Chinese human rights and the one that got away

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The Chinese authorities have begun deploying a ‘softer type of violence’ against dissidents. That’s the good news told to me by Professor Fu Hauling, head of the University of Hong Kong’s law faculty. I don’t know whether he is a fan of Monty Python, but he certainly looks on the bright side of life (dee-dum, dee-dum).

The Chinese constitution, he told me, is a ‘sleeping beauty’ that only needs to be awoken to play the role she is supposed to play. ‘China would then be a very decent society,’ Fu said.

Fu was in London to speak at the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute panel discussion on the independence of lawyers in China. He was the one that got away, because the two main speakers at the discussion, professor Mo Shaoping and lawyer He Weifang, had been stopped from boarding their aeroplane at Beijing airport and were still in China.

Prime minister David Cameron was leading a delegation to China at the same time. Was this a coincidence, I asked Fu, or were the Chinese authorities – or the all-powerful Party – sending a message to the UK government? Not at all, he replied. It was simply unhappy that the Nobel prize had been awarded to democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo. It was cracking down on anyone ‘politically suspect’ who might want to attend the prize-giving ceremony, Fu said.

So that’s alright, then. Except wasn’t China’s government embarrassed to see itself splashed all over the west’s newspapers, and on the radio and TV, as a repressive regime still – not so much an economic tiger as an economic pariah?

Fu replied: ‘China is still learning how to deal with the outside world as an economic superpower. We are expected to behave differently now, but old habits die hard. Ten years ago nobody would have been surprised at what we have done. Today, nobody would be surprised if North Korea had done it. China has to re-learn how to perform on the stage of the international community.

‘I believe very strongly that international trade will change us by association. The government is pushing back against this change, but it is happening. We are a very different country already than we were 30, 20 or 10 years ago. Then a single phone call would have had Mo and He locked away somewhere for years with no access to lawyers or publicity.’ And that is when Fu used the phrase: ‘It’s a softer type of violence.’

But why lawyers, I asked? What have they done to get on the wrong side of the Party? Fu said: ‘They are seen as an organising force that brings isolated individuals together in a common cause. The milk scandal [when milk was found to have been contaminated with melamine] was a case in point. The government would have liked to have dealt with the victims one by one. But lawyers brought 5,000 victims together in a class action, which in the government’s eyes was destabilising society.’

And what can UK lawyers do to help their Chinese counterparts? Fu said: ‘It’s easy to talk about the rule of law, but how exactly do you do it? We know about liberal constitutions in the abstract, but we don’t know how they actually work. We’d like to see more of our lawyers coming to the UK, sitting in your law firms and seeing how things are done. It’s not a case of destroying the Party. An independent legal profession and the Party can co-exist.’

Or looking on the bright side of life: ‘Everything is possible,’ Fu said.

Meanwhile, Mo Shaoping and He Weifang were able to circumvent the travel ban by participating in the panel discussion via video link from Beijing.

They spoke of the challenges faced by lawyers in China, notably the problem of undue political influence in bar associations, where the secretary general is often a member of the justice department. Also mentioned were the difficulties faced by criminal lawyers in meeting clients, and also the problem of getting witnesses to testify.

The speakers concluded that there is a need for a true legal profession to be created in China, where lawyers, judges and prosecutors all work for justice to be done and not against one another. All speakers agreed on the importance of debates and exchanges and highlighted the need for the younger generation of lawyers to play an active role, particularly in public interest cases.