The writer is an expert on Chinese civil society, and a research fellow at the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute
Seeing dissidents prosecuted in China is nothing new, but the convictions this month of a human-rights lawyer and three rights activists on charges of subversion are noteworthy for breaking with past practice.
The change has important implications for what has been a growing interest among regular Chinese people in the defense of individual rights.
A court in Tianjin last week sentenced Zhou Shifeng, director of the Beijing-based Fengrui law firm, to seven years in prison after he pleaded guilty to subversion for pursuing cases in a way that allegedly attacked the integrity of China’s legal system. Christian activist Hu Shigen, who worked with Zhou, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. Two other activists were given suspended sentences.
In the past, China’s government has tended to restrict news reporting on dissident trials. This time was different: The cases were widely covered in state-controlled and commercial media. At the same time, official social media accounts helped spread videosthat portrayed the lawyers as agents of “color revolution,” backed by “foreign forces,” who threatened to sow chaos in China in their bid to overthrow the political system.
The four trials, and a few more linked cases expected to come to trial soon, are different in another way: As dissident writer Mo Zhixu pointed out in a recent commentary, for the past several years, authorities have rarely prosecuted activists for subversion, preferring instead to charge them with non-political crimes. This was the case, for example, with prominent legal scholar Xu Zhiyong, leader of a loosely organized political advocacy group known as the New Citizens’ Movement, who was convicted of “assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place” for helping organize protests in 2014.
Why, now, are dissents being charged with political crimes?
Many argue the shift in treatment of dissidents reflects a growing paranoia inside the Communist Party about social unrest and challenges to its rule from civil society and rights activism. A fear of different social groups linking up to launch coordinated action was clearly evident in the trials, where prosecutors accused the four men of trying to connect the separate circles of activist lawyers, petitioners, underground church members and pushers of viral online content.
But if fear is the driving force behind the trials, then why advertise them so widely?
A different way of understanding the prosecutions and the propaganda around them is to view them as part of a larger attempt to politicize the defense of individual rights in general. In China, the term weiquan, or “rights defense,” refers to both legal and extra-legal actions that individuals and groups take to defend their private or public rights and interests. As rights consciousness rises and mounting economic and social problems affect an increasing number of the population, the ranks of rights defenders have continued to grow.
Rights defenders are a diverse group. Some have political agendas, while others stay focused on their own narrow demands; still others start out with little interest in politics but gradually become politicized, or even radicalized. Their methods range from simple lawsuits to more contentious actions, like street protests.
Regardless of their motivations, Chinese rights defenders have typically had be careful to portray their activities as non-political. Sometimes this has involved recasting a political issue as a technical issue — as a failure within the system, rather than of the system. The reason is simple: Once they cross the red line into political activism, they risk punishment by the authorities as well as disapproval from a public conditioned by propaganda to be suspicious of political action not sanctioned by the party.
Evidence presented in court against Mr. Zhou and the three activists mostly described them defending clients in high-profile lawsuits — a fairly standard rights defense activity with no overt political objective. Prosecutors cited one instance when the men actively discussed challenging the political order, during a gathering at a restaurant in Beijing.
Based on their public activities alone, it would be very difficult to know whether Mr. Zhou and the activists had a larger political agenda. The same holds true with many of the other individuals and groups in China who spend their time protesting environmental pollution, fighting discrimination against disabled people, or helping victims of police violence and others whose rights have been violated.
In recent years, the government left maneuvering space for activists to pursue causes that do not have direct political implications. They did this, in part, to provide a safety valve for the letting off of social pressure. The trials last week and the accompanying propaganda offensive signal that the government has changed its mind.
The government appears to think that the old arrangement created too many opportunities for its domestic and foreign enemies to covertly foment “color revolution” under the cover of rights defense. Rights defense activities, even when directed at non-political issues, can expose human rights and power abuse, diminish trust in the government and increase social tensions. Perhaps more worrying for the government, rights defenders are often able to develop organizational and communication skills and learn to network through their experience.
In future, the government will very likely treat rights defense activities with more vigilance. By loudly publicizing the trials, it’s signalling that wants the general public to do so too. This corresponds to a more general trend of re-politicizing society that has gradually gained momentum in the past few years. For China’s rights defenders that means the strategy of courting the public and mollifying the government by depoliticizing their activism may no longer be valid. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/08/12/subversion-sells-why-china-is-playing-up-dissident-trials/
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