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POLITICAL PRISONERS IN CHINA: 

TRENDS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. POLICY 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE 

COMMISSION ON CHINA 

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

AUGUST 3, 2010 

Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.cecc.gov 

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA 

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS 

Senate House 

BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota, Chairman 

MAX BAUCUS, Montana 

CARL LEVIN, Michigan 

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California 

SHERROD BROWN, Ohio 

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas 

BOB CORKER, Tennessee 

JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming 

GEORGE LeMIEUX, Florida 

SANDER LEVIN, Michigan, Cochairman 

MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio 

MICHAEL M. HONDA, California 

TIMOTHY J. WALZ, Minnesota 

DAVID WU, Oregon 

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey 

EDWARD R. ROYCE, California 

DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois 

JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania 

EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS 

Department of State, To Be Appointed 

Department of Labor, To Be Appointed 

Department of Commerce, To Be Appointed 

At-Large, To Be Appointed 

At-Large, To Be Appointed 

CHARLOTTE OLDHAM-MOORE, Staff Director 

DOUGLAS GROB, Cochairman’s Senior Staff Member 

(II) 

(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Opening statement of Hon. Byron L. Dorgan, a U.S. Senator from North 

Dakota, Chairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China .............. 1 

Cohen, Jerome A., Professor, New York University School of Law; Co-director, 

U.S.-Asia Law Institute; and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Asia Studies, Council on Foreign Relations ....................................................................................... 5 

Rosenzweig, Joshua, Senior Manager for Research and Hong Kong Operations, The Dui Hui Foundation ......................................................................... 8 

Wan, Yanhai, Director of Beijing Aizhixing Institute, Expert on HIV/AIDS, 

Human Rights, and Civil Society in China ........................................................ 10 

Richardson, Sophie, Asia Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch .................. 12 

APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS

Cohen, Jerome A. ..................................................................................................... 28 

Rosenzweig, Joshua ................................................................................................. 32 

Wan, Yanhai ............................................................................................................. 37 

Richardson, Sophie .................................................................................................. 39 

Levin, Hon. Sander ..................................................................................................

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD

Compilation of Representative Cases from the CECC Upgraded Political Prisoner Database, submitted by Chairman Dorgan ............................................... 41 

(1) 

POLITICAL PRISONERS IN CHINA: TRENDS 

AND IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. POLICY 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2010 

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE

COMMISSION ON CHINA, Washington, DC. 

The hearing was convened, pursuant to notice, at 10:19 a.m., in 

room 628, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator Byron Dorgan, 

Chairman, presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. BYRON DORGAN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM NORTH DAKOTA, CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONALEXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA 

Chairman DORGAN. We’re going to call the hearing to order. 

I’m Senator Byron Dorgan and I am Chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. This hearing is being held 

at a time when the House of Representatives is not in session, so 

I unfortunately will not be joined by Members of the U.S. House 

of Representatives. 

But I will be joined by Members of the Senate this morning. 

They are now attending a proceeding in the Foreign Affairs Committee, I believe, but will attempt to get here as soon as possible. 

I wanted to begin the hearing reasonably close to the time that was 

advertised. I thank the witnesses for being with us today to discuss 

a very important issue for our country. 

The recent trials of scholars, activists, lawyers, and others in 

China have shone a spotlight on the Chinese Government’s use of 

detention and imprisonment to squelch dissent or to advance government objectives. 

This Commission is the repository of the most complete publicly 

available database of Chinese political prisoners who are being 

held in some of the darkest cells in the world due to government 

human rights violations. 

I want to just show a printout from the database that was created and is maintained by our Commission. This three-inch thick 

binder contains names of people who are being held in Chinese 

prisons, some without hope, some for a lifetime, some for 10, 20, 

and 30 years. These prisoners have been convicted by the state, by 

the Government of China, for various offenses against the state. 

We are going to talk about that today. 

One of the things that I want to learn from the experts who will 

testify today is, what is the trend? Is the trend toward imprisoning 

people for exercising the right of free speech or is the trend toward 

allowing more space for people to exercise their freedom of speech? 

2 

China is changing, we know that. China is a significant country on 

the world stage. The relationship between our country and China 

is significant. 

The question is, what do we make of what is now happening in 

China with respect to the imprisonment of people who dare tell the 

truth, who dare on the Internet to type what to most of us would 

seem to be a very innocent email and discover it puts them 10 or 

20 years in a Chinese prison? What do we make of all that? Can 

we, and should we not, expect China to be behaving in a different 

way, to be committed to rule of law, and for which they should be 

proud of, as opposed to a rule of law that all too often is bent to 

exercise the will of their government and to repress the free expression of their citizens. 

The title of today’s hearing is, ‘‘Political Prisoners in China: 

Trends and Implications.’’ Recent trials of bloggers and professors, 

writers, lawyers, and others have heightened concern that the Chinese are now increasingly using detention and jail to stifle dissent 

and to advance government objectives at the expense of human 

rights. 

For example, just a few days ago, Gheyret Niyaz, a Uyghur journalist and editor of a popular Web site was sentenced to 15 years 

in prison in China for apparently giving an interview to the foreign 

media after the July 2009 demonstrations and riots and for essays 

critical of some Chinese Government policies in Xinjiang. 

We have a distinguished panel of witnesses who will help us examine whether or not imprisonment for human rights violations is 

on the rise in China and whether the profile of a political prisoner 

is different today than, say, for example, 10 years ago. 

We will examine whether and how the threat of political imprisonment affects the work of people and organizations who have been 

engaged in human rights advocacy or who are involved in, for that 

matter, commercial activity in China, including U.S. citizens involved in commercial activity. 

The witnesses that we have invited will also explore the opportunities that Chinese citizens have lost as a result of the chilling effects of political imprisonment on public life and what the U.S. 

Government should do in response. 

I want to mention two alarming trends. First, with respect to the 

Internet, it appears to have spawned an entire new class of political prisoners in China. Chinese citizens are increasingly going to 

jail for posting essays online that are critical of the government or 

for trying to organize political opposition online. 

Many citizens who criticize their government in blogs and comment boards go unpunished, and at most their comment is deleted. 

But individuals with a track record of human rights advocacy or 

some kind of political activism or some sort of grassroots support 

organizing or opposition to the Communist Party, they seem to be 

systemically targeted. 

The most common charges against these citizens is the crime of 

subversion, which carries a sentence of up to life imprisonment, 

and also inciting subversion, which carries a sentence of up to 15 

years. And individuals that are imprisoned on these charges have 

done nothing more than criticize the Communist Party, without advocating any form of violence. 

3 

Now, the second major concern is the government’s harsh crackdown on lawyers and human rights defenders inside the country of 

China. Over the last two years, a number of lawyers who have represented human rights advocates, including house church members, HIV/AIDS activists, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, and 

Uyghurs, have been harassed and abused by the government because of their clients and because of the causes they represent. 

Perhaps the most outrageous, I think, and cruel example of 

abuse by the government is the disappearance of Gao Zhisheng, 

one of China’s greatest human rights lawyers. He endured jail and 

torture because of his fearless advocacy and his commitment to 

speak the truth as he knew it. Last year, he was abducted from 

his home by security agents after his wife and two children had left 

China to seek asylum in this country. He disappeared. 

Now we know for more than a year security agents shuffled him 

from one location to another and subjected him to both physical 

and psychological abuse. After Members of Congress, including this 

Commission and myself, and the international community pressed 

his case, Gao mysteriously reappeared for two weeks, just two 

weeks, this past spring. He gave a few interviews, and then security agents abducted him again. His forced disappearance by the 

State reveals a complete disregard for individual rights and the 

rule of law. 

Let me say, with respect to the case of Mr. Gao, I have written 

on several occasions to the Chinese Embassy here in the United 

States, and have not received satisfactory responses, which is typical, I regret to say. 

Gao’s photograph and a detailed record of his case can be found 

in the Commission’s newly enhanced Political Prisoner Database. 

At this time, the Commission’s Political Prisoner Database contains about 5,500 records of political prisoners. Our Commission 

believes that to promote the rule of law in China it is vital to publicize and seek the release of these people. It was international 

pressure that played a critical role in securing the freedom of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Kim Dae-Jung, and many others who 

helped lead their countries to greater social justice. 

So, too, is our responsibility, to press for the release of political 

prisoners in China. Today’s imprisoned dissidents are the leading 

figures of tomorrow’s societies, in my judgment, and that is especially the case with respect to China. The new society in these 

countries will be led by people who understand and exercise a 

greater respect for human rights. 

Perhaps most of us in this large room have visited China, and 

we look at this very large, interesting country with an extraordinary history with wide-eyed interest. We understand it will play 

a significant role in the destiny of our country and the world for 

decades to come, centuries to come. The question is, what can we 

say to the Government of China to change and end their suppression of human rights and imprisonment of those who dare speak 

the truth—what can we do to change that? 

How can we continue to apply pressure on China, to say if you 

want to be a respected member of the modern world, if you want 

to be a respected member of the economic world, then you must 

change course with respect to the suppression of the human rights 

4 

of your citizens. The State just cannot go to the Internet and find 

someone who has said something critical about the government and 

throw them in a dark prison cell away from society for 10 years, 

20 years, or life. The rest of the world condemns that behavior and 

it must stop. 

We are joined today by four witnesses. I do want to read a fair 

amount of their background. The background recitation will take 

longer than their testimony, perhaps, but I want everyone to understand what these witnesses are about and what experience they 

have. 

Starting on my left is Mr. Jerome Cohen, Professor at New York 

University School of Law. He is the Co-director of the U.S.-Asia 

Law Institute and served for several years as C.V. Starr Senior 

Fellow and Director of Asia Studies at the Council for Foreign Relations. 

At Harvard Law School, he introduced the teaching of Asian law 

into the curriculum from 1964 to 1979. He has written extensively. 

He’s published several books on Chinese law, including ‘‘The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1963,’’ ‘‘People’s 

China and International Law,’’ and ‘‘Contract Laws of the People’s 

Republic of China.’’ He has a B.A. Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, and 

graduated from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief at 

the Yale Law Journal. 

Mr. Cohen, that’s quite a background. We welcome you here. 

Mr. Joshua Rosenzweig is the Senior Manager for Research and 

Hong Kong Operations of the Dui Hua Foundation where he has 

extensive research experience working in Chinese archives and libraries. Since joining that foundation in 2002, he has developed its 

comprehensive database on information about Chinese political and 

religious prisoners, and written more than a dozen volumes in the 

foundation’s series of occasional publications. 

He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College. We express a special thanks to Josh, the foundation, and its executive director, John 

Kamm, for their extensive efforts on behalf of political and religious prisoners in China. Their assistance to the Commission has 

been invaluable, particularly in helping to launch the Political Prisoner Database. 

Dr. Wan Yanhai is Director of the Beijing Aizhixing Institute and 

an expert on HIV/AIDS, human rights, and civil society in China. 

He received a medical degree from Shanghai Medical University 

School of Public Health. Upon graduation, he worked in China’s 

National Health Education Institute, then served on the staff of 

Beijing Modern Management College from 1994 to 2002. He founded the Aizhixing Institute, which works toward prevention of HIV/ 

AIDS transmission through community outreach. 

He has collaborated with the Chinese Society for the Study of 

Sexual Minorities, the National Working Committee of People Infected by HIV Through Blood Transfusion, the Working Group of 

Citizens Health Rights for Education, the China Patient Rights 

Project, and the Beijing LGBT Culture and Rights Center in 2008. 

Dr. Wan, thank you very much for being here. 

Finally, Sophie Richardson. She’s the Asia Advocacy Director of 

Human Rights Watch. Dr. Richardson oversees Human Rights 

Watch’s work on China and speaks Mandarin Chinese. She’s the 

5 

author of numerous articles on domestic Chinese political reform, 

democratization and human rights in Cambodia, China, Hong 

Kong, and the Philippines, and of a new book on Chinese foreign 

policy, I understand. 

She has testified before the European Parliament and the U.S. 

Senate and the House of Representatives, provided commentary to 

BBC, CNN, the Far Eastern Economic Review of Foreign Policy, 

and NPR. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her doctorate from the University of Virginia. 

Dr. Richardson, thank you for being with us today. 

The entire statements of all four of the witnesses will be made 

a part of the permanent record in their entirety, and we would ask 

the witnesses to summarize their statements now. 

Mr. Cohen, let me begin with you. Again, let me welcome you to 

the Commission. 

[A compilation of Representative Cases from the Political Prisoner Database appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF JEROME A. COHEN, PROFESSOR, NEW YORK 

UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW; CO-DIRECTOR, U.S.-ASIA LAW 

INSTITUTE; AND ADJUNCT SENIOR FELLOW FOR ASIA STUDIES, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS 

Mr. COHEN. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be here and also 

for the Commission’s continuing contribution to American understanding of China, especially in the area of human rights. 

I appreciated your statement, which I think accords well with all 

of those who know China. You were already, in effect, the first witness and we will try to supplement what you have said. 

This topic, as we all know, is as broad as it is important. I want 

to emphasize the breadth of it, the breadth of the term, ‘‘what’s political’’ and the breadth of the term, ‘‘who are prisoners,’’ and the 

disqualifications and sanctions that apply to people, not only those 

who suffer criminal prosecution, conviction, and are sentenced to 

jail, but those who don’t but who are also prisoners in many significant ways. 

Now, the Chinese Government always denies that it has any political prosecutions. People are always prosecuted for violating specific provisions of the criminal law. But the criminal law, as we all 

know, is very vague and it permits a whole range of people, starting with classical political dissidents, democratic organizers, freedom seekers, and covering a whole spectrum of people who didn’t 

realize they were political criminals but became so because they 

were merely protesting a range of local grievances, such as some 

of those you have mentioned: land disputes, property disputes, environmental, labor problems, birth control problems. These are all 

often local disputes that make people become political prisoners because there is no satisfactory outlet for their peaceful protest. 

Many of them, of course, get locked up. 

The trend with respect to prosecuting people—for example, engaging in conduct that endangers state security, a very vague 

term—is troublesome. It seems to be increasing; although we have 

some statistics—transparency is highly limited in this respect, as 

well as others. But as you mentioned, lawyers who defend these 

people often become political criminals. It isn’t only the famous 

6 

people that some of us have helped to publicize who become political offenders. 

Political can cover people like Xue Feng, the American petroleum 

geologist who was recently sentenced to eight years in prison. He 

thought he was acting in a commercial sense. His case has become 

highly political in terms that it involves alleged state secrets, it involves diplomatic sensitivities, it involves international business, 

the concern of the business community. 

Then you have other examples. For example, the recent trial of 

alleged mafia organized crime people in Chongqing involves domestic Chinese politics for perhaps the rivalry for who will succeed the 

current leaders in 2012. There are many reasons why the Chinese 

call their legal system a political legal system. It’s not a legal system, but it’s a political legal system. 

And if you are unfortunate enough to be prosecuted for a political 

offense, you suffer not only the inadequate protections of ordinary 

criminals, those alleged to be criminals in China, but you have additional handicaps. In my statement, I recite a litany of defects in 

the current Chinese criminal justice system that denies people fair 

trials. 

And if you’re a political offender, your situation is worse off because your trial will often be closed to the public, even to your family, and recently, even if you’re an American citizen, to American 

consular representatives. Even when they’re open in principle, 

they’re often not open in reality. Lawyers who wage a vigorous defense in cases of this nature themselves risk prosecution, disbarment, or other sanctions. 

In sensitive political cases, those who hear the case don’t make 

the decision. The decision is made often by court leaders who may 

know very little about the case. The whole process of political prosecution is generally under the supervision of the Communist Party 

political-legal group. 

Now, we shouldn’t only worry about criminal justice in China for 

punishing political offenders. We have to worry about a range of 

sanctions that aren’t called criminal. Reeducation through labor enables the police, on their own, to put away any political criminal 

or anybody who asks too many questions for as long as three years, 

and that can be extended to four. There are some similar sanctions. 

But then there are shorter sanctions that intimidate people. Petitioners who prove too irksome and find no outlet for their petitions 

often get locked up in ‘‘black jails.’’ These are unauthorized penal 

institutions and they do not have very good regulation, and there 

are many abuses that occur there. 

There is a great deal of low-visibility harassment of people who 

are not formally locked up. They may not be put in a mental asylum. They, however, may find their daily lives are severely constricted. Some lawyers lose their right to practice law, even though 

they may not be locked up. 

Political offenders who have already served their criminal sentence are themselves under continuing restraint, very often. Some 

have also been sentenced to deprivation of political rights for a 

year, or up to five years. That means they can’t do very much. 

After that period of deprivation is over, these people are often subjected to continuing surveillance, house arrest, restriction of any 

7 

meaningful life with no legal authority whatever. The former 

Shanghai lawyer Zheng Enchong, whom I managed to visit in May, 

can’t really leave the house. He’s been restricted for years. 

I worry about the forthcoming release of the famous ‘‘blind man,’’ 

the barefoot lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, who, on September 9, will 

conclude four years and three months in prison on trumped-up 

charges. 

Chen Guangcheng had been protesting birth control law violations by the local authorities and they put him away. He used to 

say to me, ‘‘What do they want? I want to use legal methods to 

solve these problems and there’s no outlet, and look what they do.’’ 

The question is, what will happen to him on his release September 

9? 

Chairman DORGAN. Did you visit him in prison? 

Mr. COHEN. No. He’s not allowed. It was very difficult, even for 

his wife to visit him. I visited him just before he was detained in 

his local village. Afterward, he was under constraint. Before they 

even invoked the criminal process he’d had over 100 people surrounding his house 24/7. His wife lives under that kind of restraint 

today. 

What we discovered is that his five-year-old daughter cannot enroll in the village school now until his political problem is settled. 

This is a very disturbing aspect. Traditional China used to have 

collective punishment. An offender’s family would also suffer severely, sometimes through two generations, or three. China has 

abandoned that barbarity in principle, but in practice we see the 

families of many of these political offenders suffer. 

In New York now you have the daughter of an ex-lawyer from 

Shanghai, Zheng Enchong. She was told she has no future if she 

wants to go on to university. But to deny a five-year-old child the 

opportunity to start education because her father has been a political offender and to use her as a tool in an evident blackmail negotiation that will begin September 9 to try to curb his activity is a 

disturbing trend. 

So we have the whole range of, who are ‘‘political people’’ and 

who are ‘‘prisoners.’’ ‘‘Prisoners’’ can embrace many people. One 

concept would say, if you can’t go back to your country because 

you’ve been excluded for over a decade, in a way you’re a prisoner 

in the United States because you’re excluded from your own society. So the breadth of this topic is breathtaking. 

Now, foreigners get involved in the system, too. That’s the significance of the Xue Feng case. I can’t go into detail in my opening, 

but it’s in my statement. But one thing we’ve seen, foreigners usually, like Xue Feng, have the benefit of a consular convention between the United States and China, and that convention needs 

some repair. I criticize the U.S. Government in certain respects for 

its own conduct on consular conventions. 

Finally, you asked, quite rightly, what can we do? One of the few 

things we can do, is do a better job on the official U.S.-China dialogues and the official U.S.-China expert dialogues on human 

rights. These have been pretty unimpressive, even when they 

occur. They’re frequently interrupted. Also, people talk past each 

other and not much has happened. We have a new administration 

8 

that is trying hard to make these more meaningful dialogues, but 

it’s very difficult to accomplish that. 

In my statement, I make some suggestions for how to improve 

these official dialogues. For example, they should discuss concrete 

cases. Chinese officials love to talk abstract principles. They don’t 

like to talk reality of concrete cases, such as the one you mentioned 

of lawyer Gao Zhisheng. 

Also, we need the participation of higher level leaders. We ought 

to try—it seems like a way-out idea, but I don’t think so. It’s worth 

trying—to get those who really make the human rights decisions 

in China to take part in some of these dialogues. Have the head 

of the Party National Political Legal Committee, Mr. Zhou 

Yongkang, for example, who is a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, have him come and spend a day or two 

exchanging ideas with a counterpart. We would have to produce 

significant people. We should have the head of the Supreme Court, 

the head of the procuracy, the head of the Ministry of Justice. 

These are officials the Party has great confidence in who make the 

decisions. We ought to have access to them. 

I have a number of other suggestions, but I would only say we 

should encourage the efforts of the State Department to try to 

make these dialogues more meaningful, to open up the experts’ dialogue to people who are not officials but know a lot about what’s 

going on, and to encourage, apart from the official dialogues, the 

NGO dialogues that are beginning to take place, so-called Track 2 

dialogues. Track 2 normally implies non-officials. 

On the Chinese side, they end up being pretty official, but I don’t 

mind that if we can get a range of people into this process of discussion in a more informal way. So there are many things that can 

be done, and I hope this hearing helps to stimulate them. 

Chairman DORGAN. Mr. Cohen, thank you very much. I’ve read 

your testimony and I appreciate very much your summary of that 

testimony today, which I think is very insightful. 

Joshua Rosenzweig, Senior Manager for Research and Hong 

Kong Operations, The Dui Hua Foundation. 

Mr. Rosenzweig, thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Cohen appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF JOSHUA ROSENZWEIG, SENIOR MANAGER 

FOR RESEARCH AND HONG KONG OPERATIONS, THE DUI 

HUA FOUNDATION 

Mr. ROSENZWEIG. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am privileged to 

be invited to participate in this hearing today, and I’d like to thank 

you, your fellow Commissioners, and the CECC staff for inviting 

me. 

The Dui Hua Foundation has been engaged for over a decade in 

efforts to uncover the names of individuals imprisoned in China for 

the non-violent expression of their political and religious beliefs. 

Our database of prisoner information includes names of roughly 

22,000 persons imprisoned for these reasons since 1980, of which 

more than 5,800 form an active registry from which we develop 

prisoner lists designed to raise individual cases directly with the 

Chinese Government and encourage better treatment and early release. 

9 

I’d like to start by discussing trends in political imprisonment in 

China. Since roughly the beginning of 2008, there have been clear 

signs that earlier progress toward rule of law in China has stalled, 

or even suffered a reversal, and there is mounting evidence that a 

crackdown is well under way, one particularly targeting members 

of ethnic minorities, government critics, and rights defenders. 

Evidence of this can be seen in the recent sharp increase in 

criminal proceedings for endangering state security, a category of 

crime that includes vaguely defined and arbitrarily applied offenses 

such as splittism, inciting subversion of state political power, and 

trafficking in state secrets for overseas entities. 

State security arrests more than doubled in 2008 compared to 

the previous year, and more arrests and indictments for endangering state security were carried out in China in 2008 and 2009 

than in the entire five-year period preceding. 

Recent statistics suggest that as many as 1,500 Chinese were 

convicted on state security charges in 2009, more than three and 

a half times the number five years earlier. In the Appendix to my 

written statement, I show the data behind this trend. 

Moreover, China’s Supreme People’s Court recently announced 

that these individuals are being punished more harshly, with a 20- 

percent increase in sentences of at least five years’ imprisonment 

in 2009. That includes people serving life sentences and being sentenced to death as well. 

One of those sentences was given to Liu Xiaobo, whose 11-year 

sentence for publishing critical essays on overseas Web sites and 

helping to draft the Charter 08 political manifesto is the longest 

sentence known to have ever been handed down for inciting subversion. Evidence suggests the majority of those punished on state security charges are members of the Tibetan and Uyghur ethnicities, 

many of them detained for engaging in non-violent criticism of government policies. 

The targets of political repression can expect no constitutional or 

legal guarantee that their rights will be protected during the proceedings against them. Defense lawyers, as Professor Cohen says, 

face numerous obstacles in simply trying to get access to meet with 

detainees or to get access to prosecution evidence before a trial, 

and their defense arguments in court fall on deaf ears while decisions about defendants are prepared by Party-dominated adjudication committees, sometimes even before a trial has even taken 

place. 

Once imprisoned, these individuals are seldom offered any clemency through sentence reduction or parole, victims of a pattern of 

discrimination based on policies of strict handling and a system 

that equates good behavior with admission of wrongdoing. This extends also to medical parole as well, even for gravely ill individuals 

such as Hu Jia, Li Wangyang, or many others. 

You mentioned the disturbing case of Gao Zhisheng, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate the work that this Commission has done and 

the personal interest that you yourself have taken in this case. Unfortunately, it appears that more work will need to be done by all 

of us in order to guarantee Mr. Gao’s freedom and safety. 

I believe that the situation that I have described here is a consequence of the Chinese leadership’s acquiescence to a hard-line 

10 

element within the Party that sees harsh criminal justice measures 

as superior to building rule of law as a means of maintaining stability. Their dominance has been at the expense of those who support moving more resolutely along a path of reform and who feel 

frustrated by the recent lack of progress and growing reliance on 

repression in China. 

Now, I believe that an important goal of our collective human 

rights engagement with China should be to support the efforts of 

this second group, particularly at a moment such as this when they 

feel the most embattled. 

In my written statement I offer some concrete recommendations 

for U.S. Policy: Enhancing the bilateral human rights dialogue 

with China, playing a more active role in the human rights institutions of the United Nations, and making more frequent use of this 

Commission’s excellent, and now enhanced, Political Prisoner Database to prepare prisoner lists for use by Members of Congress in 

their interactions with Chinese officials. In the interest of time, I 

will defer a detailed discussion of these recommendations until 

asked to do so later in the hearing. 

Finally, Mr. Chairman, I’d like to thank you again for your leadership in this area and to pay tribute to the longstanding and close 

working relationship that Dui Hua enjoys with this Commission, 

and I look forward to your questions. Thank you. 

Chairman DORGAN. Mr. Rosenzweig, thank you very much. 

Dr. Wan, I’ve already introduced you. You have a medical degree 

from Shanghai Medical University School of Public Health, you’ve 

worked extensively in Citizens Health Rights Education in China, 

and we appreciate very much your willingness to be here and testify. I understand as well, and I think you do at the same time, 

that there is some jeopardy for you to speak publicly. We appreciate, nonetheless, your willingness to do that. I’ll ask you about 

that during the question period, but Dr. Wan, why don’t you proceed? 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Rosenzweig appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF WAN YANHAI, DIRECTOR OF BEIJING 

AIZHIXING INSTITUTE, EXPERT ON HIV/AIDS, HUMAN 

RIGHTS AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN CHINA 

Dr. WAN. Yes, Senator Byron Dorgan. I am Wan Yanhai, Director of Beijing Aizhixing Institute. I’ve been working on, actually, 

HIV/AIDS prevention and care for 20 years, since 1990. My organization, Beijing Aizhixing Institute—has been working on HIV/ 

AIDS, human rights, and civil society development in China for 16 

years, since 1994. 

In the summer of 1994, I had a meaningful conversation with a 

psychiatrist in Beijing—a good friend—that influenced my philosophy about serving people. When told I was being monitored by the 

security agency in China, I said I did not care, and I could still 

manage my work from jail. 

The senior doctor said that if I am sacrificed, nobody benefits. If 

I’m sacrificed, I would not be able to work. It’s a loss. So to continue to keep on with my work that is helpful to others, I need to 

protect myself. 

11 

This philosophy has guided my approach of dealing with the security agency in China, so with great effort and careful attention 

I’ve managed to keep working in China for the past 16 years. In 

the past 16 years, I was briefly detained from August 24 to September 10, 2002, and November 25 to November 28, 2006, and December 27 to December 28, 2007. I left China because of security 

concerns in general in 1997, October 2002, and May of this year, 

but most of the time I’ve been working in China. 

So today, while I’m sitting here and not in prison, I have to say 

that I benefited from the following factors. First, actually, AIDS is 

a public health concern which the Chinese Government may also 

care about. Second, I used to work at the Government Health Education Institute, where I became known to the public and also established good working relations and friendships with individuals 

in the government. 

Government officials who were friendly may also help. The international media coverage also offered some support and protection, 

but I also carefully managed my own activities and took a sensitive 

approach in the language I used surrounding my work. 

I don’t know whether these are the reasons for my success or 

failure, but I’d like to share them with you. First, to be transparent, don’t hide. So that is a general approach of my activities 

to be transparent. Second, to understand that all your activities are 

monitored all the time by security and we need to be careful and 

be sensitive all the time. Third, use a professional approach and 

polite language. Fourth, to avoid personally offending the police 

and keep in communication with them. So, when arguing with the 

police, argue with them on logic, not about the order of things. So, 

understand and be aware of friends and allies inside of the government and be critical not just on Chinese issues, but also be critical 

of other countries. 

So when I was detained by the Beijing State Security Bureau for 

releasing a classified document from August 24 to September 20, 

2002, and also detained by the Beijing Public Security Bureau in 

November 2006, the investigation was similarly focused on my 

funding sources and relations with human rights groups and the 

media and the information provided to foreigners. In 2006, the 

focus of the investigation was on my relationships with overseas 

foundations and the human rights defenders inside of China. 

As a non-governmental organization [NGO] receiving foreign donations, I was really careful when answering questions and insisted that I was serving the Chinese people and China, and we 

happened to receive foreign donations. We also applied for Chinese 

Government funding, although we haven’t received much funding 

from the government side. 

While in detention, I was careful in my use of language and tried 

not to offend the police. Sometimes we chatted. When they asked 

questions, I seriously thought about my response before answering. 

I told the police officers that I was serving the people. If my work 

became too difficult, I could give up. I cooperated with a bottom 

line that I should not harm the third Party. In talks over tea or 

meetings in my office with security agents, I was more open and 

frank and questioned the security department or government policy 

in general. 

12 

As a leader of an organization, we manage the organization in 

a transparent and a professional way and based on the law. We anticipated that the Chinese Government would come to investigate 

any day. So our work, however, has been severely damaged by the 

government’s raid. Our work to get compensation for those infected 

with HIV/AIDS through blood transfusions was canceled in November 2006. 

Many other events were also canceled and we psychologically felt 

bad. We stopped working a month before the Beijing Olympics. For 

a month, we stopped working before the People’s Republic of China’s 60-year anniversary. We had to politically censor ourselves, 

which might damage our solidarity with other organizations. 

I left China via Hong Kong on May 6 this year, after being harassed by multiple government agencies. In the first six months of 

2010, our organization received pressure and harassment from 

about 10 government agencies, including Public Security, State Security, the Tax Department, the Department of Industry and Commerce where we were registered, the Propaganda Department, the 

File Department, et cetera. Human rights advocacy and civil society groups are developing rapidly in China, but human rights defenders and civil society groups are under surveillance and recently 

under attack by the Chinese Government. 

How can the U.S. Government make a difference? First, U.S. 

AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] programs can 

make a difference, but currently I don’t know whether the United 

States has a clear strategy to support civil society groups and 

human rights defenders. Should the United States have an evaluation of its current AID programs in China from a human rights 

perspective? 

Second, information and Internet freedom is crucial in empowering people and protecting people, but if people are not well organized, information itself cannot work. The United States should 

strengthen its work in supporting people in China in their efforts 

to organize in a way that is based on democratic laws and principles. 

Third, the United States should guarantee that the U.S.-based 

businesses will not be used to persecute human rights defenders 

and civil society organizations. Companies involved in the information censorship of the Internet—information to the Chinese people—should be punished in a democratic world. 

Thank you. 

Chairman DORGAN. Dr. Wan, thank you very much. We appreciate your being here and your statement. 

Next, we will hear from Dr. Sophie Richardson, who is the Asia 

Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch. 

Dr. Richardson? 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Wan appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF SOPHIE RICHARDSON, ASIA ADVOCACY 

DIRECTOR, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 

Ms. RICHARDSON. Thank you, Chairman Dorgan, for convening 

this hearing and for your continued leadership on these issues. It 

is equally an honor to be here with you this morning and to work 

13 

with your staff as it is to be with such a distinguished group of fellow panelists. 

I’m going to summarize my remarks to leave time for questions. 

We have written extensively over the past two decades about a 

number of very high-profile political prisoners, including Liu 

Xiaobo, Gao Zhisheng, Chen Guangcheng, and Rebiya Kadeer, the 

Panchen Lama, Tan Zuoren, Huang Qi, the list goes on and on. 

Today I want to highlight two individuals whose cases have gotten rather less attention, but whose treatment we believe represents an alarming development, extraordinarily harsh sentences 

given to those who are not dissenters or critics, but who in many 

ways embody the characteristics that the central government says 

it wants. 

Karma Samdrup is one of the largest private collectors of Tibetan 

antiquities in China. He financed an environmental protection organization, the Qinghai Three Rivers Environmental Protection 

Group. Over the years, the group has won several awards for its 

work and he was praised in the state-run press. However, he was 

arrested in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in January 2010 on 

charges of robbing graves that dated back to 1998. Karma 

Samdrup’s relatives and friends believe that the revival of the decades-old charges stem from his efforts to gain the release of his 

brothers, who had fallen afoul of local officials by criticizing their 

involvement in violating environmental protection laws. In June 

2010, Karma Sondrup received a 15-year sentence. 

Gheyret Niyaz, who you mentioned in your opening statements, 

is a Uyghur journalist and the editor of a popular Web site called 

Uighurbiz. He was detained in October 2009 on charges of endangering state security, and on July 23, 2010, was also given a 15-year 

prison sentence. His so-called crime appears to have been giving an 

interview to the foreign media after the July 2009 ethnic violence 

in Xinjiang, although in those discussions Niyaz cited economic inequality and the role of outside instigators, which is the government’s line in the unrest. 

Although over the years we have observed seemingly random 

persecution of individuals who appeared to pose no overt threat to 

the Chinese Government, the charges and lengthy sentences of 

these two men, we believe, should ring alarms. The two cases suggest a new twist in the nature of political imprisonment, which is 

a theme that Professor Cohen raised, that one can embody the 

qualities that the government claims it wants, people who are reasonably apolitical, entrepreneurial, and involved only in soft, stateapproved causes, only to find themselves arbitrarily deemed a 

threat to state security. 

Put more simply, if these people are considered threats to the 

State, who does not fall into that category? How can people avoid 

such charges? Should they not be in business? Should they not support government-sanctioned causes? Should they stop speaking entirely? 

At the same time, we cannot forget the untold numbers of political prisoners whose names we do not know, those who are arbitrarily detained in the wake of the March 2008 protests across the 

Tibetan plateau and those who are similarly held in ‘‘black jails,’’ 

the facilities that Professor Cohen mentioned earlier. 

14 

We must make a particular effort not to forget those in Xinjiang 

who are the victims of enforced disappearances, meaning statesponsored disappearances, in the wake of protests in that region 

and demand account for them, and we must not forget individuals 

such as Liu Xiaobo who committed the audacious so-called crime 

of asking the Chinese Government to uphold its own Constitution 

and laws, or Cheng Guancheng, who did nothing more than try to 

take the Chinese legal system at its word. 

All of these cases lead us to the conclusion that political imprisonment in China has reached new lows of arbitrariness and that 

therefore all behavior may be subject to some kind of reprisal from 

the government. Your business success today might be a liability 

tomorrow. Your call to end unrest last year may land you in hot 

water today. Your approval from the government at any point is no 

guarantee of a life free of persecution. 

The United States should remain profoundly concerned about the 

Chinese Government’s persecution of its citizens. Until peaceful 

dissent is tolerated, the country cannot be expected to be predictably transparent or stable. 

But in its vast relationship with China, the ever-more arbitrary 

nature of political imprisonment should serve as a reminder that 

many of the U.S.’ other goals and interests—the rule of law, a predictable trade regime, the development of civil society—are at risk 

so long as those in China who share those views and goals are considered potential threats by their government. 

What can the U.S. Government do? We offer four recommendations here today, and I would be happy to elaborate on these. First, 

Secretary Clinton should make a strong, explicit statement that the 

United States is concerned by the noticeably worsening human 

rights environment in China. Continuing to say, as seems to be the 

preferred phrase, that the Unted States and China agreed to disagree over human rights issues is profoundly unhelpful. 

Second, the United States should unambiguously reject the Chinese Government’s attempt to force the United States to remain silent on Tibet and Xinjiang on the basis of the Joint Declaration’s 

recognition of China’s ‘‘core’’ interests. This may strike some as 

merely a semantic debate. It’s not in Beijing, and it’s rhetoric the 

United States needs to be very careful about. 

Third, all senior administration officials should commit to raising 

at least one individual case in every meeting they have with their 

Chinese counterparts, particularly given the administration’s 

claims to taking a whole-government approach to the promotion of 

human rights in China. 

Finally, President Obama should welcome in the White House 

former political prisoners from China to give an unequivocal sign 

of support to China’s fledgling civil society. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Richardson appears in the appendix.] 

Chairman DORGAN. Dr. Richardson, thank you very much. 

Let me ask a general question first. Dr. Richardson, you said, at 

the end of your testimony, ‘‘a worsening situation with respect to 

human rights violations’’ or the ‘‘violations of individual rights in 

China.’’ Mr. Cohen, you referred to that; Mr. Rosenzweig as well. 

15 

When we talk about this, we talk about trends. Is there empirical 

evidence that allows us to say things are getting worse on this 

issue in China, even as China becomes a larger and larger part of 

the commercial world and there’s a lot of travel back and forth, and 

so on? China is increasingly seizing people, denying them their 

basic rights in China and throwing them into prison. So we say it’s 

getting worse. Is there empirical data to back that up or is it just 

our notion that the trend is a bad trend? Dr. Richardson? 

Ms. RICHARDSON. Senator, I guess I would answer that question 

in two ways. I mean, one of the best pieces of empirical information 

is sitting next to me. The fact that the space for civil society in 

China and organizations that were recognized and tolerated, even 

encouraged by the government for 10, 15 years, organizations like 

Dr. Wan’s, organizations like Guo Jianmei’s, organizations like 

Gongmeng, the Open Constitution Initiative, which is funded by 

Yale, these kinds of organizations have come under tremendous 

government pressure in the last 18 months, having been approved 

of for so long, I think is one quite telling indicator. 

The other way I would answer the question is simply that if you 

asked people, I think, 10 or 15 years ago what behavior they needed to refrain from engaging in in order to stay out of hot water, 

people can give you a pretty straightforward and reasonably reliable answer. I think that that can’t be answered so easily anymore 

is what worries us. 

Chairman DORGAN. All right. 

Mr. Cohen? 

Mr. COHEN. As I said, China remains largely non-transparent, although inroads have been made in various ways. You properly 

mentioned the Internet as a prominent one. We have statistics to 

some extent. They’re not sufficient, but they certainly show a 

trend. Mr. Rosenzweig has provided them. I think that’s useful. 

There are other ways. We know the 17th Chinese Communist 

Party Congress, held almost three years ago, enunciated policy 

changes that have been practiced now by the legal elites that operate according to them: judges, prosecutors, officials, law professors, 

lawyers. They all are expected to conform to the new doctrine, and 

the new doctrine is regressive. It is in large part a return to the 

ideology of the pre-1949 liberated areas when China controlled 

roughly 90 million Chinese in rural areas. 

Not only has the policy tightened up, there’s also a lack of emphasis on those features of the system, like defense lawyers, who 

can alleviate some of the hardships of the policies. If you read the 

speech of the head of the Party Legal Committee for the country, 

it’s as though you’re back in the 19th century. He never mentions 

the existence of defense lawyers, only the need for better repression 

through the police, prosecutors, officials, and judges. 

Finally, it is very important, I think, to recognize what is seldom 

recognized. These are not only policy changes, but there have been 

many appointment changes, personnel changes, where people more 

sensitive to professional legal considerations to government under 

law, rule of law, have been replaced by Communist Party 

apparatchiks who really see law only as an instrument of current 

Party policy. 

16 

Chairman DORGAN. Mr. Rosenzweig, you use some data, and 

you’ll probably reinforce that, but it is also perhaps the case with 

the Internet, that some of these cases can ricochet around the 

world quickly by the Internet for those of us that care about who 

is being railroaded and who’s being sent to a prison for exercising 

their right to speak. I guess the question is, is there just more 

transparency, via the Internet and the media, which allows us to 

see who is being shuttled off to prison, or is it, in fact, the case that 

the trend is increasing in political imprisonment? 

Mr. ROSENZWEIG. I think the Internet plays a role in several different ways. First of all, I think over the past, say, 10 years, it’s 

true that a large proportion of political speech, political activity, so 

to speak, in China has migrated to the Internet, takes place on the 

Internet, which on the one hand makes it easier for us on the outside to follow it and to track it. It also makes it, I would say, easier 

for the government to track it as well. 

So the fact that people are migrating this political space to the 

Internet both increases the channels in which that kind of discussion can take place, but it also makes it easier for that activity to 

be curbed. It also creates the opportunity for us to learn about 

those cases. So there is a certain extent to which the increase in 

the amount of information that comes out of China—especially 

compared to 10 years ago—about these kinds of cases, does play a 

factor in increasing our awareness. 

But if you compare the amount of cases that we know about, 

through whatever channels, where we actually know the name of 

a person that has been detained in China for these types of offenses, if you compare that to the kinds of numbers that the Chinese Government provides, and there are very broad statistics that 

they do provide, it’s still a tiny fraction. So in other words, we are 

learning more of the names of people who are being detained for 

these kinds of offenses, but as Dr. Richardson says, there are still 

a large number of cases that we don’t know about as well. 

Chairman DORGAN. Dr. Wan, when you left China in May of this 

year, did your family leave with you? 

Dr. WAN. Yes. 

Chairman DORGAN. And when you left in May, you had previously, I believe, left the country on two other occasions. 

Dr. WAN. Yes. 

Chairman DORGAN. Why did you decide, in May, that you needed 

to leave China? 

Dr. WAN. Yes. In March, we received a visit and pressure from 

multiple governmental agencies and that is quite unusual. So as a 

large NGO which received a large amount of donations from foreign foundations, especially from the United States, it could be a 

risk. 

Chairman DORGAN. Did you fear being arrested at that point? 

Dr. WAN. Yes. Yes. 

Chairman DORGAN. You had been arrested twice before and put 

in jail for short periods of time. Is that correct? 

Dr. WAN. Yes. In 2003, it was four weeks. In 2006, it was three 

days. Yes. Yes. 

Chairman DORGAN. You have come to this country, and I think 

all of us understand that you do very significant work in China on 

17 

the subject of HIV/AIDS, just as an example. Why on Earth would 

the government view that work as potentially subversive or view 

those engaged in that work as needing some extra surveillance? Is 

it because, as you implied, you received some funding from U.S. 

charities or some other assistance from the United States? 

Dr. WAN. I think China might have some big strategy change. 

Before the Olympics, China developed really strong security capacities. After the 60-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist regime, you might think about the 100-year celebration, so they 

might think of longer term strategies as a part of the plan, a new 

wave of crackdown against civil society, and it’s really over with, 

like the long-term Women’s Legal Education Center. Beijing University was sponsoring the Women’s Legal Education Center, which 

is totally not a political organization. 

So the Women’s Legal Education Center worked closely with the 

government and always tried to push people to work along with 

government policy. But they received huge pressure from the government. So, like Oxfam Hong Kong, also got pressure. Oxfam 

Hong Kong worked with the government and has been subject to 

really strong political censorship. 

So even this type of non-political organization received pressure 

from the government. This is the issue. There are some other 

issues. My colleagues, after I left China, two lawyers who are now 

managing our office, both received threats from the police that they 

might be arrested. 

Chairman DORGAN. Just a couple of questions of you, then I 

want to go back to others on the panel. Is the rate of HIV and 

AIDS in China substantial as compared to this country, for example, or other countries in the world? Is it growing? 

Dr. WAN. In general, information on the epidemic is not transparent. So we know three waves of the epidemic. The first is the 

HIV/AIDS epidemic among drug users. The epidemic among drug 

users was first found 20 years ago in China in the border areas. 

So now it’s a national epidemic among drug users, especially 

among the ethnic minorities. 

So the epidemic among drug users mostly happens in ethnic minority areas, like Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and 

Xinjiang. So in the urban cities among the Uyghur minorities, and 

also in other minorities, AIDS infection is very high, as high as 50 

percent of injecting drug users among Uyghur migrants in Beijing 

might have been infected. It’s a national phenomenon. 

So another epidemic is like in the mid-1990s and it’s among 

blood donors. It mostly happened in central China, like the Hunan 

Province. After the infection among blood donors, a lot of people 

who received a blood transfusion or received blood products have 

been infected. So most people suffered a lot in—and in legal aid, 

and many of them have been jailed. So, I provided two documents 

about the hemophiliacs and also the blood victims. So those people 

took a lot of legal actions and petitioned for compensation, and 

many of them have been detained and arrested on different types 

of criminal charges. So now there’s a third wave of epidemic among 

the gay communities. Yes. 

Chairman DORGAN. All right. 

18 

Just two very brief questions, and then I’m going to go on to others. You have not sought political asylum in this country. 

Dr. WAN. No. 

Chairman DORGAN. All right. Do you believe, given the fact—I 

think the New York Times did a very substantial story about your 

work in China and you now have volunteered to come and speak 

about your experience here publicly in Washington, DC. Do you believe you would run into significant difficulty going back to China? 

Dr. WAN. Yes. Without testimony here, I think even if I go back 

to China I would be in a difficult condition for now. But I think 

it’s possible for me to go back to China in the coming future. The 

Chinese civil society and democratic forces are developing rapidly, 

and I think it’s a key moment for Western societies to give a hand 

to support human rights and defending civil society organizations 

and the general democratic parties in China. Yes. 

Chairman DORGAN. This is an important moment, I think, for a 

lot of reasons. But I would just say we’ve had others testify before 

our Commission who have given testimony much more aggressive 

than yours. You’ve been pretty straightforward about your experience. The fact is, you do not gain much favor in China by doing 

so and I think risk arrest upon going back to China. We appreciate, 

for that reason, your courage to come and to share with us your 

experience. 

I want to ask a couple of questions of the other panelists as well. 

Mr. Cohen, perhaps you first, then the others. How much of this 

political imprisonment that we talk about—Gao is a good example, 

but there are many others that we’ve just described—is directed 

from Beijing and from the central government as opposed to being 

driven by errant local law enforcement officials or political officials 

at the local government who believe they’re serving the best interests of their centralized Communist government by taking a look 

at these NGOs and these individuals as being suspect or deserving 

harassment? So, how much of it is directed, do you think, from Beijing? 

Mr. COHEN. There are different levels to appreciate. One, is the 

central-local level. The center classically enunciates a policy or a 

law that’s an enlightened one. The local people frustrate it. That’s 

the traditional Chinese saying: The center has its policies, the locality has its methods of avoiding them. 

So there are terrific tensions in China along those lines. The 

Ministry of Public Security, for example. Under its previous head, 

who is now head of the country’s Political Legal Committee, the 

ministry took many measures to try to strengthen their control 

over the local police. Similarly, with the courts, the central court 

apparatus does not enjoy strong control over the local courts. It’s 

very different from Japan, where you have a central secretariat 

that moves judges around like chess pieces, that appoints them, 

that pays them, promotes them, and if necessary, disciplines them. 

So there is a legitimate central-local problem. 

But it goes beyond that because often the center puts out conflicting policies. On the one hand, it says you must observe the following niceties in protecting people with respect to enforcement of 

birth control laws. It tells that to local officials. At the same time, 

it puts out policies that say to local officials, if the number of births 

19 

in your district exceeds x, you’re going to be fired. So it tells them 

on the one hand, always observe the law. On the other hand, they 

feel if they do observe the law, the number of births will exceed x. 

So, then they have to choose. Do they observe the central law or 

do they violate the central laws on criminal law and criminal procedure and abuse a lot of people to make sure the goal of no birth 

reaches x, and they usually choose the latter. So it’s a conflicting 

central policy. 

The third confusing aspect is, who is the center? The center often 

has conflicting agencies, they have conflicting policies. Who are you 

going to listen to? One ministry may take one position, another 

ministry may take another position. You find even struggles between the court and the procurator, for example. 

Chairman DORGAN. But is there any doubt, for example, Mr. 

Rosenzweig, that the case of Mr. Gao, and many others here, and 

in the database, that the prosecution of these high-profile cases is 

supported by, and perhaps directed by the central government? 

Mr. COHEN. I don’t have any doubt whatever. They may not have 

started that way. 

Chairman DORGAN. Right. 

Mr. COHEN. But once they rise to the level of visibility of concern 

here and elsewhere, these are national policies. When they started 

with the ‘‘blind man,’’ whose picture I’m glad to see you have, Chen 

Guangcheng, I tried to see, it was a local persecution only. 

I wrote an article in the Far Eastern Economic Review that was 

an open plea to the Ministry of Public Security: Is this what you 

want your local public security people to do? Is this how China is 

going to demonstrate to the world how civilized it is? I asked them, 

in effect, to intervene. There were meetings between the center and 

the province and the locality. There were meetings in the provincial 

capital, apparently. But in the end, the local people prevailed. 

For political reasons, the center didn’t want to be seen to be 

interfering with the important birth control policy. But when it 

gets to this level, the center makes the decision. But who is the 

center? It’s not the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that can’t even give 

you a straight answer about what happened to Gao. They’re constantly asking the Ministry of State Security, what should we tell 

the foreigners? We have a press conference tomorrow. What are we 

going to say? Then they are given lines to read, some of which are 

just facetious. They’re ridiculous, or they would be if it weren’t so 

serious. 

Chairman DORGAN. When this Commission, or when I write to 

the Chinese Ambassador to the United States a specific letter or 

set of letters about specific prisoners, in this case Gao, my assumption is that those official communications from the U.S. Government go to the central government in China. While the cases may 

have emanated somewhere else, may have started somewhere in 

the provinces, the justification for and the defense of what the Chinese have done with Gao, that decision is made at the central government, my guess is. 

Mr. Rosenzweig, you have been very helpful to us as well with 

information about Chinese prisoners. I asked you about trends. 

What kinds of things can we do at this point to continue to drive 

20 

a higher profile on this issue of human rights in China and our 

great concern about the treatment of these individual prisoners? 

Mr. ROSENZWEIG. Well, there’s some structural things that can 

be done—Professor Cohen has mentioned this as well—with regard 

to the human rights dialogue. Increasing the frequency of the 

human rights dialogue, I think, would be an important step to 

take, not only to signal the importance with which the United 

States treats human rights issues in China and treats these cases 

of political imprisonment in China, but also to allow for the development of better working relationships with Chinese interlocutors 

that may yield better results. 

The fact that the human rights dialogue has not been active over 

the past several years, I think, has created a situation where communications between the two governments on human rights issues 

have not gone very smoothly. 

One thing about the dialogue, I think, that would be important, 

something I feel somewhat strongly about, is, I guess, the tone of 

the dialogue. I think it’s important, when we talk about engagement with China on human rights issues, to emphasize critical engagement, which doesn’t mean, as Dr. Richardson says, agreeing to 

disagree. It means something quite different from that. It makes 

the disagreements that we may have on human rights issues part 

of the process and recognizes that the disagreements and working 

through those disagreements is necessary in order to achieve 

progress. 

And why that is important is because I think that over the past 

several years—and this is not only true of the United States, I 

think this is true of European governments as well—there has 

been some confusion about how to engage with China, a rising 

China, as we say, on human rights issues when there are so many 

other things that we want to talk with China about that are also 

important, as important if not at some times more important than 

human rights issues, although I think human rights issues are so 

broad that human rights can be part of many dialogues. 

But I guess the thing that I want to say is that it’s my feeling 

that the Chinese Government may not agree with us all the time 

on our positions with regard to human rights, but I think they respect a consistent message, as opposed to a message where we 

downplay human rights at certain times. 

I think that feeds into a sense that we, the United States, or our 

European friends, don’t actually treat it as seriously as we say we 

do. So our consistency with regard to our commitments to human 

rights, I think, is perhaps one of the most important things that 

we as a government can do. 

Chairman DORGAN. I want to ask Dr. Richardson about the case 

of Xue Feng, an American businessman who is now in prison in 

China. My understanding is that he was arrested and then convicted of a law that was passed after he had been charged. This 

is an American businessman that was involved in a commercial 

transaction in China, a transaction that he was not aware was illegal. 

The information that he acquired in China, that is, the location 

of oil wells and so on, was apparently widely and publicly available 

in China for sale on Web sites. After he purchased that informaVerDate Mar 15 2010 17:41 Nov 21, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00024 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\3AUG10.TXT DEIDRE
21 

tion, he was detained, and Mr. Cohen has talked about the abuses 

surrounding his detention and the need to change the U.S.-China 

Consular Convention to better protect American business people in 

China. 

That’s a long question by way of asking, with more and more 

business being done in China by U.S. citizens, does this case portend some real concern about the future? Might some U.S. business 

people believing they’re doing something that’s perfectly harmless 

in China wind up in prison for those commercial activities? 

Ms. RICHARDSON. I’ll see if I can give you a straightforward answer to that question. Xue Feng’s case came on the heels both of 

a roughly similar case against executives of the Australian mining 

company, Rio Tinto, and the primary person in that case who was 

accused was a naturalized Australian Chinese. The other three 

were Chinese citizens. The lead protagonist there was also charged 

originally with state security crimes, and those were later 

ratcheted down to economic espionage crimes. 

But these are the kinds of cases that we’ve seen more where 

businessmen who were engaged in activities they seemed to think, 

ostensibly, at least, are legal, then to find out the hard way that 

somebody doesn’t agree with them about that. One of the alarming 

aspects of the state secrets laws in China is that they’re incredibly 

elastic and they can be used to charge people for all sorts of behavior for which they can’t even see the evidence that’s presented 

against them. They can’t have access to counsel or family members. 

These are real problems that I think we will see more business 

people bump up against. 

At the same time, it’s probably also worth mentioning that earlier this year the Chinese Government, or it was at the very end 

of 2009, for the first time in 50 years, the Chinese Government executed a foreigner, a British man of Pakistani descent who was desperately psychiatrically unwell and who had been found guilty of 

trafficking drugs. He, too, was not given the kind of consular access 

he should have been. He was not given access to appropriate physicians. The British Government intervened to no avail. 

We have all sat here and talked a great deal about the kinds of 

abuses that the Chinese Government regularly metes out against 

its own citizens. I think people should pay more attention to the 

fact that we’re starting to see some of those abuses be meted out 

against other people’s citizens, too. 

Chairman DORGAN. Let me ask, why would the work of Dr. Wan 

be targeted in any particular way? Dr. Richardson, you are observing this from the outside. Why on Earth would the Chinese Government take a look at a group of people that are working on HIV/ 

AIDS and decide there might be problems with respect to running 

afoul of the government dictates here? 

Ms. RICHARDSON. Well, I think it goes back to a comment that 

you made in your opening remarks, Senator, about how today’s political prisoners are perhaps tomorrow’s leaders, that some of the 

people we’re seeing persecuted are precisely the kinds of people 

who have the inclinations and the expertise and the organizational 

capabilities to address some of the most pressing problems inside 

China. Why are they perceived as a threat to the government? 

What they do is embarrassing. It shows ways in which the central 

22 

government has failed to answer certain kinds of problems, or even 

acknowledge that they exist. 

In some instances, these organizations’ work exposes evidence of 

local corruption. It’s not immediately controlled by the local authorities and that can sometimes unnerve them. In a style of 

government that really knows only two strategies to deal with 

problems, which is either to co-opt them or to crush them, what 

we’ve seen is these organizations essentially getting shut down instead of being put to work for comparable purposes to what the 

government says it wants. 

Chairman DORGAN. Mr. Cohen? And then I’m going to come back 

for a further question of Dr. Wan. 

Mr. COHEN. I wanted to help answer your initial questions about 

the American businessman of Chinese descent. First of all, in these 

cases, state secrets and similar ones, it’s impossible for the outsider 

to know what has taken place. Was the conduct harmless, was it 

not harmless? There is no way to know. Documents he’s accused 

of acquiring were not labeled ‘‘secret.’’ There was no obvious way. 

After the person is detained, the police get a certification from the 

National State Secrets Bureau that says, ‘‘Yes, these are state secrets. He should have known about it.’’ 

Then comes the court hearing. Are you allowed to see the documents? Are you allowed to challenge whether or not they should be 

state secrets? Can you produce witnesses? Can you cross-examine 

those who certified the documents as secrets? None of those things 

is possible. It’s an ipse dixit. You’re told, this is it, you should have 

known it. It isn’t the law that was changed. The law is so broad, 

change or not is irrelevant. It’s the application of the law by the 

agencies involved and it’s an ex post facto declaration that is unchallengeable. This is a state secret. 

Now, if there were transparency, if you had an open trial, if you 

had a fair opportunity for defense, then there’d be some way to say, 

were these state secrets or not? Was this man damaging the interests of China or not? But we don’t have that. That is a very sad 

situation. 

Second, I should say we have to be aware that our own conduct 

influences Chinese perceptions. We can’t merely preach at them, 

that they’re not playing by the rules or they’re losing by the failure 

to play by the rules. I personally feel, if China were transparent, 

people would see some of these cases do involve violations by any 

government’s point of view. I’ve been involved in a number of these 

cases. 

In some, the persons involved were spying for Taiwan. But nobody believes that in the outside world because the procedures are 

so unfair. We lump all these cases, and the people come out of 

China later with political help and portray themselves as legitimate scholars, hiding the fact of what they did, and China enables 

them to do it by this self-defeating Chinese policy of secrecy. 

The other point is, our own government’s behavior can really affect this. I was shocked to see that, in looking into the question of 

Chinese conformity to its obligations under the consular convention, that the U.S. Government is a rampant violator of consular 

conventions with other countries, not necessarily with China. 

23 

But when they see hundreds of cases where State and Federal 

Governments fail to notify detained foreigners, you have a right to 

contact your consulate, and fail to notify the governments of those 

detained people, you have a right of access to these people, even 

in death cases, what can people think of us? So it’s not a simple 

question of only looking at China. We can’t say ‘‘do as I say, not 

as I do.’’ International law is based on reciprocity. 

Chairman DORGAN. The mechanisms exist in this country to 

raise very serious questions in a significant way about practices in 

this country. The same is not true in China, and that seems to me 

the significant difference. 

Dr. Wan, what do people in China, ordinary folks, know of the 

things we’ve been discussing here today? Do they know of the case 

of Gao Zhisheng? Do they know of the case of Chen Guangcheng, 

and other high-profile cases, or are they unaware of these men because there’s not much information on them inside the country of 

China? 

Dr. WAN. Most people receive information through the Internet, 

through social groups, emails. I think civil society organizations 

play a very important role to keep communication in these communities. So although most civil society organizations are nonpolitical, 

they play a really important role of networking and information 

sharing. So in general, people may not know the case of Liu Xiaobo 

or Gao Zhisheng, but many people on the Internet, people who are 

active on the Internet, they know the information. A lot of activists 

work on the cases. 

Chairman DORGAN. Mr. Rosenzweig, can you give me some information about the number of Tibetans who may have been detained 

based on the protest that started in March 2008? Do we have any 

idea of what the consequences of that event have been? 

Mr. ROSENZWEIG. I wish I could give you numbers that I would 

feel comfortable with, concrete numbers about that, but I can’t. As 

we have said this morning numerous times, the empirical basis for 

our discussions of these questions is quite limited and to a large 

extent we are forced to rely on anecdotal evidence, combined with 

this limited data. 

What I can say is that, based on the statistics that we’ve seen 

over the years and that we’ve collected over the years, it is clear 

that, for example, in the first half of the last decade, state security 

cases involving Uyghurs represented as much as two-thirds of the 

total in the country. This is in a normal year, by which I mean a 

year without a major uprising. 

The fact that in 2008 we had an incident in Lhasa that grew to 

spread throughout the Tibetan plateau over a long period of time, 

where you had repeated reports of individuals being detained for 

taking to the streets and protesting—and when I say taking to the 

streets and protesting, for the most part I mean peacefully protesting, going out and shouting statements, handing out leaflets. 

Then the following year, in Urumqi, an initial demonstration 

that turned into a very violent demonstration, for which many people have been detained. The fact that in these two years you’ve had 

incidents of that scale only increases the likelihood that we’re talking about most of these detainees on state security charges being 

24 

either Tibetans or Uyghurs. We’re talking numbers well into the 

hundreds in both years. 

Chairman DORGAN. Mr. Cohen, you have been observing China 

back to the 1960s, as I understand it, and written about it. Give 

me your assessment of where we are at this point. We’re having 

a hearing about human rights abuses and political prisoners. Still, 

in all, these issues are a subset of a country that has changed enormously. 

So give me your assessment of where we are with China, what 

you expect these human rights abuses to mean to the future of 

China. Give me your assessment. 

Mr. COHEN. The Party is the victim of its own conflicting policies. 

It’s a paradox. On the one hand, since December 1978 when Deng 

Xiaoping and company decided they needed to have a great economic development, they decided they needed a formal legal system—not one that would subject themselves to law, but would 

create a legal system. They had virtually nothing then. 

In 30 years, what they have done is impressive in terms of laws, 

regulations, other norms that come from international agreements, 

bilateral and multilateral, in terms of the reestablishment of strong 

institutions like the courts, the prosecution, arbitration organizations, in terms of legal education, which was nothing when I first 

went to China. 

I remember in 1973, writing in the Harvard Law School Bulletin, 

‘‘The first thing to know about the Chinese legal system, legal education, is that there isn’t any legal education.’’ Now you have over 

700 law departments and law schools, hundreds of thousands of 

people imbibing the rule of law ideology, often American style, 

because the tens of thousands of law professors they now have essentially believe in what we have accomplished and what other 

democratic countries have accomplished. 

You now have about 200,000 judges, 180,000 prosecutors, 

170,000 lawyers, hundreds of thousands of legally trained people 

who, while not called lawyers, are staffing government agencies at 

every level in China. You have these law professors who are influential law reformers. Every business now that amounts to anything 

has to have legal advice, many of them have in-house counsel. 

In other words, in 30 years there is an overlapping series of legal 

elites that didn’t exist before. This is a broad constituency for law 

reform. Things are bubbling up, and these are the people, many of 

whom are frustrated by the post-17th Party Congress—you might 

say conservative, or I might say reactionary—line. 

They’re upset by being displanted, supplanted by Party hacks 

taking over their jobs. So this is impressive. The leadership has responsibility for creating this system and they have amended the 

Constitution to foster human rights, to respect property rights, et 

cetera. 

On the other hand, three days a week they tell their people, don’t 

take all this seriously. This is all bourgeois stuff. We will have our 

socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics, and that means 

no real rule of law in the sense of law governing government officials. So it’s a paradox. The intensity of that paradox is increasing. 

It makes me go back to the original Hegelian-Marxist-Leninist 

thought which I never had much interest in about the unity of opVerDate Mar 15 2010 17:41 Nov 21, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00028 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\3AUG10.TXT DEIDRE
25 

posites, because you have two opposite trends in China now. 

They’re increasingly coming into conflict. Although social-economic 

conditions are better, significantly better, those very successes 

breed more people who were dissatisfied. 

Chairman DORGAN. It seems to me that the ‘‘opening’’ of China, 

going back some decades now, precipitated a series of changes 

you’ve just described. One, is the desire and the development of a 

market system to participate in the world economic order, at the 

same time, even as you develop a market system, you continue a 

Communist government with Communist control. There are certain 

tensions that are automatic with respect to that. 

When you begin to integrate with the rest of the world in a market system, inevitably your institutions come under scrutiny, and 

should, and must. Because if we’re going to do business there, we 

need to understand, with what capability can we do business and 

believe that business agreements will be honored. 

Chairman DORGAN. I was in Hanoi, Vietnam at one point, speaking with the head of the Vietnam government, a Communist government, and then met with the American Chamber of Commerce 

in Hanoi. One of the things they said is, ‘‘We need more government here in Vietnam,’’ the American Chamber of Commerce. I 

said, ‘‘Well, that is an unusual kind of request by a Chamber of 

Commerce group.’’ They said, ‘‘What we mean by that is you can’t 

do business in areas unless you have the ability to write contracts, 

have administrative law, go to court to enforce agreements, and so 

on. It’s the only way you can really do business.’’ 

So when you open up a country like China or Vietnam, you must 

have those kinds of capabilities in place and the institutions with 

which to enforce the rule of law. Then those institutions will come 

under intense scrutiny. That’s what is happening here. 

That’s why we have circumstances where substantial things have 

changed, China has moved, no question about that, the standard 

of living for the average Chinese has improved some, and we understand all the impact of that on the world. 

There are probably several hundred million people in China who 

now aspire to drive an automobile at some point, and will be looking for a gas station once a week as well, just as they see the rest 

of the world doing. So all of these things have an impact on us, on 

China. 

This issue of, with more scrutiny on their institutions, which 

should happen and is happening, and then the scrutiny of people 

like this sitting in the darkest prisons in the world on charges that 

ran them off to prison because they dared question their government. Is that of interest to our country? Sure it is. 

I think what all of you have said today is that our relationship 

with China must be a relationship in which we understand our mutual responsibilities and we understand the economic alliances and 

various things that we do together, but we should always, in our 

relationship with China, continue this scrutiny with respect to the 

way its institutions are working and continue to press the issue of 

human rights. 

We have gone into a circumstance where it’s kind of up and 

down, hills and valleys, on whether we’re engaged in human rights 

questions with respect to China in our normal discussions or 

26 

whether we kind of give human rights the backseat treatment. 

There ought not be a case where our relationship with China does 

not always press the issue of human rights. That should be our requirement. 

That is our responsibility, in my judgment. If you are going to 

be a player in this world on the world stage, and China certainly 

is, then we believe there are certain responsibilities that attach to 

that position. That is the purpose of this Commission, as I indicated earlier, to keep the records and the stories of those unfortunate people who are now in prison in China as political prisoners, 

and to also address a range of other issues. 

I wanted to just conclude today by saying that all of you have 

extensive experience, and I appreciate very much your willingness 

to contribute your thoughts and your experience to the Commission’s efforts to understand and evaluate this relationship and 

where it’s been and where it’s heading. Your sense is very important. 

Dr. Wan, you perhaps bring more to this table in terms of your 

personal safety and your own future than the other three. The 

other three witnesses do their work in safety. If you attempt to go 

back to China, I assume you have to worry about your personal 

safety, so we thank you very much for your courage and your willingness to speak out today. 

We thank all of you very much for traveling here today to Washington, DC and being a part of this hearing. 

This hearing is adjourned. 

[The prepared statement of Representative Levin appears in the 

appendix.] 

[Whereupon, at 11:59 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.] 

(27) 

A P P E N D I X 

28 

PREPARED STATEMENTS

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JEROME A. COHEN

AUGUST 3, 2010

Chairman Dorgan and Co-Chairman Levin: 

I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this Hearing as well as for the 

Commission’s invaluable contributions to American understanding of China. 

Today’s topic—‘‘Political Prisoners in China: Trends and Implications for U.S. Policy’’—is as broad as it is important. Because introductory statements are necessarily 

brief, I will only emphasize several significant points and am confident that my distinguished colleagues will provide more comprehensive coverage. 

WHAT IS ‘‘POLITICAL? ’’ 

The Chinese government generally denies that any of its criminal prosecutions 

are ‘‘political.’’ People are supposedly convicted for violating specific provisions of the 

Criminal Law, not for their political conduct. Yet some provisions of the Law are 

so vague and all-encompassing that it is a simple matter to charge democratic activists and a huge range of peaceful protesters with their violation, especially since the 

courts are under Communist Party control. 

For example, for trying to exercise the freedoms set forth in China’s Constitution, 

many people have been convicted of ‘‘endangering state security.’’ We know names 

such as Liu Xiaobo and Hu Jia, but the non-transparency of China prevents an accurate accounting. The statistics we do have, however, indicate a troubling trend. 

Many people who initially had no interest in political reform became ‘‘political’’ 

offenders when the government suppressed their efforts to protest property deprivations, labor abuses or religious restrictions. Even lawyers who were not originally 

‘‘political’’ have been sent to prison for too effectively representing protesters, activists and other controversial clients. 

But ‘‘political’’ can also embrace many other types of cases. I am sure that the 

American petroleum geologist Xue Feng, who last month was sentenced to eight 

years in prison for ‘‘gathering intelligence’’ and ‘‘unlawfully sending abroad state 

secrets,’’ thought he was engaging in commercial activity when he helped his employer, a leading U.S. oil consulting company, purchase a database regarding oil 

resources. Yet his case became ‘‘political’’ because of its inevitable impact on SinoAmerican relations and international business. 

To take a very different situation, China’s leadership politics was reportedly involved in the recent prosecutions of organized crime figures and officials who allegedly corrupted the city of Chongqing. 

There are multiple reasons why the Chinese call their system for administering 

justice a ‘‘political-legal’’ system. 

POLITICAL TRIALS ARE MARRED BY EVEN MORE UNFAIRNESS THAN NON-POLITICAL ONES

Despite the dedicated law reform efforts of many Chinese officials, judges, lawyers 

and scholars, criminal justice is still the weakest link in the country’s burgeoning 

legal system. Gradually, some improvements in the Criminal Procedure Law and 

Criminal Law continue to be made, even in China’s current very conservative political climate. But in non-political cases as well as political ones, law enforcement 

agencies frequently violate their country’s laws or interpret them in ways that defeat legislative purposes. 

Justice in non-political cases is often marred by arbitrary arrest, illegal search, 

extended incommunicado detention, torture and coerced confession, barriers against 

defense lawyers who seek to meet their detained clients, gather evidence and learn 

the prosecution’s case, and failure to require prosecution witnesses to come to court 

or to allow defense witnesses to appear. There are also the distorting effects of widespread corruption and protean ‘‘guanxi,’’ the networks of personal relationships that 

are a dominant feature of Chinese life. 

Political trials feature the same abuses plus additional ones. Often they are closed 

to all but defense counsel, and even when ‘‘open’’ they are restricted to selected 

auditors. Lawyers who wage a vigorous defense at trial risk sanctions against themselves, including disbarment and prosecution. Court leaders rather than trial judges 

usually make ‘‘sensitive’’ decisions, and the local Party political-committee generally 

controls the entire process. 

29 

WHO ARE ‘‘PRISONERS? ’’ 

Punishment of political offenders is not confined to criminal cases. Political offenders are often severely punished outside the formal criminal justice system. Police 

do not need to ask any prosecutor or judge for approval before they sentence someone to up to three years of ‘‘reeducation through labor’’ or subject them to similar 

supposedly ‘‘non-criminal’’ sanctions. 

Persistent critics and petitioners with legitimate grievances regularly suffer even 

less formal but harsh punishments. Some are committed to mental hospitals, many 

more to notorious ‘‘black jails.’’ Moreover, many rights activists who nominally are 

‘‘free’’ actually have their freedoms denied by low-visibility police harassment and 

surveillance that continue without end. Some civil liberties lawyers avoid prison but 

lose their right to practice law. 

Political offenders who have served their prison sentence suffer further constraints after release if they have also been sentenced to ‘‘deprivation of political 

rights’’ for a period. Yet even after that deprivation has expired, they continue to 

be restricted, often confined to their home, without any legal authority or time limit, 

as is the case with unfrocked Shanghai lawyer Zheng Enchong. In effect they are 

‘‘prisoners’’ for life. I hope this will not be the fate of the blind ‘‘barefoot lawyer’’ 

Chen Guangcheng when his sentence of four years and three months is completed 

in September. And at least one famous lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, after disbarment, torture and a prison term, has mysteriously been ‘‘disappeared’’ by the authorities, perhaps forever. 

The many Chinese democratic activists who live outside their country and are not 

allowed to return are also ‘‘prisoners’’ in a different way because they are excluded 

from their own society. 

So the definition of ‘‘political prisoners’’ is broad and complicated. 

FOREIGNERS ARE NOT IMMUNE TO THIS UNFAIR SYSTEM, ESPECIALLY IN ‘‘POLITICAL’’ 

CASES

In announcing this Hearing, the Commission recognized the impact that criminal 

injustice can have on international commercial cooperation with China. Foreign 

business personnel as well as other foreigners are subject to the same inadequacies 

in China’s criminal justice legislation as the Chinese people and to many of the 

same abuses that occur in implementing the laws, especially if their case becomes 

‘‘political’’ for one reason or other. 

Although Americans and many other foreigners have some additional protections 

under bilateral and multilateral consular agreements that their governments have 

concluded with China, those agreements are themselves imperfect and are sometimes ignored in practice by the Chinese government. 

That is the significance of the now highly-politicized case of American citizen Xue 

Feng, which is currently on appeal. It illustrates not only some of the problems experienced by Chinese criminal defendants but also the operation of the U.S.-China 

Consular Convention that is supposed to alleviate some of those problems when 

Americans run afoul of Chinese law. I attach, as Appendix 1, an ‘‘op-ed’’ article that 

I recently published on the Xue case. 

SHOULD THE U.S.-CHINA CONSULAR CONVENTION BE REVISED TO BETTER PROTECT

INDIVIDUALS?

The Xue case shows the need to consider amending the Convention in at least 

four ways that would enhance the protection of Americans who fall into the hands 

of China’s law enforcers: 

(1) Reconfirm that the host state is required to notify the sending state whenever one of the latter’s nationals is placed under ‘‘any form of detention,’’ as the 

Convention now puts it, by spelling out the various forms of detention that 

China has imposed on Americans over the thirty years of the Convention’s life, 

so there can be no excuse for failure to notify; 

(2) Reduce the maximum time allowed between detention and notification to 

consular officials, and between notification and the first consular visit; 

(3) Clarify that consular officials and the detainee have a right to discuss any 

matters including the details of the detainee’s case; and 

(4) Confirm that consular officials have the right to attend defendant’s trial 

even if the trial is ‘‘closed’’ to the public and family. 

Of course, the protection of individual rights is not the only factor to be considered 

when contemplating revision of the Convention. Under the Convention, Chinese nationals and officials are entitled to reciprocal consular rights in the U.S., and some 

U.S. federal or state agencies may object to the suggested proposals for enhancing 

30 

individual rights because of their impact on the handling of criminal cases against 

Chinese in this country. Moreover, the Chinese government will have its own ideas 

about whether and how to revise the Convention. 

The Xue case revealed the need to improve one aspect of U.S. consular assistance 

to Americans detained in China. From their first visit with Xue, he reportedly asked 

consular officials to make his case known to the public. Although able and conscientious, they declined to do so, because his wife wished to keep the matter confidential. Thus, for two years Xue lost the potential benefits that publicity might have 

brought him. In future cases, our consular officials should honor the detainee’s wishes in this respect unless there is strong reason to doubt his mental stability. 

One additional benefit of seeking renewed U.S. government attention to consular 

issues with China is that it will remind many members of the Executive Branch and 

the Congress, not to mention the American people, of the appalling record of both 

our federal and state governments in complying with the multilateral and bilateral 

consular commitments we have made to many countries. The long-standing, irresponsible U.S. failures to notify foreign governments of their nationals’ detentions, 

and foreign detainees of their rights to contact their governments, even in capital 

cases, place us in a poor position to ask for compliance by other countries. Although 

the U.S. government has taken steps to rectify this stupefying contempt for international agreements and international law, the topic deserves detailed Congressional and public scrutiny. I attach as Appendix 2 to these remarks an ‘‘op-ed’’ article 

that I will publish tomorrow about the U.S.-China Consular Convention. 

‘‘POLITICAL PRISONERS’’ AND THE OFFICIAL U.S.-CHINA HUMAN RIGHTS DIALOGUES

It is good news that the Obama and Hu Jintao administrations have renewed the 

official bilateral human rights dialogue and agreed to revive the official ‘‘experts’ 

dialogue.’’ It is regrettable that these meetings have often been postponed and in 

any event proceed at a glacial pace inappropriate to the urgency of the problems. 

Like discussions that other Western governments have conducted with China on 

human rights, these discussions have been generally disappointing, at least to most 

outside observers. Perhaps greater transparency might give us a more favorable 

view, but I doubt it. I am glad that the Department of State is earnestly seeking 

new methods of investing these dialogues with greater significance. Heaven is wonderful, but the problem is how to get there! 

I believe that both official dialogues should take place every quarter. The traditional desultory, and often interrupted, pace, has to be quickened. Moreover, joint 

committees should be established on various important topics, including those we 

discuss today, and they should operate on a continuing basis and prepare reports 

for advance submission to participants in the quarterly meetings. Although the Chinese side shies away from discussion of concrete cases, analysis of actual cases illuminates human rights problems more than consideration of abstract principles. 

Higher level, responsible leaders should take part in these meetings, not merely 

to symbolize that the governments take these matters seriously but also to bring 

the matters to the attention, and increase the understanding, of the highest leaders 

and their staff, those who make decisions. 

Is it too much to hope that, on the Chinese side, one quarterly meeting might involve the leader of the Central Party Political-Legal Committee, usually a member 

of the Politburo Standing Committee, or one of his key deputies? After all, they really run China’s legal system. 

Is it unreasonable to expect the participation of the President of the Supreme People’s Court in another quarterly session and of the Procurator-General and the Minister of Justice in other sessions? 

Of course, the United States would have to produce their counterparts, and in a 

meaningful way. But aren’t the human rights of 1.4 billion Chinese and 300 million 

Americans worth a higher priority than either government has given them to date? 

Thank you for the opportunity to present a few thoughts. I look forward to the 

statements of the other panelists and our discussion with the Commission. 

31 

APPENDIX 1 


579054.eps
32 

APPENDIX 2 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JOSHUA ROSENZWEIG

AUGUST 3, 2010

Mr Chairman, I am privileged to be invited to participate in this hearing and I 

would like to thank you, your fellow commissioners, and the CECC staff for inviting 

me. Today I represent The Dui Hua Foundation, which has been engaged for more 

than a decade in an effort to uncover the names of individuals imprisoned in China 

for the non-violent expression of their political and religious beliefs. Our database 

of prisoner information includes the names of roughly 22,000 persons imprisoned for 

these reasons since 1980, of which more than 5,800 form an ‘‘active registry’’ from 

which we develop prisoner lists designed to raise individual cases directly to the 

Chinese government and encourage better treatment and early release. 


579055.eps
33 

Recent decades have seen China emerge as a global power, fueled by strong economic growth, its importance as a trading partner, and its key diplomatic role with 

regard to trouble-spots such as North Korea, Sudan, or Iran. During this period, 

many Chinese have enjoyed substantial improvements in living standards. To many 

developing countries, China serves as a model for the delivery of basic education 

and health care. Though not without caveats—for instance, the ballooning gap between rich and poor—China’s substantial progress in these areas cannot be denied. 

However, progress in the area of civil and political rights has unfortunately not kept 

up with economic and social development. 

Over the past 21⁄2 years in particular, roughly since the beginning of 2008, there 

has been a palpable sense that earlier progress towards rule of law in China has 

stalled, or even suffered a reversal, and there is mounting evidence that a crackdown is underway, one particularly targeting members of ethnic minorities, government critics, and rights defenders. 

One manifestation of this can be seen in the recent sharp increase in criminal proceedings for ‘‘endangering state security’’ (ESS) a category of crime that includes 

vaguely defined and arbitrarily applied offenses such as ‘‘splittism,’’ ‘‘inciting subversion of state political power,’’ and ‘‘trafficking in state secrets for overseas entities.’’ ESS arrests more than doubled in 2008 compared to the previous year, and 

more arrests and indictments for ESS were carried out in China in 2008 and 2009 

than in the entire five-year period from 2003 to 2007.1 In China, arrest almost inevitably leads to trial and trial to conviction. The most recent official statistics suggest that as many as 1,500 Chinese were convicted on state security charges in 

2009—more than 31⁄2 times the number convicted for ESS in 2004.2 (Data for the 

period from 1998 to 2009 are included in the appendix to this statement.) 

Moreover, China’s Supreme People’s Court reports that these individuals are 

being punished more harshly, with a 20 percent increase in sentences of at least 

five years’ imprisonment in 2009.3 One of these harsh punishments was handed 

down to Liu Xiaobo, whose 11-year sentence for penning a few essays critical of the 

government and helping to draft the ‘‘Charter 08’’ political manifesto is the longest 

sentence known to have ever been handed down in China for the crime of ‘‘inciting 

subversion.’’ 4 And statistics suggest that a majority of those punished on state security charges are members of the Tibetan and Uyghur ethnicities, many of whom 

were detained for engaging in non-violent protests against government policies.5

But we mustn’t limit our concern to formal criminal proceedings on state security 

charges, because there are other kinds of political imprisonment in China. Charges 

of ‘‘illegal business activity’’ are used against the publishers of politically themed 

books or distributors of Bibles.6 Muckraking journalists and environmental activists 

are charged with ‘‘extortion’’ or ‘‘fraud,’’ and bloggers who criticize corruption or 

wrongdoing by local officials can find themselves imprisoned for ‘‘defamation.’’ 7

Countless practitioners of Falun Gong or members of unauthorized Christian sects 

are locked away for ‘‘using a cult to undermine implementation of the law’’ and subjected to specialized regimes of discipline and re-programming.8 And I have not even 

yet mentioned the system of administrative incarceration known as ‘‘re-education 

through labor,’’ in which so-called ‘‘minor offenses’’ can be punished for up to three 

years without proper trial and without legal counsel—a system whose survival despite violating Chinese law testifies to its expedient value to the preservation of stability.9

The targets of political repression can expect no constitutional or legal guarantee 

that their rights will be protected during the proceedings against them. The geologist Xue Feng, an American citizen, was held incommunicado and subjected to physical and psychological abuse as police failed to honor their obligations under China’s 

consular agreement with the United States, and he languished in detention for more 

than two years while procedural deadlines were repeatedly ignored.10 Defense lawyers face obstacles in their attempts to fulfill basic duties, such as meeting with 

detained clients and getting access to prosecution evidence, and their eloquent, reasoned defense statements fall on deaf ears in the courtroom while decisions against 

their clients are made by external, Party-dominated ‘‘adjudication committees,’’ 

sometimes before a trial has even begun.11

Once imprisoned, these individuals are seldom offered any clemency, victims of a 

penal system that equates good behavior with acknowledgment of wrongdoing and 

requires that sentence reduction and parole for those convicted of endangering state 

security be ‘‘strictly handled.’’ 12 Compared with a decade ago, fewer of the individuals whose cases are raised with the Chinese authorities by Dui Hua or through 

the bilateral human rights dialogues are seeing any changes to their sentences— 

a situation that is especially true for Tibetans and Uyghurs. This extends to medical 

parole, even for gravely ill individuals like Hu Jia, who suffers from serious liver 

disease, or Li Wangyang, an activist who has spent nearly all of the past 21 years 

34 

in prison, much of that time hospitalized because of poor health. On the rare occasion when medical parole is granted to political prisoners, it tends to be as in the 

case of Zhang Jianhong, whose health under the burden of neuromuscular disease 

deteriorated to the point where he was unable to breathe without the assistance of 

a machine.13

Perhaps the most outrageous—and telling—example of China’s worsening human 

rights environment has been the government’s failure to provide a credible accounting of the whereabouts of Gao Zhisheng, the outspoken rights lawyer whose repeated criticism of government policies and defense of Falun Gong practitioners and 

political activists ultimately landed him a 2006 conviction on charges of inciting subversion by a Beijing court. Given a suspended sentence, Gao and his family were 

subjected to intense police surveillance, interrupted by a period of detention in late 

2007 in which his captors allegedly tortured him so severely that friends said it left 

him ‘‘a broken man.’’ 

In February 2009, shortly after Gao’s wife and two children left China to seek 

asylum in the United States, Gao disappeared. We now know that for more than 

a year, he was secretly shuttled from location to location and kept under police custody, during which time he was subjected to physical and psychological abuse. After 

a sustained period of pressure by the international community, Gao mysteriously reappeared in Beijing this past April and gave two interviews: one, blessed by his captors, in which he announced to the Associated Press he was ‘‘giving up activism’’ 

and one during an unauthorized meeting with a small group of friends and diplomats in which he described in detail his ordeal over the past year.14 Several days 

later, Gao disappeared once more—presumably again into the hands of security 

agents acting with reckless disregard for individual rights, rule of law, or the consequence of their actions on China’s international image. 

I believe that what we are witnessing today is a manifestation of a Chinese leadership that, though it may exude confidence in its dealings with the outside world, 

sees mounting signs of instability at home in the form of petitioners seeking redress 

for grievances, growing numbers of mass incidents, eruption of long-simmering ethnic tensions in Lhasa and Urumchi, and the messy, hard-to-control Internet, with 

its channels for expression of critical opinion and transmission of uncensored news. 

A sense of imminent and perpetual threat has played into the hands of a hard-line, 

‘‘stability-above-all-else’’ element in the leadership, one particularly associated with 

the security forces, the military, and the propaganda apparatus. Though the factors 

underlying these developments in China have been primarily domestic, confusion in 

the international community about how best to engage with ‘‘rising China’’ on 

human rights has clearly emboldened some Chinese leaders to pursue certain policies despite international opposition. 

For the time being, at least, China’s leadership appears to be pursuing what the 

Chinese scholar Yu Jianrong has called ‘‘rigid stability,’’ instead of heeding the 

voices of those inside and outside the Party who advocate taking stronger steps toward establishment of a more legitimate rule-of-law system, one that would weaken 

the authority of the security forces and see Party oversight of court decisions receding in favor of a more independent judiciary.15 But as long as the perception remains of a high level of threat from ethnic separatists, hostile foreign forces, mass 

incidents, and political subversives, this hard-line faction will try to continue to 

hang on to its remaining strongholds long enough at least to have an influence over 

the formation of the new leadership group at the 18th Party Congress in 2012. 

Notwithstanding the strong position of the hard-liners, proponents of expanding 

civil rights and further developing rule of law in China still have a voice, particularly via the media. On a few occasions, backlash against local government officials’ 

abuse of criminal defamation charges to prosecute critics of corruption and malfeasance have forced authorities to acknowledge they overstepped their authority.16

Major media outlets have been vocal in exposing serious problems such as the use 

of ‘‘black jails’’ to incarcerate petitioners, mysterious deaths of detainees in policerun detention facilities, and the torture of criminal suspects.17 There have been stirring calls for reform to the laws governing state secrets and household registration, 

and last month new rules took effect that should in theory prevent illegally obtained 

evidence and testimony from being used in criminal proceedings.18

In short, there appears to be a constituency within the Party (not to mention 

among Chinese legal experts and practitioners and the wider population) that supports moving more resolutely along a path of reform, a group that may feel frustrated by the recent lack of progress on political reform and growing reliance on 

repression. An important goal of our collective human rights engagement with 

China should be to support the efforts of this constituency, particularly at such a 

moment when it may feel most embattled. 

At this point, I would like to offer the following recommendations: 

35 

First, the bilateral human rights dialogue between the United States and China 

should be enhanced and expanded. To this end, we recommend: 

• Doubling the frequency of the dialogue to make it a semi-annual event. 

This would facilitate the establishment of relationships with Chinese interlocutors and better reflect the importance the US government attaches to the 

human rights situation in China. A semi-annual dialogue would also match the 

frequency of China’s human rights dialogue with the European Union. 

• Ensuring that detailed, bilingual prisoner lists an integral part of the dialogue process. It is also essential that the US government hold China accountable for responding to these requests for information in a sincere and timely 

manner. 

• Establishing a working group on the rights of political prisoners. Thanks 

to efforts by the State Department, China has agreed in principle to establish 

working groups as part of the bilateral human rights dialogue. The United 

States should actively follow up on this agreement and propose that a working 

group be established on the rights of political prisoners. 

The United States must be prepared to engage China critically in the area of human 

rights. Disagreements can be expected, but engagement must be about more than 

simply ‘‘agreeing to disagree.’’ It should involve recognizing the value of substantive, 

critical discussion in which all parties are held equally accountable for their commitments to human rights under international law. 

Second, we further recommend that the United States play a more active role in 

the human rights institutions of the United Nations, including the Human Rights 

Council and its process of ‘‘universal periodic review.’’ I attended the Human Rights 

Council’s February 2009 review of China’s human rights situation and was disappointed that the United States chose not to take the opportunity to raise its 

concerns during that process. Without stronger leadership and commitment to upholding international human rights law by the United States, there is real reason 

for concern that this important multilateral institution will continue to allow countries like China to defend their problematic rights records by appealing to ‘‘unique 

national circumstances’’ and the notion that some human rights are more fundamental than others. The United States should also help to ensure that the treatybased bodies and ‘‘expert-driven’’ processes of the United Nations continue to play 

a vigorous role in the monitoring and protection of human rights in all countries, 

including China. 

Our third recommendation concerns taking better advantage of this Commission’s 

fine Political Prisoner Database. In a 2008 visit to Beijing, Commissioner Christopher Smith and former Commissioner Frank Wolf handed over a list of Chinese 

political prisoners to the former Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing. This was the 

first time that members of Congress had handed over a list of prisoners derived 

from the CECC database. This database is an invaluable resource, expertly developed and maintained by Commission staff members, and we are proud to contribute 

information from our own database to this project on an ongoing basis. We would 

like to recommend that the Com-mission encourage members of Congress to make 

more frequent use of relatively short, focused lists as a routine part of their interactions with Chinese officials. 

In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for 

your leadership in this area and to pay tribute to the longstanding and close working relationship The Dui Hua Foundation has had with this commission over the 

past decade. I shall be happy to answer any questions you or other commissioners 

may have. 

36 

APPENDIX: SELECTED STATISTICS ON POLITICAL CRIME IN CHINA, 1998–2009 

Source: Data for 1998–2008 come from China Law Yearbook (1999–2009). For estimates, see notes 1 and 2 below. 


579051.eps 579052.eps 579053.eps
37 

NOTES

1See The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘Official Data Show State Security Arrests, Prosecutions in 

China Exceeded1,000 in 2009,’’ (12 March 2010): http://www.duihua.org/media/press/statements/ 

statement—on—ESS—in—2009.htm. 2The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘Supreme People’s Court ‘Work Report’ Indicates More Trials, 

Heavier Sentences for Endangering State Security in 2009’’ (20 July 2010):http:// 

www.duihuahrjournal.org/2010/07/supreme-peoples-court-work-report.html. 3 Ibid. 

4 Verna Yu, ‘‘Liu’s Sentence a Grim Warning to Dissidents,’’ South China Morning Post (27 

December 2009): A1. 5 According to statistics collected from the Xinjiang Yearbook, ESS trials in the Xinjiang 

Uyghur Autonomous Region typically accounted for between one-half to two-thirds of the national total during the early 2000s. See The Dui Hua Foundation, Statistics on Political Crime 

in the People’s Republic of China: Volume 3, Occasional Publications of The Dui Hua Foundation 23 (December 2006): 23–24. Provincial data and anecdotal evidence suggest that allegations 

of espionage may contribute another large portion of China’s state security cases, especially in 

predominantly Han areas. See The Dui Hua Foundation, Reference Materials on China’s Criminal Justice System 5 (June 2010): iii, 13–17. 6See, for example, documents related to the case of Yang Maodong (Guo Feixiong), in The 

Dui Hua Foundation, Selected Decisions From Chinese People’s Courts, Occasional Publications 

of The Dui Hua Foundation 26 (June 2008) or the case of Shi Weihan, in ChinaAid, ‘‘Christian 

Shi Weihan Sentenced to Three Years in Prison for Printing and Giving Away Bibles’’ (11 June 

2009):http://www.chinaaid.org/qry/page.taf?id=105&—function=detail&sbtblct—uid1=1212&— 

nc=28225309e65c49b23121c31f64d3a39e. 7See, for example, the case of Qi Chonghuai, in Committee to Protect Journalists, ‘‘Chinese 

Journalist Sentenced to Four Years’’ (13 May 2008): http://cpj.org/2008/05/chinese-journalist-sentenced-to-four-years.php; the case of Wu Lihong, in The Dui Hua Foundation, Selection of Cases 

from the Criminal Law, Occasional Publications of The Dui Hua Foundation 27 (September 

2008): 16–18; and the case of Fan Yanqiong et al., in Chinese Human Rights Defenders, ‘‘Three 

Fujian Digital Activists Convicted as Thousands Gather in Landmark Protest’’ (16 April 2010): 

http://chrdnet.org/2010/04/16/three-fujian-digital-activists-convicted-as-thousands-gather-in-landmark-protest/. 8See The Dui Hua Foundation (trans.), ‘‘Notice Regarding Printing and Distribution of ‘Implementation Measures for Assessment of Education and Conversion of ‘‘Falun Gong’’ Prisoners,’ ’’ 

Reference Materials on China’s Criminal Justice System 5 (June 2010): 44–48. 9See The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘Professors Yu Jianrong and Jiang Ming’an Spar Over Future 

of Re-Education Through Labor’’ (9 July 2010): http://www.duihuahrjournal.org/2010/07/professors-yu-jianrong-and-jiang-mingan.html. 10 Charles Hutzler, ‘‘Chinese Court Sentences US Geologist to 8 Years,’’ Associated Press (5 

July 2010); Jerome A. Cohen, ‘‘Justice Denied,’’ South China Morning Post (21 July 2010). 11See The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘A Day in the Life of a Chinese Defense Lawyer’’ (9 July 

2010):http://www.duihuahrjournal.org/2010/07/day-in-life-of-chinese-defense-lawyer.html; Maggie 

Chen, ‘‘Freedom of Speech Defence Bound to Fail,’’ South China Morning Post (7 June 2010): 

A6; and The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘Only in China: ‘Adjudication Committees’ Serve Judicial 

System,’’ Dialogue 39 (Spring 2010): 6–7. 12See The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘Chan Yu-lam Sentence Reduction Sheds Light on How Prisoners Are Rewarded for Good Behavior’’ (8 August 2009): http://www.duihuahrjournal.org/2009/ 

08/chan-yu-lam-sentence-reduction-sheds.html 13See The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘Systemic Sickness: Diagnosing the Ills of Medical Parole in 

China,’’ Dialogue 39 (Spring 2010): 1–3. 14 Charles Hutzler & Isolda Morillo, ‘‘Crusading Chinese Lawyer Gives Up Activism,’’ Associated Press (7 April 2010); Paul Mooney, ‘‘Beijing’s Mafia Justice for Lawyer They Won’t Lock 

Up but Can’t Set Free,’’ South China Morning Post (13 June 2010): A12. 15See China Digital Times, ‘‘Yu Jianrong: Maintaining a Baseline of Social Stability’’ (6 March 

2010):http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/yu-jianrong-maintaining-a-baseline-of-social-stabilitypart-i/ (first of a multi-part series of translations). 16See Joshua Rosenzweig, ‘‘China’s Battle Over the Right to Criticize,’’ Far Eastern Economic 

Review (May 2009): 12–15. 17 Andrew Jacobs, ‘‘A Rare Chinese Look at Secret Detentions,’’ New York Times (27 November 2009): A10; Human Rights Watch, ‘‘An Alleyway in Hell’’: China’s Abusive Black Jails (12 

November 2009); The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘Zhejiang Daily Compiles Morose Compendium of 

‘Unnatural Deaths’ in Detention’’ (25 June 2010): http://www.duihuahrjournal.org/2010/06/ 

zhejiang-daily-compiles-morose.html; The Dui Hua Foundation, ‘‘Zhao Zuohai Case Provokes Responses on Legal Protections from Chinese Public, Government’’ (2 June 2010): http:// 

www.duihuahrjournal.org/2010/06/zhao-zuohai-case-provokes-responses-on.html. 18These rules have been translated by The Dui Hua Foundation: http://www.duihua.hk/ 

hrjournal/evidence/evidence.htm 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF WAN YANHAI

AUGUST 3, 2010

Senator Byron Dorgan, Commissioners: 

I am Wan Yanhai, director of Beijing Aizhixing Institute. I have been working on 

HIV/AIDS prevention and care for 20 years, since 1990. Our organization, Beijing 

38 

Aizhixing Institute, or Beijing Aizhi Action Project, has been working on HIV/AIDS, 

human rights, and civil society development for 16 years—since 1994. 

In the summer of 1994, I had a meaningful conversation with a psychiatrist in 

Beijing that influenced my philosophy about serving the people. When mentioning 

being monitored by security agencies in China, I said that I didn’t care and I could 

still manage my work from jail. The senior doctor said that if I am sacrificed, nobody benefits; and if I am sacrificed, I will not be able to work. It is a loss. To continue to carry out my work that is helpful to others, I need to protect myself. 

This philosophy has guided my approach to dealing with security agencies in 

China. Through great effort and careful attention, I have managed to keep working 

in China for the past 16 years. 

In the past 16 years, I was briefly detained from August 24 to September 20 in 

2002; November 25 to 28 in 2006; and December 27 to 28 in 2007. I left China because of security concerns in January 1997, October 2002 and May of this year. But 

most of the time, I have been able to continue my work in China. 

Why am I sitting here, and not in prison? I have to say that I benefited from the 

following factors: 

1. HIV/AIDS is a public health concern, which the Chinese government also 

cares about. 

2. I used to work at the government health education institute, where I became known to the public and established good working relationships or friendships with individuals in government. 

3. Government officials who were friendly helped. 

4. International media coverage also offered some support and protection. 

But I also carefully managed my own activities and took a sensitive approach in 

the language I used surrounding my work. I don’t know whether these are reasons 

for my success or failure. But, I’d like to share these with you. 

1. Be transparent, don’t hide. 

2. Comport yourself as if you are being monitored all of the time and be sensitive to all potential risks. 

3. Use a professional approach and appropriate language. 

4. Avoid personally offending police and keep good communication with them. 

5. When arguing with police, do so with regards to their logic, not the basis 

of their order. 

6. Be aware of friends and allies inside the government, and everywhere. 

7. Be critical not only of China but also of the United States and other countries. 

When I was detained by the Beijing State Security Bureau for releasing a classified document, from August 24 to September 20 of 2002, and detained by the Beijing 

Public Security Bureau in November of 2006, the investigations were similar, focused on our funding sources, relationships with human rights groups and media, 

and information provided for foreigners. In 2006, the focus of investigation was on 

my relationships with overseas foundations and human rights activists inside 

China. As a nongovernmental organization (NGO) receiving foreign donations, I was 

very careful when answering questions. I insisted that I was serving the Chinese 

people and China, and we happened to receive foreign donations. And we also applied for Chinese government funding, although not much funding has been provided for us. 

While in detention, I was careful in my use of language and tone, and tried not 

to offend police. Sometimes we chatted. When they asked questions, I seriously 

thought about my response and then answered. I told police officers that I was serving the people—if my work became too difficult and dangerous, I could give up. I 

cooperated with a bottom line that I should not harm a third party. 

In talks over tea and meetings in my office with security agents, I was more open 

and frank, and questioned security departments or government policy in general. 

As a leader of an organization, we managed the organization in a transparent and 

professional way and based on the law. We anticipated that the Chinese government 

will come to investigate any day. 

Our work, however, has been severely damaged by government threats. Our conference on compensation for those infected with HIV/AIDS through blood transfusions was cancelled in November 2006. Many other events were also cancelled. 

Time was wasted. We psychologically felt bad. We stopped working a month before 

the Beijing Olympics for two months. We stopped working a month before the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) 60-year celebration. We had to politically sensor ourselves, which might damage our solidarity with other organizations and people. 

I left China via Hong Kong on May 6 of this year after being harassed by multiple 

government agencies. In the first six months of 2010, our organization received presVerDate Mar 15 2010 17:41 Nov 21, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00042 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 U:\DOCS\3AUG10.TXT DEIDRE
39 

sure and harassment from about 10 agencies, including public security, state security, the tax department, the department of industry and commerce where we were 

registered, propaganda department, the fire department, etc. 

Senators, human rights advocacy and civil society groups are developing rapidly 

in China. But human rights defenders and civil society groups are under severe surveillance and recently under attack by the Chinese government. How can the US 

government make a difference? 

1. US AID programs can make a difference, but currently I don’t know 

whether the United States has a clear strategy to support civil society groups 

and human rights defenders. Should the United States have an evaluation of 

its current aid programs in China from a human rights perspective? 

2. Information and Internet freedom is crucial in empowering people and protecting people. But if people are not well organized, information itself can’t 

work. The United States should strengthen its work of supporting people in 

their efforts to organize in ways that are based on democratic rules and principles. 

3. The United States should guarantee that US-based businesses will not be 

used to persecute human rights defenders and civil society organizations. Companies involved in information censorship and that provide privacy information 

to the Chinese government should be punished in a democratic world. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SOPHIE RICHARDSON

AUGUST 3, 2010

Human Rights Watch has written extensively over the past several years about 

the Chinese government’s persecution of scholars, activists, lawyers, and others as 

a means of crushing dissent. We and others have raised many well-known cases— 

Liu Xiaobo, Gao Zhisheng, Chen Guangcheng, Rebiya Kadeer, the Panchen Lama, 

Huang Qi, and Tan Zuoren—and the many problems therein, ranging from baseless 

charges that clearly violate the Chinese Constitution to torture in custody and denial of access to lawyers and family members. 

Human Rights Watch continues to believe, as we have since December 2008, when 

Liu Xiaobo was arrested, that the government’s actions toward him reflected an 

overall political hardening in China. The failure of the international community and 

the US government to respond forcefully then contributed to the most severe sentence passed since the introduction of the crime of ‘‘inciting subversion’’ in the PRC 

criminal code in 1997. Nor is there any doubt that Secretary of State Clinton’s statement just two months after the sentencing, that human rights should not ‘‘interfere’’ 

with other aspects of the US-China relationship, was profoundly unhelpful. The 

string of harsh convictions against dissenters that followed Liu’s sentence should 

not come as a surprise. 

Today Human Rights Watch wishes to highlight two individuals whose cases have 

gotten less attention but whose treatment we believe represents an alarming development: the extraordinarily harsh sentences given recently to those who are not dissenters or critics, but who in many ways embody the characteristics the government 

says it desires. 

Karma Samdrup is one of the largest private collectors of Tibetan antiques in 

China. He financed an environmental protection organization, the Qinghai Three 

River Environmental Protection group, after the Chinese government began a massive effort to protect the environment of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. Over the 

years, the group has won several awards for its work, and he was praised in the 

state-run press. However, Karma Samdrup was arrested in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in January 2010 on charges of robbing graves dating back to 1998. In late June 

2010, Samdrup received a 15 year sentence. 

Karma Samdrup’s relatives and friends believe that the revival of the decade-old 

charges stems from his efforts to gain the release of his two brothers, who were arrested in August 2009, after the local environmental protection group they had created had tried to bring attention to various alleged environmental abuses by local 

officials, including the hunting of protected species. His two brothers are also in jail, 

one serving a 21-month reeducation through labor sentence, and the other a fiveyear prison sentence, both for alleged state security offenses. This is one of the most 

extreme cases of arbitrary persecution that Human Rights Watch has witnessed in 

decades. 

Gheyret Niyaz is a Uighur journalist and the editor of a popular website called 

Uighurbiz. He was detained in October 2009 on charges of ‘‘endangering state security,’’ and on July 23, 2010, received a 15 year prison sentence. His ‘‘crime’’ appears 

40 

to have been giving an interview to the foreign media after the July 2009 ethnic 

violence in Xinjiang, although in those discussions Niyaz cited economic inequality 

and the role of outside instigators in the unrest. 

Although over the years Human Rights Watch has observed seemingly random 

persecution of individuals who appeared to pose no overt threat to the Chinese government, the charges and lengthy sentences against Samdrup and Niyaz should ring 

alarms. 

These two cases suggest to us another twist in the nature of political imprisonment: that one can embody the qualities the government proclaims it wants—apolitical, entrepreneurial, involved only in ‘‘soft,’’ state-approved causes—and still find 

oneself arbitrarily deemed a threat to state security. Put more simply, if these people are considered threats to the state, who does not fall into that category? How 

are people to avoid such charges—should they not be in business? Should they not 

support government-sanctioned causes, or turn down prizes from the government? 

We must also not forget the untold number of political prisoners whose names we 

do not know—those arbitrarily detained in the wake of the March 2008 protests 

across the Tibetan plateau and those similarly held in ‘‘black jails,’’ secret and illegal detention facilities used to remove petitioners and other ‘‘undesirables’’ from city 

streets. We must make a particular effort not to forget those in Xinjiang who are 

the victims of enforced disappearances following the ethnic violence in that region 

in July 2009 and demand account for them. And we must not forget individuals 

such as Liu Xiaobo, who committed the audacious ‘‘crime’’ of asking the Chinese 

government to uphold its own Constitution and laws, or Chen Guangcheng, who 

tried to make the government’s own legal systems function. 

All of these cases lead Human Rights Watch to the conclusion that political imprisonment in China has reached new lows of arbitrariness, and therefore no behavior is safe—your business success today might be a liability tomorrow; your call to 

end unrest last year might land you in hot water today; your approval from the government at any point is no guarantee of a life free of persecution. 

The United States should remain profoundly concerned about the Chinese government’s persecution—until peaceful dissent is tolerated, the country cannot be expected to be predictably transparent or stable. But in its vast relationship with 

China, the ever-more arbitrary nature of political imprisonment should serve as a 

reminder that many of the United States’ other goals and interests—the rule of law, 

a predictable trade regime, the development of civil society—are at risk so long as 

those in China who share those views are considered potential threats by their government. 

We offer the following recommendations as ways of ameliorating these problems: 

First, Secretary Clinton should make a strong, explicit statement that the United 

States is concerned by the noticeably worsening human rights environment in 

China. 

Second, the United States government and its officials should unambiguously reject the Chinese government’s attempt to force the United States to keep silent on 

Tibet and Xinjiang on the basis of the Joint Declaration’s recognition of China’s 

‘‘core interests.’’ 

Third, all senior Obama administration officials should commit to raising at least 

one individual case in each meeting with their Chinese counterparts, particularly 

given the administration’s claims to taking a ‘‘whole of government’’ approach to the 

promotion of human rights in China. 

And, finally, President Obama should welcome in the White House former political prisoners from China to give an unequivocal signal of support to China’s fledgling civil society. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. SANDER LEVIN, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM

MICHIGAN; COCHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

AUGUST 3, 2010

We hold this hearing today in order to shine a spotlight on political imprisonment 

in China. As this Commission has documented, for the last several months, the Chinese government has engaged in an increasingly harsh crackdown on lawyers and 

human rights defenders. Political repression, political imprisonment, and the tightening of controls over criminal defense attorneys, human rights lawyers, and the 

legal profession in general has led some Chinese legal experts to conclude that the 

rule of law in China today is in ‘‘full retreat.’’ 

To promote the rule of law in China, it is vital that we publicize and seek the 

release of political prisoners—people detained or imprisoned for peacefully exerVerDate Mar 15 2010 17:41 Nov 21, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00044 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 U:\DOCS\3AUG10.TXT DEIDRE
41 

cising their human rights under China’s own Constitution and laws, or under China’s international human rights obligations. These rights include peaceful assembly, 

freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom of expression—including the 

freedom to advocate for peaceful social or political change, and to criticize government policy or government officials. 

China’s political prisoners include some of the country’s most capable and socially 

committed citizens—scholar and writer Liu Xiaobo, labor and democracy advocate 

Hu Mingjun, HIV/AIDS advocate Hu Jia, attorney Gao Zhisheng, journalist Gheyret 

Niyaz, environmentalist Karma Samdrub, and thousands of others. Lawyers, labor 

advocates, religious adherents, advocates for ethnic minority rights, writers, scholars, civil society leaders, and businesspeople are in prison for exposing corruption, 

poor working conditions and environmental problems, for posting online commentary critical of the government or Communist Party, and for trying to organize 

without advocating violence. They must be released. If the Chinese government 

would engage these public-minded citizens instead of making them the targets of 

brutal repression, then it would unleash constructive forces in Chinese society that 

are poised to address the very social problems with which the government and Party 

now find themselves overburdened, including rampant corruption, occupational safety and health, environmental degradation, and police abuse. 

Last month, this Commission completed an enhancement of its online Political 

Prisoner Database. The Commission’s database provides a unique and powerful resource for governments, NGOs, educational institutions, and individuals who research political and religious imprisonment in China, or who advocate on behalf of 

political prisoners. The enhancement roughly doubled the types of information available to the public, enabling individuals, organizations, and governments better to 

report on political imprisonment in China and to more effectively advocate on behalf 

of Chinese political prisoners—and people around the world have been doing just 

that. The number of ‘‘hits’’ to the database from individual users, NGOs, academic 

institutions and governments around the world has increased dramatically. 

Stability in China is in the national interest of the United States. The Chinese 

government’s full and firm commitment to openness, transparency, the rule of law, 

and the protection of human rights, including worker rights and civil and political 

rights, marks a stability-preserving path forward for China. Anything less than the 

Chinese government’s full and firm commitment to protect and enforce these rights 

undermines stability in China. 

The United States and China’s engagement on trade and other matters has never 

been as extensive as it is today. The potential of this engagement in the future to 

bring prosperity and stability depends on China’s applying its laws equally and fairly, in accordance with international human rights norms. That will require an end 

to political imprisonment. This hearing and the Commission’s newly enhanced Political Prisoner Database both will play a critical role in enabling governments, NGOs, 

educational institutions, and the general public around the world to monitor China’s 

progress toward that end. 

42 

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD

REPRESENTATIVE CASES FROM THE CECC UPGRADED POLITICAL

PRISONER DATABASE


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Æ 


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