Click to expand Image Protesters hold posters of imprisoned lawyer Wang Quanzhang during a demonstration at the China Liaison Office in Hong Kong against the crackdown on human rights lawyers in China, December 26, 2018. © 2018 S.C. Leung/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images The Chinese government is persecuting and silencing lawyers who challenge official abuses a decade after a major crackdown on lawyers defending people’s rights.The Xi Jinping government has sought to eradicate the influence of lawyers who defend people’s rights while compelling the rest of the legal profession to serve the Chinese Communist Party’s political agenda.The Chinese government should stop persecuting rights defense lawyers and reinstate their licenses. Concerned governments should speak out to support rights defense lawyers, and support those seeking refuge abroad.(New York) – The Chinese government is persecuting and silencing lawyers who challenge official abuses a decade after the “709 crackdown” on lawyers defending people’s rights, Human Rights Watch said today. The Chinese Communist Party has also strengthened ideological controls over the broader legal profession.In July 2015, Chinese police rounded up and interrogated about 300 lawyers, legal assistants, and activists across the country; members of a loosely connected community known as the “rights defense” movement, which had become increasingly influential between 2003 and 2013. Some were forcibly disappeared for months and tortured, and 10 were sentenced to harsh prison terms. In the decade since, the authorities have subjected many of them to surveillance, harassment, public shaming, and collective punishment, and revoked or cancelled their or their law firms’ licenses.“The Chinese government under Xi Jinping has sought to eradicate the influence of lawyers who defend people’s rights while compelling the rest of the legal profession to serve the Chinese Communist Party’s political agenda,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities over the past decade have muted the rights defense lawyers, though many still find ways to fight against social injustice.”Human Rights Watch reviewed relevant official documents governing law firms and lawyers caught up in what has been called the “709 crackdown,” for the July 9 date of the roundup. Human Rights Watch also interviewed seven rights defense lawyers and another lawyer not involved in activism.In addition to the ongoing harassment of lawyers, the authorities have increasingly demanded that lawyers show “absolute loyalty” to the Party and required law firms to establish Party cells and follow the Party’s leadership. The government’s expansion of access to public legal services has increased the role of Party-approved lawyers at the expense of rights defense lawyers, using the legal system to diffuse conflict and ensure social control.The Chinese government should cease persecution of rights defense lawyers, compensate the victims of past and recent abuses, and reinstate the licenses of these lawyers and their law firms, Human Rights Watch said. On the anniversary of the 709 crackdown, concerned governments should speak out in support of China’s rights defense lawyers, and support those seeking refuge abroad.“China’s rights defense lawyers and their families have suffered tremendously for seeking to provide justice to people in China,” Wang said. “Foreign governments should counter their ongoing persecution and silencing by providing international recognition, solidarity, and support to these courageous lawyers.”Repression of Rights Defense Lawyers under Xi JinpingAround 2003, a number of China’s lawyers and legal experts responded to the Chinese government’s embrace of a liberal conception of rule of law to assert people’s constitutional and civil rights. Through litigation, they worked with activists, journalists, and people who used the relatively less censored internet of the early 2000s to hold local officials accountable for rights abuses, from land seizures to forced evictions.Human Rights Watch found in a 2008 report that these lawyers and legal experts had faced violence, intimidation, threats, surveillance, harassment, arbitrary detention, prosecution, and suspension or disbarment from practicing law for pursuing their profession. Nevertheless, one lawyer said that lawyers during this period had “some limited space” and were becoming “organized, politicized … and internationalized.”Soon after Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, the Chinese government aggressively dismantled China’s nascent civil society and severely tightened control over the internet, the media, and academia. In 2014, the authorities began to arrest and prosecute prominent rights defense lawyers including Pu Zhiqiang, Tang Jingling, and Xu Zhiyong. In July 2015, the authorities rounded up 300 lawyers and legal workers in what soon became known as the 709 crackdown.One person interviewed who was a rights defense lawyer at the time said:Xi Jinping's crackdown on human rights activists … is not aimed at a few specific individuals.… In the past, those who were arrested were those who crossed the red line, those who showed up, those who took to the streets.… Now the goal is to catch all of civil society in one fell swoop, to eliminate the nodes where people gather, to eliminate the budding of civil leaders, to disintegrate the ability of the people to resist, and even to preemptively strike before the activists plan their actions.Ten years on, while those imprisoned during the 709 crackdown have been released, some continue to experience intense surveillance and harassment. The authorities have cut off their water, electricity, and phones in some cases, repeatedly forced them out of their homes, imposed arbitrary banking restrictions, and forced some to quit their profession. The prominent human rights lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan sought to raise public awareness of the plight of the 709 lawyers by posting a photo of himself selling insect repellent on the streets.The authorities have also imposed collective punishment on some of these lawyers’ families. The father of Wu Gan, a legal activist, said he was repeatedly detained for a total of two years. The children of several rights defense lawyers have been barred from leaving the country to study abroad and to escape harassment.The persecution of the lawyer Wang Quanzhang’s now-12-year-old son has been particularly egregious. Not only has the family been forced to move repeatedly—during one two-month period, police forced the family to move 13 times—but the family has had to find new schools multiple times as police put pressure on the schools to eject the son.The authorities have sought not only to punish, marginalize, and erase the influence of these lawyers, but also to change the public’s perception of them. A 2016 Ministry of Public Security press release said the rights lawyers had, “in the name of ‘protecting rights’ … seriously disrupted social order,” and that the group had “profiteered,” operated “shady plots,” and had “ulterior motives.” Such smearing has continued with harmful implications for the legal community.One rights defense lawyer said: “In the past, we were seen as a symbol of justice who dared to fight against injustice, but now we have become a ‘hostile force.’”Another said: “I used to promote legal knowledge in the community where I lived.… I thought I was doing public service, but I didn’t expect to be questioned by my neighbors many times whether I was a spy.”The erasure of rights defense lawyers has over the past decade been so effective that even fellow lawyers are unaware of this group. A Beijing-based lawyer not involved in the rights defense movement told Human Rights Watch: “I have never heard of the names [of the human rights lawyers] you mentioned, [like] Xu Zhiyong, Ding Jiaxi, Zhou Shifeng. I started practicing in 2015, but by then they had been completely erased from the public eye.”The Chinese government has also sought to eliminate these lawyers’ international influence. Ten years on, the authorities are still barring many of the 709 lawyers from travelling abroad.A lawyer who fled China, Lu Siwei—who was not subjected to the 709 crackdown but ran a public campaign in support of 709 victims—was seized by Laos authorities in 2023 and forcibly returned to China. A court sentenced him to 11 months in prison. Yu Wensheng, a lawyer who represented some of the 709 lawyers, and his wife Xu Yan, were imprisoned for attempting to meet with European Union officials, sending the message that the authorities would punish any lawyer who maintained contact with foreign governments.The lawyer who was not involved in the rights defense movement said:Forget going to the embassy to discuss human rights … I went to the US and Canadian embassies to attend several cultural events to watch movies, and I was warned by the authorities not to approach the embassy again.A decade after the crackdown, Chinese rights defense lawyers confront “more comprehensive and sophisticated” controls by the Ministry of Justice and the government-controlled lawyers’ associations, a lawyer interviewed said, and these authorities are adopting a “one-versus-one” strategy to monitor them:As soon as you make a public post … on your [social media] account, they will call you right away. For a certain number of lawyers, the judicial authorities have even gone to the court to follow and observe the trial. This was not common before but has developed into a systematic strategy over the years.Another rights defense lawyer interviewed said:In the past, the suppression of human rights lawyers was very blatant … [lawyers] were arrested at any time and disappeared after being covered in black hoods. Now the means have become more covert and more rules-based. This is even more terrifying, because it is not easy for the outside world to see it, and it is even more difficult to criticize it.The rules for lawyers are set out in the Measures on the Administration of Lawyers’ Practice and the Measures on the Administration of Law Firms, both revised in 2016. The second document was further amended in 2018. Together, they make law firms responsible for ensuring that their lawyers do not take part in activities that the authorities deem “endanger national security” or incite others to do so, such as “collecting signatures” or “unfurling banners.” The measures also empower judicial authorities to disbar law firms or lawyers for failing to comply with these rules.Rise of Lawyers Pursuing the Communist Party’s InterestsSince Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, he has strengthened the Communist Party’s control over society and state institutions and imposed further ideological controls, while re-adopting Mao Zedong's militant language and logic in political discourse. In 2013, the authorities reportedly circulated “Document Number 9,” which apparently prohibits public discussions of “seven ideological taboos,” including the rule of law and judicial independence.Xi also reversed the Chinese government’s earlier embrace of liberal legal reforms, turning the law into a tool to cement his and the Party’s power. He has increasingly emphasized the Party’s leadership over lawyers’ work and demanded their “absolute loyalty.” In 2016, the government issued the “Opinions on Deepening the Reform of the Lawyer System,” which called for the establishment of “high-quality lawyers who support the leadership of the Party and the socialist rule of law.”In 2018, the government-controlled All-China Lawyers Association added language to its charter calling on lawyers to “firmly safeguard the authority of the Communist Party, which has comrade Xi Jinping as its core.” The government amended the Measures on the Administration of Law Firms to require law firms to:… adhere to the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought.… [U]phold and strengthen the Party's overall leadership over the work of lawyers, firmly safeguard the authority and centralized, unified leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, and make supporting the leadership of the Communist Party of China and supporting socialist rule of law a basic requirement for practicing the profession.The same revisions require law firms to establish Party cells “to the extent possible.” Firms with three Party members should have a Party cell while those with fewer need to have alternative arrangements to ensure the Party’s leadership. By mid-2019, all law firms in China had met these requirements, according to China’s Legal Daily. These revisions also require including the Party cells in the law firms’ decisions and management, which presumably include personnel management and allocations of cases.At the same time, the government has made expanding various public legal services, including legal aid, a priority. Chinese legal academics estimate that in 2022, 20 to 30 percent of all criminal suspects had lawyers, of whom 60 percent were legal aid lawyers funded and assigned by the government.Fu Hualing, a Hong Kong-based Chinese legal scholar, wrote in a 2020 research paper that such services have become “a policy tool” for the Chinese government to ensure that social conflicts are averted before they spring out of control, bringing them “from the streets back into the courts.” What emerges, he wrote, is “a narrative [that ties] legal aid and public interest law to the political ideology of serving the people.” This “socialist rule of law” is in turn an integral part of Xi’s promotion of the “Fengqiao model of governance [that] prioritizes prevention and preemption of disputes … through individualized and targeted legal intervention.”In other words, the legal system is meant to divide people in China, steering them away from responding to social injustices in an organized manner, as some rights defense lawyers were doing. One rights defense lawyer agreed with this assessment, telling Human Rights Watch that this has the impact of co-opting the legal profession:After rights defense lawyers were purged and silenced, the Chinese government organized and carefully supported pro-Party … state-designated lawyers to occupy defense seats in sensitive cases. The scope of application of these designated lawyers is getting wider and wider from politically sensitive cases to a wider range of criminal cases.She said that this was equivalent to slowly undermining the criminal defense system and reducing legal defense work to a formality:As they [the state-designated lawyers] cooperate with the authorities to persuade defendants to plead guilty, dissuade family members from defending their rights, and deny human rights discourse, they cover up judicial abuses, cooperate with procedural violations, and do their best to prevent the media and human rights organizations from obtaining information.The Future of Human Rights Lawyers in ChinaThe immediate future of China’s rights defense lawyers is grim. Prominent lawyers such as Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi are in prison while Gao Zhisheng has been forcibly disappeared since 2017. Others, like Li Fangping and Li Jinxing (also known as Wu Lei), have gone abroad with their families.One lawyer familiar with this community said that even though one can no longer speak of an organized movement of rights defense lawyers, there are lawyers still willing to defend human rights independently:Some lawyers choose not to speak out and focus on making big money, but there are still many who insist on fighting, although they have toned it down … I think there are some lawyers who are forced to turn to a semi-underground approach, such as lawyers who defend [practitioners of the persecuted religious group] Falun Gong and [underground] Christians. But no matter what, they still appear in court.