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Philip Lenczycki
Daily Caller News Foundation
The U.S. must pressure China to disclose the status of a prominent human rights attorney who was “forcibly disappeared,” advocates told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
On August 13, 2017, agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) kidnapped Gao Zhisheng, an award-winning Chinese attorney for religious minorities, after subjecting the Nobel Peace Prize nominee to over a decade of imprisonment and torture, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. His advocates, including commissioner of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith, president of the Christian nonprofit ChinaAid Pastor Bob Fu, and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Andrew Bremberg, told the DCNF that the U.S. government has a responsibility to confront China and determine if Gao is alive or dead.
“You can launch public campaigns to pressure businesses to reduce their business exposure to human rights abuses taking place in China from a consumer-led perspective, but I think what we’ve seen is that there’s very little fruit,” Bremberg told the DCNF. “What we really need is to get the U.S. government pushing in that direction.”
“Unless or until the U.S. government adopts a position or does something, it’s kind of the tail wagging the dog,” Bremberg added.
Nicknamed “China’s conscience,” Gao ran afoul of the CCP in 2004 by sending open letters to the Chinese government on behalf of practitioners of Falun Gong, a “spiritual practice” which the CCP designated as an “unlawful organization” in 1999, according to the congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.
For his legal advocacy, the CCP shut down Gao’s law firm in 2005, sentenced him to three years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” in 2006 and then forcibly disappeared the human rights attorney for the first time in 2007, according to CECC. Over the next decade, the CCP continued to torture Gao in increasingly brutal fashion, his advocates told the DCNF.
Yet, despite human rights activists’ best efforts, Gao’s whereabouts remain unknown because the U.S. government has allegedly failed to raise the human rights attorney’s case in meetings with China, advocates told the DCNF.
Pastor Fu told the DCNF that to his knowledge, President Joe Biden has never mentioned Gao’s name “in private or in public.” Moreover, despite “multiple bilateral summits” between the U.S. and China, not “a single prisoner of conscience’s name” has ever been raised.
“If you don’t raise people’s names in public or to your counterparts, if you don’t meet with dissident’s families in the U.S., how could you ever persuade Xi Jinping to release Gao Zhisheng or others?” Fu asked.
Gao “suffered like almost no one I could ever imagine has suffered anywhere,” Rep. Smith told the DCNF.
Gao sent an open letter critical of the then-upcoming 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics to the U.S. Congress on Sept. 12, 2007, after having been granted a five-year parole, according to CECC.
A little over a week later, the authorities allegedly summoned the beleaguered attorney to a “re-education” meeting on Sept. 21, 2007, which Gao later recounted in an open letter entitled “Dark Night, Dark Hood And Kidnapping By Dark Mafia” made public in February 2009.
As Gao walked through the night to the “re-education” meeting “about six or seven strangers” suddenly appeared and he suffered “a strong blow to the back of my neck,” Gao’s 2009 letter states.
“Someone yanked my hair and a black hood was pulled over my head … I was brought to a vehicle and was put in … My belt was pulled off and then used to tie my hands behind my back … About 40 minutes later I was dragged out of the car. My pants were falling down around my knees and I was dragged into a room.”
“Your date of death has come,” one of Gao’s captors allegedly told him.
