The list of political prisoners in China is long, but one of the more notable cases involves Gao Zhisheng, which was the focus of a congressional hearing Thursday.
“This is the darkest, the worst time, for human rights in China since the revolution,” Bob Fu, president of the China Aid Association, said in summing up the current situation before the Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations.
Several witnesses, including Gao’s wife, gave distressing testimony about what happens when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sets its sights on someone for being a political dissident.
Gao, a human rights lawyer, disappeared from under "residential surveillance," or house arrest, in 2017, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) reported.
"Because Mr. Gao dared to defend citizens’ rights in China, he enjoyed no privacy and was under 24/7 surveillance by state agents,” HRF President Thor Halvorssen said at the time. “It is therefore difficult to believe that the state agents are innocent in his disappearance."
Several months after he disappeared from his home, reports surfaced that Gao was secretly being held in police custody in a dark room in Shaanxi province, according to a Congressional Human Rights Commission. Gao had previously published a book titled "Year 2017, Stand up China - A Narration by Geo Zhisheng, a Human Rights Lawyer Under Torture," in which he described being tortured while imprisoned.
Gao has had multiple run-ins with the state. Geng He, his wife, said the problems date to soon after Gao published “An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress” in 2007, where he referred to the CCP as “a criminal gang in the guise of a state” and asked U.S. leaders to boycott the 2008 Olympic Games in China.
“Since this letter was issued, Gao Zhisheng has been upgraded from a disobedient lawyer to a ‘lapdog of the Americans’ and has been kidnapped for more than 50 days without any judicial procedures and subject to all kinds of appalling torture,” Geng said in her testimony.
All told, he has been in and out of prison since 2006, when he was convicted of “inciting subversion of state power," until he was sentenced to residential surveillance in 2014, HRF said. With his latest “disappearing,” Geng said she doesn’t even know if he is alive.
Yaqui Wang, senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRS) and Sophie Luo, wife of “prisoner of conscience” Ding Jiaxi, shed light on the plight of other political prisoners.
“Chinese authorities subjected (Ding and Xu Zhiyong) to torture and ill treatment, including prolonged sleep deprivation, loud noise harassment, interrogation while being strapped tightly to an iron ‘tiger chair,’ food and water restrictions, no exposure to sunlight and no showers,” Luo said, referencing her husband and another prisoner whose situation she is familiar with.
When it comes to those who speak out against policy, “It is very clear that in China, there is no law at all,” Luo said.
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, detailed one of the problems with U.S.-China relations.
“The Chinese Communist Party is a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist organization that governs according to a communist ideology that holds that all aspects of society should be controlled by the party and especially its top leader,” Bremberg said. “For too long, the United States failed to understand the reality of the communist nature of the CCP, which resulted in a misguided policy of engagement.”
Several witnesses urged the U.S. government to do what it can to exert pressure on China to change.
Fu called on the president and others “to publicly meet” with family members – some of whom are on U.S. soil – of political prisoners. To that, Committee Chair Christopher H. Smith (R-NJ) said he would follow up with the White House and “God willing, it will happen.”
Geng’s wish list was more personal.
“First, I expect the U.S. embassy officials in China to visit Gao Zhisheng, a husband and a father of the U.S. citizens,” she said in her written testimony. “Secondly, I would like the U.S. Congress to urge China to allow Gao Zhisheng to be tried in public, like ordinary political prisoners, and to be granted the visitation rights that citizens are entitled to.”
After hearing detailed accounts of the horrors going on behind closed doors in China, “We do have to respond and respond robustly,” Smith said, adding later that he is working on a bill that will call for the release of Gao, Ding and others. He said the legislation will also require regular reports from the White House, no matter who is in charge, about what it is doing to stand up for the oppressed.
It has been 34 years since the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and though the CCP has continued to wage a war of brutality against dissidents, Wang said hope has survived.
“We are living in a grim period for human rights in China, but there are reasons for hope,” she told the panel. “For one, many young people in the country are waking up to the CCP’s brutal repression and are following the steps of towering figures like Xu Zhiyong and the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo.”
But it's not time for the U.S. to stand idly by, and the panelists said they'd push for more meaningful action.
