Rights Lawyer Wang Quanzhang Still not Home

Emily Lau holds up a picture of Wang in front of the Liaison Office in HK

Chinese human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang was "released" 15 days ago from prison after serving almost five years in prison for subversion of the state. Then supposedly as a precaution to protect his family from him possibly having the coronavirus, he was sent to his home in Jinan, Shandong province for two weeks.

But that 14-day quarantine is over and yet Wang is not allowed to go back to Beijing to be reunited with his wife, Li Wenzu and their son. She fears that he is being held under house arrest.

"Today is the 15th day and he still can't return to Bejing," she said on Sunday. "I really cannot accept this."

Wang is still under house arrest in Jinan, Shandong province

Li said in the past two weeks she is only able to have phone conversations with Wang -- monitored by the police -- who determine how long the calls are and the content of their dialogue. She said Wang had told her the online posts she made "were causing him trouble" and ordered her to delete them.

She said Wang called her on Saturday to tell her he was not able to come back to the Chinese capital because he had "just come out and needed to get used to (everything)".  She questioned whether he was speaking of his own will.

"This is not the Wang Quanzhang I knew," she said. "The pain is like a knife stabbing into my bleeding heart."

When Chinese rights activists are released from prison but put in de facto house arrest for many years, this practice is called "non-release release" by rights groups and legal experts like Jerome Cohen.

Li Wenzu and her son have yet to be reunited with Wang

Francine Chan, executive director of Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group said: "The harassment, surveillance and effective house arrest of Wang Quanzhang after his 'release' vividly illustrate China's use of the pandemic to extend Wang's imprisonment in violation of Chinese and international law."

What can Li do now to so that she and her son can be reunited with Wang?

He has already suffered so much physically and psychologically since 2015. Isn't that enough punishment already?

Li's fight for Wang will have to continue if she wants to see her husband again, in person.

When will Wang Quanzhang be Truly Free?

Wang Quanzhang with his family before he was detained in August 2015

 

This morning Wang Quanzhang, the last of the 709 lawyers was released today from Linyi City Prison in Shandong province after serving a five-year sentence for "subverting state power", but he is not received into the arms of his wife, Li Wenzu and their son; instead he was escorted to his hometown in Jinan, also in Shandong, where he has a place.

Apparently this action was taken as a precaution to quarantine him for 14 days because of the coronavirus pandemic, but Li, who is in Beijing, worries this is an excuse to put Wang under house arrest and would be subjected to surveillance.

Jerome Cohen says non-release release is not new in China

"I think (the authorities) have been lying to us step by step," she said. "They used the pretext of the epidemic as an excuse to quarantine him for 14 days when he should have been able to return to his home in Beijing according to the relevant legal guidelines."

This existence of being released, but not fully free from the authorities is what eminent Chinese legal expert Jerome Cohen calls "non-release release".

He explains this is not new in China -- it was used during the Communist Party's "anti-rightist campaign" in 1957-58, when people were subjected to punishment by "reeducation through labour" and has been modified in recent times.

"In the past decade, non-release release has been customized to suit the Party's needs for effectively suppressing human rights lawyers on a more individualized basis than a formal system might allow, and also for a longer time than formal criminal or administrative sanctions might seem suitable. To the public, non-release release looks better than sentencing a lawyer to life in prison, but it can nevertheless amount to a more discreet form of stifling someone forever," he writes.

Li Wenzu has her head shaved in December 2018

Five years ago Wang, a human rights lawyer, was one of 300 lawyers and activists who were arrested in a nationwide crackdown on July 9, 2015 in a bid to silence China's emerging rights defense movement, hence the name 709. Wang was taken away in August.

While other lawyers had already stood trial and released on bail or given suspended sentences, Wang was held incommunicado for three years. His wife Li tried to find out where her husband was held, turning the housewife into an activist.

In April 2018, she started on a 12-day march from Beijing in Tianjin where she believed Wang was being held. However the authorities stopped her from completing her quest. In December that year she and two other women publicly shaved their heads to protest the continuing detention of Wang.

When the state finally gave notice to Wang's family of his detention, they did not tell his family of his whereabouts nor allow them to see him; the lawyers they hired were dismissed by the authorities, and on the day of his trial, he fired the court-appointed lawyer, as if to make the point that the trial was a sham. It resulted in his trial being further postponed.

Li and her son anticipating her husband's release

So while Wang has tried to stand up to the system the best he can, one can only imagine his fragile mental and physical state after being detained for so long without access to his own legal representation let alone his family until last June, which was devastating for Li to see her husband's mental state.

"I can't wait to hold him again, but I don't know when that will happen," she said a few days ago.

On March 12 he sent a letter to her with a simple wish:

"What I want the most after getting out of here is to live freely, where there is no one knocking on my door. Let us restart a life we had built," he wrote.

We hope so too.