On this episode of China Uncensored,
if you think your job is torture,
well...just ask this guy.
Welcome back to China Uncensored,
I'm Chris Chappell.
What do you think is the most dangerous job in China?
Is it construction?
Tall buildings, tight deadlines, plus low safety standards are a recipe for disaster.
Or how about coal mining?
Mine collapses, gas explosions, and long-term lung disease
kill thousands of workers every year.
No?
Ok, how about...landmine removal?
I do not want to be this guy.
Or any of these guys.
Whoa!
Well, actually, there's one job that's even more dangerous.
It's carried out by those people who are the dregs of society,
the filth with no regard for what their poor mothers might think:
I'm talking about lawyers.
And not even those slimy corporate lawyers,
or those personal injury lawyers.
No, no, I'm talking about the lowest
of the low in the eyes of the Communist Party:
Chinese human rights lawyers.
You see, human rights lawyers think
the law exists to protect the Chinese people.
That makes them like the annoying little angel
on the Chinese government's shoulder,
always going on and on about doing what's right.
It's like they think they can win against the Communist Party.
Wait, what's that Shelley?
Oh, apparently human rights lawyers know they can't win?
That's according to what one human rights lawyer
told the New York Times.
''We know we can't win.
We can't do anything to make our clients not guilty.
For human rights lawyers,
our job is to meet with them,
to encourage them,
to deliver their message to the outside.
Only lawyers can do this.
And so I continue to defend them.''
So being a human rights lawyer in China
is kind of like climbing Mount Everest in bike shorts.
It seems impossible,
but there's always the hope that someday,
it can happen.
You know,
after Everest collapses due to infighting and corruption.
Two years ago,
starting on July 9, 2015,
the Chinese regime launched a massive crackdown
on China's rights lawyers.
More than 300 Chinese human rights lawyers and activists
have been targeted.
Most were forcibly detained and questioned.
And a lot of them were tortured.
You may know some of their names.
On August 25th,
I talked about Jiang Tianyong.
He's a human rights lawyer who stood up
for other human rights lawyers that were tortured
by the Chinese regime.
And guess what?
He got tortured.
And then appeared on trial on state-run media,
saying he totally wasn't tortured,
and all that stuff he said about
other human rights lawyers being tortured--
that was all just lies.
And it's because he was brainwashed by evil
Western ideas like, you know, the rule of law.
And funny enough,
that was the same confession
another human rights lawyer made back in May.
After also being tortured.
What a coincidence.
And you may also recognize one of China's
most famous human rights defenders,
Chen Guangcheng.
Despite his blindness,
he taught himself law,
and then defended poor people who
couldn't afford a lawyer.
Helping people in need?
Big mistake.
The police put him under house arrest.
But Chen got huge international publicity
when he evaded the Chinese police guarding his house
in the middle of the night,
scaled a wall,
and fled to the US Embassy.
Wait.
Is he...the real Daredevil?
But anyway,
today I want to talk about human rights lawyer
Gao Zhisheng.
Gao is less known in the West,
because unlike Chen Guangcheng,
Gao never made it onto the front page of US magazines.
But Gao Zhisheng has a heck of an origin story.
He was born in 1964.
In rural China.
In a cave.
But as a boy, he never dreamed of becoming a lawyer.
That's because back then,
China had no criminal justice system.
The Communist Party just had, well,
I guess you could call it the "Judge Dredd System":
The CCP was the judge, jury, and executioner.
Finally, in 1979--
three years after Mao Zedong's death,
the Party had to build a criminal justice system from scratch.
Because Mao had already purged all the lawyers.
And while I know "'Let's kill all the lawyers"
is a memorable line from Shakespeare,
let's remember it was said by a guy named
"Dick the Butcher."
A hilarious joke,
but maybe not the best advice for building a civil society.
So the Party began encouraging people,
anyone really, to study law on their own.
And that's what Gao Zhisheng did.
He saw a newspaper article that China needed lawyers.
At the time, he was a soldier and a loyal Communist Party member.
And he decided that becoming a lawyer
is what he ought to do to help China.
He studied law on his own,
passed the bar exam in 1995,
and soon was one of the best.
Literally.
In 2001,
China's Ministry of Justice named Gao Zhisheng
one of the top ten lawyers in China.
Gao said it was his Christian faith that
drove him to work so hard to bring justice
to those who needed it most.
And, it turns out, that eventually came to include
practitioners of the severely persecuted spiritual practice,
Falun Gong.
And that's why his good standing with the Ministry of Justice didn't last.
In October of 2005,
Gao published this open letter to China's top leaders,
Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.
It basically says,
I have faith that you two are good men,
and I hope that you'll stop the persecution of Falun Gong.
And also here's like 20 specific cases
of practitioners being tortured,
in case somehow you didn't know this was a thing.
I have great faith that you can stop this,
et cetera, et cetera.
But the only thing the CCP stopped was Gao Zhisheng.
A couple weeks later,
they shut down his law practice.
Then Gao publicly renounced the CCP, saying,
"[I] quit the cruel, untrustworthy, inhumane, and evil party."
The next year, he was arrested and convicted of inciting subversion.
State-run media publicized the subversion,
but failed to mention that they also
tortured the bejesus out of him.
Here's what Gao Zhisheng wrote about it.
"We always hear how strong and stalwart
hero is in the face of torture,
how he refused to utter a sound,
but in my judgment this is utterly bogus and impossible.
I'm sure that my screams were absolutely hair-raising
and audible for five or six floors in either direction."
And that's when the Communist Party decided to show off
a little magic trick they've been practicing.
To perform it,
All they need is a volunteer.
It can be anyone really,
how about, I don't know,
shall we sayyyyy, Gao Zhisheng.
Watch as the Communist Party takes this grown man,
and makes him disappear!
Then reappear.
Then disappear.
Then reappear.
Then disappear again.
Gao's latest disappearance last month
is especially worrisome.
His health was already failing
over the past three years of house arrest,
since they wouldn't let him get medical treatment
after all that torture.
His teeth were falling out.
So what I want to get across here
is what this guy has gone through is unimaginable.
If I'd gone through half as much,
let's just say you'd probably see me making
a somewhat different show on China Central Television.
"Hi, welcome to China's Not Censored.
On this episode,
we celebrate the heroic struggle of China's democratic dictatorship
against the American imperialists and their running dogs."
Gao Zhisheng on the other hand,
is like a living motivational poster.
Even though he was under constant surveillance
for the past three years,
somehow he managed to write this 446-page book,
which details his experiences in detention.
And then he somehow gets it out of China.
And then on August 7,
he gave a rare interview with US-based NTD Television.
"In China 1.3 billion people are under house arrest,
not just me.
To human nature, human rights, humanity,
and heaven's mandate,
this is a prison.
My greatest wish is to change this evil system
so Chinese people can live a normal life
and China can go back to being a normal civilization."
My greatest wish is to change this evil sustem so Chinese people can live a nortmal life and China can go back to being a normal civilization.
Well, the "evil system" didn't change soon enough,
because a few days later:
Ta-dah!
He disappeared again.
So as of now,
we have no idea where Gao Zhisheng is right now
or what's happening to him.
You might be thinking we should do something
to get Gao safely out of China.
Well, eight years ago,
after being harassed and watched for years by the police,
his wife and kids fled China,
escaping as refugees
and finally making it to California.
But as much as Gao Zhisheng wants to see his family again,
he's also said he's not ready to leave China.
He considers staying in China and fighting for justice
his mission from God.
This guy is a superhero--
fighting a regime so evil it makes you feel bad for lawyers.
And this is why being a human rights lawyer
is the most dangerous job in China.
They defend the people who are in trouble
for trying to stand up to the Communist Party.
They defend the people who are the most disliked
and abused by the Communist Party.
The fact that they get tortured for doing their job
shows the world that the there is no rule of law in China.
It shows that the call is coming from inside the house--
Chinese people are fighting for their own rights.
It's not something the CCP can blame on hostile Western forces.
Although they're trying really hard to,
by torturing lawyers into confessing they were brainwashed by Western ideas.
This is an issue that strikes at the heart of
the legitimacy of the Communist Party's rule.
By trying to make the system work,
these human rights lawyers are showing that the system is broken.
And in the eyes of the Communist Party,
that is the ultimate crime.
So what can we do to help these human rights lawyers?
International attention is the best way to ensure Gao's safety.
So we've created this handy Where's Gao Zhisheng poster.
Let's see if we can find him,
using the power of social media.
Share it with everyone you know using the hashtag
Where's Gao on facebook, twitter,
whatever other obnoxious social media platform you kids are using these days,
I don't know, snapghost?
Periscope?
The point is, let's get ourselves an answer to Where's Gao.
And you know who might be interested in knowing
that people out there are looking for Gao?
How about the twitter and facebook pages of Chinese state-run media?
We'll put the links in the description below.
Have fun.
Thanks for watching this episode of China Uncensored.
Once again I'm your host Chris Chappell.
See you next time.
You know, I could've done an episode
about pandas to get lots of views.
But I covered Gao Zhisheng instead.
You know why?
Because of you!
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