Conscience of China comes home
Published on Sat Apr 10, 2010
Gao Zhisheng, a human rights lawyer at his first meeting with the media since he resurfaced two weeks ago, at a tea house in Beijing, China, (April 7, 2010)
By Bill Schiller Asia Bureau
BEIJING—Many feared he was dead. He’d been missing for more than a year.
Commonly called the “Conscience of China,” lawyer Gao Zhisheng was carted off by security police into the darkness of a winter’s night last year, dropped into the maze of China’s official and unofficial jails — and “disappeared.”
Fears for his life were well founded. In 2007 he’d been tortured and threatened with death.
Gao’s repeated calls for respect for human rights and for constitutional reform made him a prime target for Chinese authorities. But this week, in a working-class neighbourhood in north Beijing, Gao Zhisheng answered his own door.
After an international uproar over his safety, including appeals from Canada, the United States, Britain and others, Gao was returned home without announcement.
Looking thinner, but unbroken, Gao said he was standing down from his role as a leading dissident. But he was not walking away from his basic principles, he said.
“Undoubtedly I’ll be giving up a role,” he said. “But giving up a role doesn’t mean giving up one’s fundamental point of view.”
He wouldn’t be drawn on whether he had been tortured during this detention, as he had previously. Nor could he reveal where he had been held since February 2009.
He described his freedom as “superficial.”
“It comes with some trade-offs,” he said.
He was exhausted, he stressed — and so was his family. His wife and two children sought asylum in the United States last year.
“The body needs to recover,” said Gao. “My family needs relief.”
Last year, after police swept up Gao for the seventh time in six years for his relentless human rights work, his wife and children staged a harrowing, overland escape to Thailand, before finally making it to New York.
Their life in China, under constant police surveillance, had become a living hell.
Thoughts of his family and the ability to regularly communicate with them were strong factors that lead him to compromise, Gao said.
He is now in regular contact with them by phone.
“This experience has been very cruel for my children,” he said. “A complete family structure is a basic necessity for children when they’re growing up, psychologically and physically. They haven’t had that.”
This week, Gao opened the door to an empty apartment this week where remnants of his family life still echo: a cloth Winnie the Pooh organizer on a wall, a Mickey Mouse notebook, his children’s empty shoes.
It was an emotional re-entry.
Gao said he hoped that one day he might be reunited with his family, but he didn’t want to think about it too much.
Throughout the entire period of his disappearance, he said, he purposely tried not to focus on family for fear of breaking down.
“It was just too painful,” he said.
“My greatest hope at the moment is that the three of them can live complete lives on their own.”
As for being reunited, “I hope for it from the bottom of my heart,” he said.
A U.S. embassy official met with Gao Thursday and the topic was raised, but there are no plans, said Gao.
Gao said his first trip out of Beijing would be to his in-laws in Urumqi, in Xinjiang province. His father-in-law had been overwrought with anxiety by his son-in-law’s disappearance.
Police told Gao his father-in-law had scoured newspaper obituaries daily and travelled back and forth between hospitals and morgues checking bodies to see if one of them was Gao.
“When I heard that, my heart ached,” Gao said.
Police also told him that his elder brother, also in Xinjiang, was suffering health problems and frequently broke down and sobbed like a child.
Finally, while captive, Gao was also told that his children were suffering mental stress in America and had to seek care.
“They said to me, ‘If you don’t care about this sort of thing, how can you call yourself a human being?’ ”
Gao said his previous experiences in detention, his deep Christian faith and thoughts about South African statesman Nelson Mandela helped him hold his strength during a tough period.
“I admire him greatly,” said Gao of the Nobel laureate. “I’ve always hoped to be able to meet him. His capacity for forgiveness, his broad-mindedness, his perseverance — all those qualities that allowed South Africa to make its transition without conflict.”
Much like Mandela, Gao has never uttered an unkind word about his captors.
“I don’t consider those people enemies,” he said. “They had to do their jobs. They were given assignments . . . They’re victims too.”
During his most difficult times in detention, Gao said, he used a practised ability to completely “shut down.”
“I shut down my emotions, my thoughts. I don’t think anything at all.”
His spiritual faith was a source of great strength too, he said.
There were times when “God felt far away . . . but there were other times when I felt God right there with me.”
He was unaware that his disappearance had sparked an international campaign for the Chinese government to account for his whereabouts.
Canadian Liberal MP and former federal justice minister Irwin Cotler, in particular, had taken a personal interest in Gao’s case. And the government of Stephen Harper raised Gao’s case at the United Nations Universal Periodic Review of human rights in Geneva.
Gao described Canada’s stance on human rights in recent years as “quite admirable.”
He said he hoped China would move forward on issues of human rights and constitutional law.
“If there aren’t fundamental improvements in these areas, the reputation of the world will be tarnished,” he said. “Civilization itself will fracture.”
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