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The None D&G handbag xistent Case Of The Missing Lawyer
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The Nonexistent Case Of The Missing LawyerPublished: 07 May 2009 17:42:33 PSTAuthor: Gady EpsteinBEIJING — I first met the now-disappeared lawyer Gao Zhisheng four years ago. He was not one to mince his words: ”The China you see and the China we feel are totally different. Maybe you see only the prosperity and development in China and also the many legal rights that the Chinese people should have on paper,” he said. ”Every day, I feel the truth of the development of the rule of law in China.”More From Forbes.com: In Depth: World’s Most Powerful Luxury Brands In Pictures: Eight Disruptive Companies Investors Love In Pictures: The Best Countries For Business Whitney: Capital Markets Regress Stress Tests: Not The Final Grade That is chillingly true now. Gao, 45, was taken away by police on Feb. 4, in what had all the markings of a black operation by China’s shadowy security apparatus. Not a word from the government on his whereabouts. Not a word on his condition. Not even an assurance that he is alive. Once named one of the best lawyers in the country, Gao’s crime was to advocate for those who have no rights, most notably the followers of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong. Today, he is the one without rights.For his crime, the secret police abducted Gao and tortured him for days on end. A kangaroo court convicted and sentenced him for subverting state power. His wife and two children, relentlessly harassed by police, finally escaped while under surveillance in January, fleeing for exile in the U.S.This is the other China Gao was talking about, ”a state with the characteristics of the mafia,” he said, where no laws can protect lawyers like him. This China is a Stalinist anachronism: brutal and merciless when it encounters the most stubborn dissidents; thuggish when it thinks a good beating or detention on trumped-up charges will teach the appropriate lesson; merely intimidating when it believes that making some bluntly worded threats and scaring off a lawyer’s paying clients will produce the desired results.And this China gets results. There is a limit to how much intimidation and brutality most Chinese rights defenders can endure before deciding, finally, that it might be best for them and their families if they work within carefully defined boundaries. They remain under constant pressure even while operating in the mainstream, working in the China that is part of our more acceptable, comfortable discourse, the one where many earnest efforts are being made to improve rule of law, human rights, working conditions and environmental protections.I don’t need to describe this China because it is the one that the rest of the world engages with every day, the one that international institutions and NGOs work with, the one that multinational corporations invest in, the one that appears daily in the foreign media (despite many fine individual efforts to peer into and describe Gao’s China). The Western democracies long ago concluded that engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is ultimately in the best interests of the Chinese people; Gao counters that engaging with the Chinese government is no different historically from ”shaking hands with Stalin” at Yalta.”I would like to remind those so-called ’good friends and partners’ of the CCP around the world,” he wrote in his first-person account of torture at the hands of the secret police, ”that the increasing level of confidence of the CCP in treating the Chinese people with increasingly cold-blooded brutality and cruelty is the direct result of appeasement by both you and us [the Chinese people].”Obviously, engagement at this point is not a choice. It is reality. Many Chinese rights defenders work diligently within that reality, and some believe unrestrained activism like Gao’s undermines their cause, weakening reform-mindedキャバクラ 求人 搅拌机 引越し CFD クレジットカード現金化 プロジェクト管理
