And the fact that Gao Zisheng, after trying in vain for a few years to defend the rights of these people in court, for example the right not to be tortured, or at least the right not to be convicted on the basis of torture, i.e. statements made under torture, through torture…

IW: …were extorted.

EP: …were extorted. He should not be convicted on the basis of statements made under torture. For several years, he tried to stand up for the rights of Falun Gong practitioners in court and also to point out the torture, in the hope that the court would take this into account in some way when making its decision. However, since it was not possible to achieve success – these were highly political court cases – he decided to stand up for the rights of Falun Gong practitioners in a different way. Together with an assistant, he went on a kind of tour where he practically interviewed individual clients and acquaintances of these clients, individual Falun Gong practitioners, and recorded what they had to say about their experiences of torture. This was transcribed or reworked into a text, and he posted this text on the Internet as an open letter to the party state leadership.

This put him completely in the firing line of the state. But interestingly, he also attracted a great deal of criticism from his fellow lawyers and the wider civil society, including the sections that are also committed to human rights and the rule of law. Simply because many felt that this was going too far, too fast, too radical and too provocative towards the party-state. In other words, from his point of view, they stabbed him in the back and then said, for example: „If you carry on like this, you’ll provoke the party-state so much that there might be another 4th of June.“ It was simply irresponsible to do it like this now.

Gao Zisheng, Mr Gao and his friends and colleagues naturally saw things very differently. They literally saw directly in conversation with their clients that they needed help, legal defence. They saw it as their duty to insist on their clients‘ rights. Mr Gao paid an insanely high price for this. He started, I think it was 2004, with the open letters. He wrote three in total, which he posted online. As soon as he started, it was of course clear that he would be placed under heavy surveillance. Then came the house arrests, informal ones, without any legal basis. I met him once in 2006, when it was already the case that he practically couldn’t leave the house without being shadowed by the police. Which meant that if you met up with him, the police would be somewhere nearby. That was my first experience back then, and it was repeated many times.

In 2007, he was abducted for the first time by the security forces of the party-state and tortured very severely. When he came out of this phase, he wrote a report in which he mentioned, among other things, that his torturers told him at the time: „You complained about the torture of your Falun Gong practitioner clients. We have now worked out a programme, a torture programme that is exactly the same.“ This included electric shocks to the genitals, cigarette butts, smoking cigarettes in his eyes so that he was temporarily unable to see. Severe, terrible, unbearable physical torture and a great deal of psychological torture. Threats that not only affected him, but also his family, his two children. During these years, his family, his wife, his daughter in particular, and to a lesser extent his then still very young son, came under pressure and were persecuted. His daughter, for example, was always taken to and from school by the police. She reported what her teachers were told, who then told the class that her father was a traitor. That she was practically stigmatised. It was sometimes so bad that the police or state security agents not only set up shop outside the front door, but actually moved into the flat. This led to a terrible psychological terror and to Mr Gao’s wife and two children leaving China in 2009 at great risk and without permission, i.e. „illegally“ in this sense. They now live in the USA.

The last time I saw Gao Zisheng himself was in 2010. He has actually been under various forms of control over the last few years, i.e. since these open letters.

IW : Can you get in touch with him?

EP: I haven’t been in contact with him for a few years. I’ve had a bit of contact from time to time via social media, but I’ve mainly tried to keep in touch with the lawyers who have been friends with him the most, the longest, and to use them to understand how Mr Gao is doing. It is simply not clear whether it is good for him to maintain this kind of contact. One of his friends, Li Heping (李和平, pictured left), has – just like the other colleagues and friends – also been very heavily persecuted over the last few years, and I had the impression that this was partly related to his attempts to maintain contact with Mr Gao, to visit Mr Gao in his home village, where he is detained most of the time. In other words, it was problematic. I am certainly not the most important person for Mr Gao. The most important people are his comrades-in-arms, his colleagues, his close friends, all of whom, unfortunately, are now being followed quite closely.

EP: To come back to this reform issue, this promise of the rule of law. I think that was a very attractive rhetoric that a lot of extremely well-meaning NGOs and individuals, including governments, bought into very strongly. Perhaps with good reason. I also think that a lot of people who, as we would say in Chinese, tizhinei (体制内), i.e. who worked within the system, who were inside it – as party-state officials or as loyal, relatively strongly co-opted lawyers and so on – had every confidence that China would gradually transform itself into a better constitutional state. That the institutions would improve, that the courts would become more independent and also more professional. That more lawyers would be trained. That the opening up of the media, the opening up of society, the creation of so many new large and small NGOs would contribute to China actually gradually moving closer to the global constitutional model . In other words, it would become a constitutional state that could perhaps also become more politically pluralistic at some point and possibly democratise at some point.

And I think that the fact that this was such a strong hope had extremely complicated consequences for the small group of human rights defenders. On the one hand, they were protagonists of this movement of China’s gradual transformation, but on the other hand, they were always a bit suspicious when they, like Mr Gao, stepped forward and brought abuses out of the shadows of party-state persecution and censorship and into the public eye. It is probably fair to say that from 2003/04 until the beginning of Xi Jinping’s (习近平) reign, the opening up of society was achieved in many respects. Because, for example, apart from the institutional reforms and the strengthening of the human rights and human rights lawyers‘ movement, the communication structures have also changed. And because in many respects there were new opportunities to bring political and legal demands for opening up, change and better human rights protection into Chinese society. And of course also to a kind of global, transnational civil society. The human rights lawyers were part of this movement. The more successful they became, the more they were persecuted.

IW: How did you find them? Under the circumstances, it’s not that easy to make contact. What kind of people got involved and said: „I’ll get involved now“?

EP: Yes, that’s also very interesting. My first personal contact was made through Jerry Cohen, who I already mentioned. A mentor, one of my mentors in the USA, who had been involved with Chinese law since the 1960s. Initially from Hong Kong, of course you couldn’t get in at all until the early 1970s, and he has a huge circle of acquaintances. Part of this circle of acquaintances included a few human rights defenders. He took me to many meetings. Especially in 2003, 2004 when I was in China, and in 2004 in New York, which gave me the opportunity to make my first contacts. With people who were incredibly curious, wanted to learn, wanted to know what it was like in Germany and actually opened up to me straight away. They also opened up to many other people, as far as academic colleagues or civil society people wanted to engage with him, without reservations. Including Mr Gao, whom I was only able to see a few times, of course, because he was already so insanely persecuted when I started working on these issues. But also including the people around Mr Gao Zisheng. I only continued to work with them after he disappeared. He was also sent to prison at times, convicted under criminal law and was simply gone most of the time.

EP: I then met with slightly younger colleagues, with friends. With very interesting young academics who managed in 2003 – this was perhaps another important point in the human rights movement in China – to criticise a State Council regulation so effectively by appealing to the party state, to criticise it as unconstitutional, that the State Council withdrew it. Perhaps I should briefly recount this. That was the case of Sun Zhigang. A migrant worker who, like many, many others, was arrested by the police for not bringing the right papers. He was a Chinese citizen, but a migrant labourer in the southern city of Guangzhou (广州, Canton). Sun Zhigang (孙志刚) was arrested by the police. He resisted, perhaps already a sign of a growing awareness of individual rights, saying that it was wrong: „You can’t do this to me! You can’t just lock me up!“ As far as we know, he was beaten to death on the first night after his arrest. And the fact of this violent death in a form of administrative detention, administrative detention based on this State Council decree that I have just mentioned, gave some young, reform-minded academics, academic lawyers, the opportunity to criticise this State Council decree in an appeal to the party leadership, party-state leadership, and to demand that it be withdrawn because it violated the right, the individual right of personal freedom, freedom of movement and integrity of the person. That was in 2003, just before Mr Gao started to take action. And Teng Biao (滕彪, pictured left), Xu Zhiyong (许志永) and Yu Jiang (俞江), the three academics, were successful with this appeal. This turned them into academic stars overnight, so to speak, and because the media in China was already a little more open in 2003, they actually received some kind of media attention. And who then started to work on human rights issues, like Gao Zisheng’s group. I approached them too, it wasn’t difficult at all. At the time, they were still academics who simply worked at universities in Beijing. I started having conversations with them and my own academic work developed in such a way that these conversations simply became more structured and then turned into interviews, which I then used in my essays and so on.

IW: What do you mean by academics in this case? You were law students, weren’t you?

EP: They had just finished their doctoral studies and were then employed at various universities. I should probably mention Dr Teng Biao and Dr Xu Zhiyong in particular, who both continued after this initial success with human rights, continuing to work on human rights issues at two different universities in Beijing.

IW: And how do you think they came up with this idea?

EP : I think they got into it because they had both written their doctoral theses at Peking University, at the Faculty of Law. Because it was such an open, interesting and essentially liberal-minded academic community in the early 2000s.

IW: So they didn’t come up with it because they themselves felt threatened or persecuted in any way? Rather, they saw the situation and…

EP: …I think so. But we’re talking about a generation that was around fifteen when 4 June happened. In various one-to-one conversations, I’ve heard again and again: „Yes, yes, we were already aware of that back then. I was at secondary school and then suddenly there were these wall newspapers. Suddenly there were reports about demands for democracy and human rights. Of course, I didn’t really realise what that meant. And then our teacher, one of our teachers, disappeared. He was suddenly no longer there. That really shocked me.“ I have heard stories like this time and time again. But in fact, people like Teng Biao and Xu Zhiyong, and Li Heping, Jiang Tianyong (江天勇, pictured left) and Li Fangping (李方平, pictured right) – there are so many! – did not turn to these human rights issues because of a particularly strong, harrowing experience of injustice on their own bodies, but more because they were simply young, sensitive, open-minded, inquisitive people who wanted to learn more.

realised that some things were not right, that there was oppression and that people could be disappeared. And that something had somehow gone wrong in the wake of 4 June. But basically they came to university in the early 90s, when the repression was relatively strong. In other words, the state’s efforts to keep everything under control because of 4 June had been intensified. I think that despite these efforts, this generation – supported by university teachers who were still quite liberal – simply did not allow themselves to be stopped in their push for liberal ideas, for human rights ideas and a legally political opening.

IW: Do they have platforms?

EP: Yes, increasingly so. For example, the case of the migrant labourer Sun Zhigang. He was able to achieve success because at that time, in 2003, there were already beginning to be relatively independent media companies, newspapers or networks of different newspapers, magazines and so on, like the Southern Weekend . A newspaper that was published in Guangzhou and that dared to report on this case. And it did so with really well-written reports, with pictures, with interviews, with all the tools of investigative journalism. This gave the human rights movement a platform and it also gradually gave civil society, in a broader sense, a platform, which in many small groups began to deal with things like the plight of workers or environmental problems, discrimination against women, discrimination against carriers of certain pathogens such as hepatitis B or AIDS, and so on. The human rights lawyers have begun to build up a profile and develop a certain political effectiveness through this media platform. And then, over the last ten or twenty years, they have also been able to benefit more and more from social media. First from the internet, then from social media, which then made it even easier for them to produce and disseminate their messages, their own statements. I think that this gradually made it possible for these lawyers to communicate directly with a fairly broad, growing Chinese public about cases of legal abuse. As soon as they did that, censorship always followed. Social media in China has always been heavily censored. That was always an issue, but it then became a cat-and-mouse game. Around 2010, you got the impression that these human rights lawyers, who worked together with other civil society groups, were actually becoming more and more effective. Suddenly it was no longer just a handful, as in Beijing, but 100, 200, 300, 500, someone told me around 2010. It was then pointed out, for example, when a certain lawyer was taken into custody, disappeared, which always entailed a great risk of torture. Around 2010, it suddenly became possible to communicate this in real time , almost simultaneously. Within a few hours, open letters were written and distributed via social media. And some of them received up to 500 signatures from other lawyers, which was pretty impressive.

IW: That’s quite a movement.

EP: Exactly, it was a movement. Also because you could assume that for every lawyer who dared to sign something like that, there were maybe another ten or a hundred who at least noticed it. And who then perhaps took their colleague aside at some point and said: „I really admire that! Good luck.“ So there was a movement, I think, and it was strengthened by the fact that there were people who somehow benefited from the help of the human rights lawyers, i.e. the clients, the many people who tried on their own initiative to somehow ask the party-state for help in their own cases as petitioners (shangfangzhe 上访者) . These groups, which were much larger than the few hundred human rights lawyers, also joined forces with the lawyers and to a certain extent supported the lawyers, just as they themselves received support from the lawyers when they were imprisoned or otherwise persecuted.

In this respect, I think that from the perspective of the party-state around 2010, shortly before Xi Jinping came to power, this was probably quite disruptive. It was also the case that the suppression continued to increase. In 2011, while Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) was still in power, there was a wave of persecution in which, for example, Dr Teng Biao, whom I just mentioned as one of the three young academics who had campaigned for the abolition of a State Council regulation after the Sun Zhigang incident, was disappeared. As well as some lawyers who had originally rallied around Gao Zisheng, for example Jiang Tianyong for several weeks, if I remember correctly about two months, in a detention centre that was not recognised by the state. In other words, he really had simply disappeared for his family. And unfortunately they were all tortured and forced to sign all kinds of confessions and promises before they were released from this informal, illegal detention.

IW: Did they try to turn them over?

EP: I had some good discussions with dissidents, lawyers and human rights defenders about this question of why lawyers, human rights defenders and dissidents are not typically killed in China. I think one of the reasons is that China, the party-state leadership, doesn’t need that. The society is well controlled. All that seemed necessary at the time was to get these promises, a torture programme, which is always very structured. So it’s quite clear that there are certain programme points when someone disappears and is tortured. After two weeks or so of relatively intensive torture and intensive interrogations, there was a period of several weeks in which these confessions were written, and then they were released again. But in 2011, they came back from prison and got back together within a few weeks and simply carried on.

IW: You ask yourself, what is the point of these „confessions“? So does anyone believe them?

EP: I think not. The point of these confessions is, from the perspective of the people who are directly responsible as officials or employees of the party-state for producing these confessions and promises and so on, it’s just a bureaucratic process.

IW: If I may interrupt briefly, we’ve already talked about the fact that in the Third Reich, people were forced to sign „confessions“. They then said afterwards that he had been released because of this „confession“. The impression was created that he might have been turned over and betrayed his own people. That you can be labelled a traitor, so to speak.

EP: Yes, and even that was actually, interestingly enough, less effective in China. If that was the aim of the authorities, I don’t think they managed to do that because these people more or less started talking again within a day to a few weeks of getting out of detention and saying, „Of course I made this confession under duress, I made these promises under duress, that doesn’t mean anything. And I’m moving on now.“ There was certainly some criticism, especially among the more traditionally-minded fellow campaigners, of the „cowardice“ or „moral failure“ of people who allowed themselves to be put under pressure through torture and were persuaded to make this confession and so on. Of course, there were always internal tensions and criticism. You can imagine that in a group that is under so much pressure.

IW: Of course, that can also have a divisive effect.

EP: It can have a divisive effect, and has had a divisive effect to some extent. But I would say that essentially, at least around that time, most people actually understood how it worked. That these lawyers, who of course typically had a lot of experience with torturing other people, also understood that people make statements under torture. That you can use torture to get almost anyone to do almost anything. And they were actually relatively quick to simply suppress or reject this.

IW: That’s courageous, incredibly courageous.

EP: Very brave, yes. Very, very impressive, because they practically came back from arrest and most of the lawyers just carried on.

And then came Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping became Party General Secretary at the end of 2012 and President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013. Even before he took office, I had conversations with one or two victims of the 2011 wave of persecution in particular, who told me at the time that it was already clear that Xi Jinping was the designated successor: „This looks bad. It will somehow pick up and become more difficult under Xi Jinping.“ And that’s exactly what happened. Today, in 2019, I think it’s quite clear that China is one of the states that is contributing to the diagnosis that there is a kind of global resurgence of authoritarianism, neo-totalitarianism. Xi Jinping announced in 2013, or the party under Xi Jinping announced as early as 2013, that the concept of civil society and the so-called, and I quote , universal values such as human rights and other basic liberal constitutional concepts had to be pushed out of the discussion in universities. That they were suddenly no longer legitimate terms, and it then became clear very quickly, between 2013 and now, that all parts of civil society, especially those that were somehow committed to change and the defence of individual rights, had to be brought under control. And that also affected the human rights lawyers. The worst wave of persecution against human rights lawyers to date began in July 2015. I can still remember it well, I was still in Beijing in June 2015 and had had various discussions with human rights lawyers…

IW: …You never got into trouble, did you?

EP: Not in the sense that I was no longer able to enter the country or that I had any significant complications with encounters with the police. There was the occasional encounter, but nothing really bad. The bad things only ever happened to the people I spoke to, and that was terrible. Yes, so in June 2015 I was still in Beijing and had conversations with people like Wang Yu (王宇), Zhou Shifeng (周世锋), Li Heping, various lawyers who were affected by the 2015 wave of persecution a few weeks later.

EP: I particularly remember my conversation with Ms Wang Yu [in June 2015]. She was wrongly convicted of criminal offences [in 2010], she had worked as a lawyer in the commercial field, so commercial law, civil law – she was wrongly convicted of criminal offences as a result of a minor conflict with the railway police. After returning from her own imprisonment, she became a human rights lawyer and continued to work on various cases, including the criminal cases of Falun Gong practitioners, together with her husband, who also took up the legal profession. As a result, she came under pressure and as a result of the pressure she and her husband came under, her then 16-year-old son, I believe, was also put under pressure.

For him, this meant that, although he had actually secured a place at a secondary school in Australia… So you can imagine that Mrs Wang Yu and her husband Bao Longjun (包龙军, pictured left) naturally wanted to avoid the fate of the other children, such as Gao Zisheng’s daughter, for their son and therefore wanted to get him out. Yes, and when I met with Wang Yu in June, she told me: „I’m so happy. After many, many failed attempts, we have finally managed to get a visa and an exit permit for my son. And the difficult part, of course, was getting the exit permit from the Chinese police. And he now has this place at a school in Australia. And he can now travel. And he will be leaving in the next week or two. And I’m so happy about that. Of course, the worst thing was the idea that my own work, my commitment to human rights, could ruin my son, my son’s life.“ On 9 July, the night of 9 July 2015, her husband Bao Longjun drove to Beijing airport with their son Mengmeng (蒙蒙). And then suddenly we, who were of course connected to her and her husband via social media, suddenly got these messages saying: „I’ve lost contact with my husband and my son. This looks kind of bad. I’m worried.“ And then there was another message saying that the police were at the door. And then all three of them disappeared. After a few days, the son came back from prison. The son was sixteen, a minor who had done nothing at all, but was placed under very heavy surveillance by the authorities. So it was practically impossible to really make contact with him. They also had to delete all his social media contacts at the behest of the police. Yes, and his parents, Wang Yu and Bao Longjun, then disappeared for over a year. Except for one sign of life from the two of them. But that was an emotionally very difficult sign of life.

What happened was that Mengmeng, the son, after realising that the situation in China was absolutely hopeless for him, tried to leave China illegally with the help of family friends. These friends took him to Myanmar, where he was picked up by the local police and brought back to China on the instructions of the Chinese government. The friends, who were practically escape helpers, were convicted of criminal offences and Mengmeng was taken to his family and controlled so tightly that it was impossible for him to try to escape again. After that happened, Wang Yu and Bao Longjun were shown on television, on Chinese national television, completely shocked, desperate. I think he was in tears. And unsurprisingly, of course, they said: „That’s terrible. And of course we would never have wanted that for our son. And that’s terrible. How could he? How could those escape helpers do that? We completely reject that.“ A few months later, I think it was around August 2016, about a year after the arrest, Mrs Wang Yu made another television appearance. Shortly after she was officially released from pre-trial detention, she was shown having a nice chat with journalists. In front of the camera, in a very friendly environment – it looked like a café in the countryside – she talked about how well she had fared during her year in pre-trial detention. How well the authorities of the party-state had looked after her. How grateful she was to the state and the party that she had been brought to her senses. That she had been seduced by hostile foreign forces into working on these so-called human rights. She had now realised how wrong it all was and would of course not continue to work on these issues under any circumstances. Of course, she also firmly rejects the human rights prizes that she has since been awarded by various organisations abroad because they were hostile foreign organisations.

Unsurprisingly, it was then completely impossible to make contact with Wang Yu for many months. She was reunited with her husband and they were both able to see their son. But they were kept under strict house arrest in a relatively small town in Inner Mongolia. The son was allowed to go to school, but not much else was possible. If the whole thing…, I should say that this little individual story I’ve just told about this last wave of persecution, which began in 2015, is just a small individual story. At the time, around 200 or 300 people were arrested and interrogated at short notice and persuaded to make confessions and promises. A smaller number of people, like Wang Yu, were detained for much longer.

EP: I’ve spoken to many of these people in the meantime and can’t say much about the details, because it’s all still explosive at the moment. But I have heard a lot now, including about the individual fates, and one thing that deserves special mention is that in this last wave of persecution, the victims were not only physically tortured. That was continued. Although perhaps the physical torture was not quite as dramatic as that of Gao Zisheng, for example. But of course it’s always difficult to judge, because sometimes you don’t know exactly what the person you’re talking to is able to tell you. But in addition to these well-known methods of torture, forced drugging was clearly used systematically in the last wave of persecution. And I think that many of the televised confessions and televised court hearings that have become a feature of this latest wave of persecution under Xi Jinping have been produced under the influence of forced drugging. In one of the conversations I had about a court hearing, it turned out that the victim was tortured and forcibly drugged, and that at the end of this programme they negotiated with the victim, a human rights lawyer, what would happen in the court hearing. The court hearing was meticulously rehearsed – and this also reminds us of German history – in other words, it really was rehearsed meticulously like a theatre rehearsal . In this case, the trial was not shown on television because the victim still, despite everything, successfully refused to make a complete confession of guilt. Others have not managed to do so. Others were unable to do so. Thanks to this fact, we can now see some, a few of these human rights lawyers, virtually in their own criminal trials, via YouTube and other channels, making full confessions, testifying to full remorse, and of course promising that they would now return to the straight and narrow, so to speak, and drop the human rights defence. Nevertheless, the fact is that I have still been able to meet these individual victims, as of course have others, especially media people who work in the media. To get these descriptions from them. And that even in 2018, even now, I can still observe – that we can observe – how these victims, after everything they have been through, are still coming together, still signing appeals and putting them online, putting them in social media groups for others, still campaigning for human rights in China.

IW: Where are they now? Where can you meet them? Well, I mean, you couldn’t have visited them in prison.

EP: No, unfortunately I can’t visit anyone in prison. I always have to wait until they come out again. Even then it’s not necessarily possible, sometimes only after a delay, to meet with someone. Unfortunately, I can’t mention these individual names now. For most of them, the situation is that after their period of detention, whether it was pre-trial detention or completely informal or so-called house arrest in a place determined by the authorities – so not really house arrest, but not really pre-trial detention either – people are practically released after their period of detention, but are still very much under control. After a few weeks or months, however, this loosens up a little and it is then possible for a particular family or a particular lawyer, for example, to return to their place of work. This is very often the case for human rights lawyers in Beijing, but there are also a few other cities in China. Typically, when they have returned to this community of other lawyers and human rights defenders, it is more possible for me to meet with them.

IW: And of this big wave of arrests, so there were several hundred…

EP: …originally, most of these hundreds were only detained for a short time.

IW : We probably don’t know exactly, but how many are still „disappeared“ today?

EP : Yes, so I think the most difficult case was actually that of Wang Quanzhang (王全璋) , who disappeared for three years, practically from the summer of 2015 to the summer of 2018, i.e. until after the summer of 2018, without any sign of life. At one point there was a rumour that a lawyer had seen him. But we didn’t know whether we could really trust him. And that was particularly bad. Wang Quanzhang was also an old acquaintance who I had seen relatively shortly before his arrest. And of course he also had many friends, parents, a wife and a small child, a small son, who must have been terribly worried. That was perhaps the worst case in terms of the individual fates of this 2014, in Chinese, in English-speaking countries, they say 7-0-9 persecution wave. It began on 9 July, 7-0-9, and Wang Quanzhang’s fate was the worst. At the beginning of 2019, it was reported that his trial was now imminent, and he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in a secret, non-public trial. It was clear that the fact of his public indictment and imminent criminal trial was a relief for his wife. For everyone who was worried about him. That included me. Because at least that was a sign of life. After three years, people were naturally worried that he could have been murdered „accidentally“ under torture, for example. Because there are „mishaps“, so to speak, even with torture.

Unfortunately, it is still the case that none of his family, friends or colleagues close to him have seen him. So we still have to worry because we don’t know how he is really doing, even from the forced medication. But there are increasingly a few reports from lawyers who say: „Okay, he’s been forcibly medicated…“

For example, at the trial, one of the lawyers appointed by him or accepted by the government saw him briefly, but was then immediately dismissed, and it was not at all clear why. It was clear that, as a result, this lawyer was only able to get a very brief impression of how Wang Quanzhang was actually doing. This is quite serious and of course still a cause for great concern. (Left: Lawyer Yu Wensheng (余文生) demonstrating for the release of lawyer Wang Quanzhang (王全璋), who was recently subjected to a secret trial – ed.)

It should also be said that, unfortunately, there are many people in China who are not well known, defenders of individual rights, human rights defenders, dissidents, civil society activists, who simply haven’t attracted that much attention. They disappear or semi-disappear somewhere in this system and then after long periods of imprisonment, after episodes of torture and so on, they eventually emerge from the belly of the police state. And somehow, typically, carry on. It’s difficult to say exactly how many are still affected at the moment. Because it’s also difficult to narrow down who is actually part of this wave of persecution or affected by other waves of persecution. But there are still some people who are serving prison sentences. And then there are people like Wang Yu and her husband, for example, who are somehow trying to continue working under very strong control.

IW: Yes, that would have been my point, you say they continue to work. In other words, despite these extremely difficult conditions and despite their own history of injuries. They carry on!

EP: Yes, I think that a very strong sense of obligation has probably developed for these people who have spent so long, several years in this movement, who are typically also very aware that only solidarity can protect this small community. And who already have a very strong sense of injustice.

IW: You sent me the text, your contribution, which is about the right to resistance. I was very moved by that and it was also something that Fritz Bauer was very moved by, that there is not only a right but also a duty to resist. You also spoke about this sense of duty. Especially under these circumstances, I think it sounds incredibly optimistic to say that there is an awareness of solidarity and of this right to resistance.

EP: Yes, of course. Although this is of course the subject of heated debate, even within this community. So I do believe that there is a very strong sense of duty. Interestingly, this is not something that is completely part of modernity or liberal ideas, but something that also has a very strong tradition in China. The idea that you have to protest against injustice and fight for justice is also deeply rooted in Chinese tradition. It is an obligation to society and to the law. I think that is important for some of the protagonists of this human rights and human rights advocacy movement, absolutely. As far as resistance and the right to resist is concerned, there is a debate about how far this right goes and which methods are legal.

IW: I mean, on the one hand, the concept of civil courage, of civil society, is banned from universities and areas of society, and on the other hand, we talk about resistance.

EP: …exactly. But we are not only talking about resistance in China, we are now talking more about resistance globally because there is a feeling that liberal democracies are collapsing and this resurgence of authoritarianism and…

IW : …attack on the rule of law.

EP : Exactly, an attack on the rule of law, an attack on human rights too, and on this multilateralism. This idea of the UN, the United Nations, the institutionalisation of human rights, which should also have a strong overarching effect. All of this is now being attacked somehow. And I think that because it is under attack, there is also a strong feeling that liberalism has been pushed back into a position of resistance. In other words, it has been pushed back into a corner from which it must oppose and resist. For the Chinese human rights defenders, it was practically the case from the very beginning that they saw themselves as being in resistance because the state regarded them as subversive. Because the state saw them as enemies of the state. And under Xi Jinping in particular, this aspect has been increasingly emphasised. And of course, this means that these lawyers work with the idea that no improvement is possible without political change. And that the rule of law – and this is of course now a sharp, to a certain extent a departure from this slow transformation idea that was so popular under Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao – that without real, radical political change, it will simply not be possible to achieve an acceptable level of rule of law and human rights protection in China. And that means that rights defence is also civil and liberal resistance.

One of the really interesting discussions is about how far the right to resist goes and what forms of resistance are lawful. This is, of course, a discussion that is not unique to China. In particular, because the party-state in China is so brutal, so violent towards dissidents and human rights defenders and petitioners and so on, with all marginalised and persecuted groups, there are also discussions about the extent to which it is possible to achieve transformation through non-violent, peaceful resistance. At the moment, my impression is that at least the human rights lawyers are not particularly interested in violent resistance. But there is, of course, a concern that because of this increased repression and persecution in China, because of the social tensions, economic tensions and so on, which are intensifying in some respects, that at some point the situation could, so to speak, harden further and worsen because of all these factors. And that there could be more unrest than there already is. This is certainly another important and difficult aspect of developments in China.

IW: Eva, thank you for the interview…

EP: …thank you.

IW: …and I’d like to ask when you’ll be travelling to China again?

EP: Well, I don’t have any specific plans at the moment, but I do try to visit China at least once or twice a year. And to meet up with my old friends and acquaintances and dialogue partners as much as possible. And I’m sure I’ll try to do that again in the course of 2019. It always gets a bit exciting at the border. I think it’s becoming increasingly so for many academics, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Without a doubt, my biggest concern is for the human rights defenders and the many, many victims in China. And I don’t think you should have a conversation about human rights in China in 2019 that doesn’t at least mention what’s happening in Xinjiang, in the far west of China. Where there is a wave of persecution on a completely different scale to what we have just discussed. It is assumed that at least hundreds, hundreds of thousands of people from the Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz minorities, who are also religious and Muslim minorities, have been interned at the moment. And the whole thing serves the purpose of a kind of re-education, and this radicalisation is extremely, extremely worrying.

IW: I’ve just read today that the borders have been closed, haven’t they?

EP: Well, many, many people have simply had their passports taken away. And there is so much digitalised, electronic control, with facial recognition and whatnot, that it is completely impossible for many people to travel. So not only to leave the country, but also to leave Xinjiang. And that is certainly the most serious thing at the moment, the most serious systematic human rights violation taking place in China. And if you think about how the people and the victims of this wave of persecution and of the many other waves of persecution are faring, then this is of course so much more serious than what can happen to these observers who, like me, come from outside, as well as the journalists who work on these issues and so on.

IW: Yes, I hope you can continue to tell us about it and we will certainly publish it again. Thank you!

EP: Thank you.

The interview took place in Munich in February 2019.

Eva Pils is Professor of Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London, where she teaches human rights, public law and law and society in China. She studied law, philosophy and sinology in Heidelberg, London and Beijing and holds a PhD from University College London. Her research focusses on human rights, authoritarianism and law in China. She has written on these topics both in academic publications and in the popular press. She is the author of China’s human rights lawyers: Advocacy and Was bedeutet das?Resistance (Routledge, 2014) and Human Rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism (Polity, 2018).

Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva Pils was an Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She is an associate scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School, an external member of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Centre for Social Innovation Studies, an external fellow of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law and a member of the Legal Action Committee of the Global Legal Action Network.