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Verna Yu

Wang Yu had her eyes shut and was panting nervously. The normally spirited lawyer, who has been held incommunicado in police custody for three months, was visibly distressed in footage shown on a state television newscast last Saturday.
In a separate shot, her husband Bao Longjun, also detained since July, broke down in tears, clasping his hands over his head.
A narrator said Wang fainted while Bao broke down after hearing that their son had been caught after he entered Myanmar earlier this month while trying to flee abroad with the help of two men.
However, what the state broadcaster failed to mention was that earlier 16-year-old Bao Zhuoxuan had had his passport confiscated after he and his father were about to board an aircraft to go to Australia, where he was to start school in early July.
READ MORE: The Chinese rights lawyer denied right to see his lawyer
His mother, a rights lawyer seen as a thorn in the side of the authorities, was taken away hours after she saw them off at the airport.
After they were barred from leaving the country, Bao Zhuoxuan was separated from his father and roughly handled by security agents. He was held for two days before he was sent to stay with his grandparents.
Later, the police said he could not go abroad and was forbidden from communicating with his parents’ friends, lawyers and the media. He has since been living under round-the-clock surveillance.
His parents were the first of more than 290 people to be taken away in a sweeping crackdown on rights lawyers and activists since July. They have been placed in “residential surveillance” – a form of solitary detention that can last up to six months – on a charge of “incitement of subversion of state power” and denied visits from lawyers or family.
While the crackdown was seen as an effort by the authorities to punish those involved in the rights defence movement, it was not limited to the lawyers and activists themselves. The retaliation has also been extended to their loved ones.
Liu Xiaoyuan, a partner at the Fengrui law firm that is at the centre of the crackdown, said Bao Zhuoxuan was one of at least three children of the lawyers at his firm who had been barred from going abroad. Several lawyers at Fengrui, including Wang, have been singled out by the state media as belonging to “a criminal gang” for their legal activism.
Liu’s own 21-year-old son, a university undergraduate, applied for a passport earlier this month in preparation for studying abroad next year, but police told him he would not get one, Liu said.
He said the son of another Fengrui lawyer, Yu Hejin, also a university student, was stopped at the airport when travelling to Britain on an exchange visit in August.
The 15-year-old son and five-year-old daughter of another lawyer, Li Heping – taken away during the crackdown and still unaccounted for – have also been denied passports, said Wang Qiaoling, Li’s wife. She was also detained at a Beijing police station for five hours in early August after her essays were carried by overseas websites.
The Chinese authorities have long resorted to collective punishment of the family members of those people regarded by the state as “troublemakers”, but lawyers and family members said the authorities now seemed to be employing the practice more readily, and that the retaliation made a mockery of the party’s pledge to “rule the country with law”.
“My son is being stripped of his legal rights just because of me,” Liu said. “This is like going back to the Cultural Revolution.”
Liu said police had previously been to his wife’s office to investigate his family.

Wang Qiaoling said she and her children were now living in constant fear. The children were traumatised after they watched police take their father away and raided their home.
“I fear every knock on the door… I fear that they will take me away again,” she said. “My little girl asked: why are police bad people?”
The concept of zhulian –- the implication by association of family members of political criminals – is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. In imperial dynasties, even distant relatives of political prisoners could be put to death. During the Cultural Revolution, children or spouses of people seen as “enemies of the state” were persecuted just because of their “bad background”.
Professor Jerome Cohen, a China law expert at New York University, said the Communist Party was still using collective punishment to force prisoners to “confess” to alleged crimes, even though the practice was abolished more than a century ago in the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
“The authorities evidently think it is an effective tool, since it can transform even the most courageous dissident into the Communist Party’s compliant victim,” he said.
When veteran journalist Gao Yu was detained on the charge of leaking state secrets abroad last year, the authorities took away her son at the same time. Later, she confessed on state television that she “endangered national interests”. She later reneged, saying that the confession was coerced. She was sentenced to seven years in jail this year.
Other cases of collective punishment abound.

We’re very angry. The children are innocent
Zhou Fengsuo
Liu Xia, the wife of Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, has been under house arrest since he won the award in 2010.
Geng Ge, the daughter of rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, was followed to school by security agents and the family was under constant surveillance before the family fled to the US.
Zhou Fengsuo, a former Tiananmen pro-democracy movement student leader who planned to take Bao Zhuoxuan to the US embassy in Thailand, said he and others were trying to rescue him from suffocating surveillance in China.
He said they had little choice but to smuggle him out of the country as his passport had been confiscated.
Zhou said the scale of the retaliation against the loved ones of political prisoners was “shocking”.
“We want to help them, but often we can’t,” he said. “We’re very angry. The children are innocent.”
The Ministry of Public Security has not responded to a request for comment.


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A supporter donates money at an event where Chinese and American writers pushed for the release from house arrest of Liu Xia, the detained wife of Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, in New York. Photo: AP

Human rights lawyer Wang Yu. Photo: Reuters

Liu Xia, wife of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, cries outside Huairou Detention Centre outside Beijing where her brother Liu Hui was jailed in 2013. Photo: AP

Bao Zhuoxuan

Detained human rights lawyer Bao Longjun

Detained human rights lawyer, Wang Yu, on Chinese state TV informed of 'failed attempt to smuggle son overseas'

Human rights lawyer Wang Yu was detained in July in a crackdown against civil rights activists.

Bao Longjun

Detained Chinese human rights lawyer 'unaware' of her son's escape bid, claims state media

Human rights lawyer Wang Yu was detained in July in a crackdown against civil rights activists. Photo: Reuters

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