ALN has released a statement protesting the continued disappearance and presumed arbitrary detention of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who will turn 61 this month after almost 20 years of continued arbitrary detention for his human rights work and advocacy.
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Human Rights Lawyer Gao Zhisheng
Disappeared Chinese Human Rights Lawyer Gao Zhisheng Turns 61
Is there any chance that he could still reunite with his family in the US or even reappear?
By Patrick Poon
I first heard of Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng in 2004 when he was representing a group of rural migrant workers in Dongguan, Guangdong province, in southern China, in their lawsuit against a Taiwanese-run shoe supplier. His spirited defense of the workers in a speech, explaining why they applied extreme measures to fight for their rights, attracted wide attention. He was then one of the best known and highly respected lawyers in China.
However, soon later, his legal practice was revoked and he was accused of “inciting subversion of state power” after he started a hunger-strike campaign to draw attention to the persecution of human rights activists in China. He was sentenced to three years, which was suspended for five years, in December 2006. In 2008, he was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet, he actually never regained his freedom. He and his family were placed under tight surveillance; their bank accounts were frozen; and his children were prevented from attending school. His wife and two children were lucky enough to have fled to the US after enduring a very dangerous journey in March 2009. Gao Zhisheng himself stayed in China, and he has been subjected to endless surveillance and harassment ever since.
Over 20 years have passed. He is still being detained, and he’s turning 61 on 20 April 2025. His case is among the most horrific examples of human rights violations in China. Other critics on China and journalists would always ask: “Why would the Chinese authorities hate Gao Zhisheng so much? Why would they need to apply such extreme measures to silence a human rights lawyer?” Even the most experienced China critics couldn’t understand why. We felt so helpless and frustrated that we could only try our best to write joint statements, commentaries and advocacy documents to highlight his case in whatever possible international advocacy efforts.
In April 2010, after he told the Associated Press about the torture he experienced in detention in which he described how he was stripped naked, beaten and pistol-whipped while being hooded and bound with belts, he went missing for 20 months. No matter how his family and even journalists, human rights researchers and NGOs tried all kinds of channels, nobody was able to get any bits of information about him. In December 2011, ironically, while being detained incommunicado, the Chinese authorities accused him of violating the terms of his suspended sentence and was therefore sent to serve his three-year sentence. After Gao Zhisheng was released from prison in 2014, Gao Zhisheng stayed in his elder brother’s home in a village in the northern part of Shaanxi province, while under continued surveillance. His health deteriorated a lot during his detention in prison, and his teeth decayed to the stage that he could not eat solid food. Yet, the authorities did not allow him to leave the village to receive medical and dental treatment.
His daughter helped him publish his memoir abroad in 2016 detailing the treatment he received during his detention in 2009-2014. In August 2017, he was forcibly disappeared again and his whereabouts have been unknown ever since. He is going to be 61 this month. Since his first detention in 2006, he has de facto lost his freedom for nearly 20 years. He seems to have fallen into a black hole. It is just utterly scary that nobody can get any information about him. Is he still alive? He seems to be, but not even his family is certain about that. As many of us who have worked on China human rights issues for a long time have always concluded in similar cases, what the Chinese Communist regime wants is collective amnesia about these people. Very few people still remember the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo who died about a month before Gao Zhisheng went missing again in 2017. Nor will anyone in China still remember Chinese scholar Wang Bingzhang, who was kidnapped in Vietnam and detained by Chinese secret police in 2002 and later sentenced to life imprisonment for “espionage and terrorism” charges. As the international community has not been effective in pressuring China to stop such human rights abuses and years of persecution against certain human rights activists, I’m afraid we will no longer hear any news about Gao Zhisheng. His disappearance will become like the case of Liu Xiaobo. Even death in custody would not cost Communist China anything. There is certainly a serious problem with our international human rights mechanisms when they just shamefully give impunity to authoritarian regimes like China. With many politicians who are indifferent to human rights gaining power in America and Europe, the situation can only be expected to become more gloomy.
Patrick Poon is a board member of Tokyo-based Asian Lawyers Network.
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