After attorney Gao Zhisheng was arrested by the Chinese communist regime in August, he seemingly evaporated from this world. No one has been able to obtain a single piece of information regarding him.
He was tried suddenly without any advance notice. This really puzzles me. The official explanation regarding this kind of legal operation is that it involves a "state secret." What kind of state secret?
I have been put under state control for the past more than three months. It was not possible for me to connect to the Internet.
Only two days ago was I able to surf the Internet and understand the series of incidents: Gao's defense lawyer was banned from meeting with him. Gao's family has been isolated from the world. Gao's friends and people who used to be around him have been isolated too. Gao's wife Geng He was violently abused, and so on. Wow! In my view, Gao's case has reached the most critical level I have seen.
What kind of state secret could attorney Gao have been involved in? What state secret could he have violated?
At the beginning of 2006, I accompanied Gao on a trip back to his hometown in northern Shaanxi Province to celebrate the traditional Chinese New Year. Later, over several months, we visited Sichuan Province, Xi'an City, Wanhan City, and then Shandong Province.
As Gao and I traveled together, we were like a person and his shadow. That is the only period of time that I experienced so many plain clothes police and their intense, around-the-clock surveillance, which included monitoring our communication devices.
During the trip and afterwards, we had no secrets or privacy. By a rough calculation, about 200 days passed from the beginning of my contact with Gao until his covert arrest. The plain clothes police surely kept him under constant surveillance during that time. I cannot think of any state secret that Gao could possibly be involved in.
The "People's Republic of China Law of Keeping State Secrets," item 8, defines state secrets. The definition includes secret information regarding: important policies of state affairs, national defense and military activities, foreign affairs, the national economy and social development, science and technology, criminal investigation and national security, and information classified as secret by the State Intelligence Department.
From the above definitions, I cannot see anything Gao has done that involves state secrets. All his articles and interviews were published by either domestic or international media. All journalists who interviewed him are from known media. The topics he talked about are appeals of people from the lowest levels of society, and criticism of the current [local] political system. I don't find any state secrets.
During my days with Gao, most of the people we met were poor people from the lowest levels of society, so poor, they still could not escape the greedy and corrupt local communist officials who deprived them of their human rights. Can these poor possibly hold state secrets in their hands?!
Gao—a renowned rights lawyer who serves poor people—feels people's pain, uses his legal knowledge, is guided by justice, and fulfills his responsibility as a legal professional in this country. I want to ask the authorities, by what kind of opportunity could attorney Gao access state secrets and at what level?
Or was attorney Gao's case labeled "state secret" so he could be tried under the authorities' exclusively controlled legal procedure, so the regime need not and dare not make public attorney Gao's case?
Gao's trial is one more case that debunks the slogan of a "harmonious society" proclaimed by Hu Jiantao and Wen Jiabao.
Feeds