Chinese Rights Lawyer Gao Imprisoned in Far Western China

Gao Zhisheng, the human rights lawyer who has been persecuted by China’s communist authorities since late 2006, will spend the next three years in a remote prison, according to his brother.

Gao Zhiyi, Gao Zhisheng’s brother, told media on Jan. 1 that he received word from the authorities that Gao will be imprisoned in Shaya County, Xinjiang, a remote province where he was stationed decades ago in the military.

Gao was arrested on Aug. 16, 2006. On Dec. 22, 2006, Gao was given a suspended sentence of three years in prison, with a period of probation of five years. The sentence meant that if he broke his probation within that time, he could be sent to jail for the original term.

As the five-year anniversary of his sentencing approached last month, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) security forces claimed that Gao violated his probation and would be jailed. Initially under house arrest, Gao ended up spending several years of his sentence in extralegal custody and was repeatedly subject to beatings and a range of extreme tortures, as documented in letters he wrote and in an interview he gave The Associated Press.

Almost immediately after the 2006 sentence Chinese security forces began kidnapping Gao, subjecting him to beatings, then releasing him before kidnapping him again—for increasingly long periods. He was disappeared entirely in February 2009, not resurfacing until April 2010 to grant an interview with The Associated Press, before vanishing again.

In that interview he disclosed being beaten almost to death by security forces. “That degree of cruelty, there’s no way to recount it,” he told AP. “For 48 hours my life hung by a thread.”

A chorus of international criticism had led up to his brief reappearance in April 2010. AP published the interview in January 2011, just prior to Hu Jintao’s visit to the United States.

The purpose of shutting Gao away in remote Xinjiang, Gao Zhiyi said, was to make it difficult for family to visit him. “They haven’t assisted us about what we should do, we can only try to come up with a way to visit him,” he said in an interview with New Tang Dynasty Television.

Gao’s wife, Geng He, said she was extremely worried after hearing about the sentence. “If they’re really locking Gao Zhisheng up there, the CCP must have ulterior motives, they want to shut him far away, basically throwing him into exile there,” she said in an interview with NTD Television. “They want the world to forget about him.”

Hu Jia, a well-known human rights activist who has himself been jailed by the Party, expressed his commitment to visit Gao, despite the resistance of communist authorities. “I am in the right on this,” he said. “What they’re doing is illegal, all the things they’ve required of me are illegal.”

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