本是Lan发给我的关于08北京奥运的社论，细看之下，文章涉及到的是中国司法制度、人权问题、维权律师的生存困境。文中提到的律师都是国内极其出名的维权律师。
奥运确实是一次挑战，当全世界的眼光都集中于中国的时候，为了应对西方的质询，政府和人民不得不反思，以作出调整和改进。
有兴趣的话，各位不妨找找香港电台节目《铿锵集》的纪录片《扣着脚镣跳舞的中国律师》看看，不过40分钟，题材敏感，从建国后最著名的为江青辩护的律师张思之开始讲起。 不过，国内已经将这个页面封了，要翻翻墙，sysu ftp上也有过，不知道删没。
July 2001: 'If China wins the Olympics, it will make progress on the promotion of human rights'.
April 2008: The terror goes on...
They promised progress but, as Edward Cody in Shanghai reports, human rights activists face brutal persecution
- Edward Cody, Washington Post
- The Observer,
- Sunday April 13 2008
- Article history
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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday April 13 2008 on p37 of the World news section. It was last updated at 00:07 on April 13 2008.
Zheng Enchong is a self-taught lawyer and a dogged human rights activist. In many countries, he would be considered a gadfly. But in China, during this Olympic year, he is treated like a threat to national security.
One police surveillance camera captures on tape whoever enters or leaves his Shanghai apartment. Another monitors whoever presses the elevator button. A third records people in the building's elevator. Lest the cameras prove unreliable, plainclothes police officers lounge in one corner of Zheng's landing throughout the day, smoking, sipping tea and playing cards.
Often, Zheng said, they prevent him from leaving his building. When he tried in February to go out to buy dumplings, the guards beat him up. In recent months, he said, they have been allowing him to attend church services most Sunday mornings. But sometimes not. He never knows exactly why. 'That's the way things are for me,' he said, smiling haplessly as if embarrassed by his fate. 'It's been going on for the last two years.'
As Beijing prepares to host the Olympic Games in August, the grinding controls imposed by the Chinese government on Zheng and other civil rights activists over the last decade are coming under growing scrutiny abroad. China's security forces have extensive experience and little legal restriction in suppressing dissent.
But domestic challenges to Communist rule are playing out today within a rising international debate over what place China's human rights record should have in the Olympics. Beijing insists that the Games should have nothing to do with politics. Foreign activists, however, argue that the desire to celebrate athletic achievement should not be a reason for the world to ignore the dark side of Chinese policies.
But while much focus has been on China's record in Tibet, little mention is being made of the daily challenges - from monitoring to arrest - risked by Zheng and any of China's 1.3 billion residents if they question the party line.
Zheng, a 57-year-old native of Shanghai, first encountered trouble during the Cultural Revolution at the age of 17. He was sent to far northern Heilongjiang province, just south of what was then the Soviet Union, interrupting his secondary school studies.
When he arrived back in Shanghai six years later, he had no diploma and no place to live. Zheng quickly caught up with his studies, however, and entered Fudan University to study economic administration. Before the Eighties were out, he had also taught himself law and qualified for a licence to practise. Sensitised by his past, he started defending Shanghai families expelled from their homes to make way for the explosive development that would turn the city into China's largest, richest and most modern. 'Why did I worry about those people who lost their homes?' Zheng asked, sitting in his living room in front of a wall full of legal manuals and case files. 'Because I had the same experience.'
Feng Zhenghu, a friend and fellow activist, said Zheng started out like any other lawyer, but began to see his clients' problems as the result of government corruption and misconduct. As a result, Feng said in an interview, Zheng gravitated increasingly towards human rights cases and confrontation with Shanghai authorities.
His tactic was to use the letter of Chinese law, which offers broad guarantees in theory, to harass city officials who were seeking to plough ahead with their development deals. By asserting that the deals were often driven by officials' desire for self-enrichment, Zheng became known as an adversary up and down the Shanghai government and party bureaucracy.
'In such cases, it's their own interests they are protecting,' Feng said. 'Why are they so concerned? It's just speaking out and writing articles, right? Well, it's because people respond to these ideas. They want change. They can produce a lot of pressure on the government.'
Zheng converted to Christianity along the way and started attending services at a Wesleyan church about a 15-minute walk from his home. His wife, Jiang Meili, also became a member. Their faith, Zheng said, has given them values that inform his legal activism.
In recent years, several dozen lawyers have made it their business to use Chinese law to defend people against the government. Like Zheng, a number have suffered retaliation.
One, Li Heping, was kidnapped and beaten in September. His car was recently rammed by a police vehicle as he took his son to school. Another, Teng Biao, was kidnapped for about 40 hours last month, presumably because of his friendship with Hu Jia, the internet essayist who was sentenced on 3 April to three and a half years in prison. Gao Zhisheng, a lawyer who became famous defending practitioners of the spiritual movement Falun Gong, has been under house arrest for months.
In defending homeless families caught up in land confiscation, Zheng got into trouble by suggesting publicly that corruption had infected senior officials in the Shanghai leadership.
He specifically pointed a finger at Huang Ju, a former mayor who rose to the Politburo's elite Standing Committee; Chen Liangyu, the Shanghai party secretary; and two sons of Jiang Zemin, the national party leader and President before Hu Jintao. 'Corruption is a large-scale problem in China,' Zheng said. 'But the biggest problem of all is corruption in land seizures. So that's why they're always after me.'
The Shanghai authorities acted first to invalidate Zheng's law licence. Undeterred, he kept taking cases. Then came the criminal prosecution. Zheng had been given a New China News Agency dispatch describing the Shanghai land disputes. Unknown to him, he said, it was an 'internal' article, distributed only to officials above a certain level. He gave the dispatch to local reporters for the BBC and Agence France-Presse and faxed a copy to a US-based human rights organisation.
For that, he was convicted of revealing state secrets and sentenced to three years in prison. After serving his time, he was released in 2006. That, he said, was when the surveillance cameras were installed and plainclothes police from the local Public Security Bureau were stationed on the landing.
The Zhabei District Public Security Bureau, queried by telephone, said it knew nothing about the team monitoring Zheng. 'Don't disturb us,' a woman said before hanging up. An official at the city Public Security Bureau's information office said he would investigate and call back, but did not.
Zheng also has been unable to return to work because of the restrictions, which include disabling his land line and mobile phones. He said he relies on his wife's pension and contributions from sympathetic lawyers in Beijing and the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group in Hong Kong.
Police cited Zheng as a suspect because his wife's younger brother has been accused of evading taxes on an adjacent apartment, Feng said. He has repeatedly been called in to testify. 'But the more they try to pressure him, the more he sticks his neck out,' Feng said, smiling.
In what was interpreted as a gesture of US government support, Zheng's daughter, Zheng Zhaojia, 22, was granted a US visa last year and has gone to the United States to study. 'We are dismayed by the restrictions on Mr Zheng's freedoms, including his inability to leave his residence and meet with other people,' the US Consulate here said in a statement.
Long after Zheng's accusations irritated officials, party secretary Chen was fired and tried for massive corruption; he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment on Friday. Huang Ju died of cancer last year, but his secretary, Wang Weigong, was taken into custody on charges of corruption in the same case. The Shanghai government, however, still appears to be concerned with Zheng. A pair of civilian officials visited him on Wednesday last week, he said, and urged him not to post anything on the internet about the troubles in Tibet because of the 'sensitive situation'. On Friday, the plainclothes police squad upbraided him for trying to leave for the evening services at the church down the street.
'Why are you trying to surprise us?' he quoted them as saying, suggesting that they had orders that the Sunday morning leave was all he was going to get.
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