Price of conviction: Chinese rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang pays with suspended jail term over social media posts slamming the authorities
At his trial he admitted his microblog writing style was “sharp, caustic and sometimes vulgar” but insisted he had not warranted the charges of ’inciting ethnic hatred’ or ’provoking trouble’
Outspoken Chinese human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who received a three-year suspended jail term on Tuesday for posting online comments critical of the Communist Party, is no stranger to paying the price for standing up for his beliefs.
Although Pu, 50, who was found guilty of “inciting ethnic hatred” and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, will be released soon, his fellow lawyers say he has already been punished heavily. He has spent the past 19 months in police detention and will not only face many restrictions during his three-year probation, but he will also no longer be able to practise law.
In 1991 when he completed his master’s degree in history at the prestigious China University of Political Science and Law, he was not assigned a job like other graduates because he had refused to show remorse for joining the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, which ended in a crackdown on June 4 that year.
Read more: Chinese rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang given three-year suspended jail sentence
“Thanks to a mysterious twist of fate, this has become my life’s mission,” he said last year, weeks before he was detained by police.
Instead of admitting that he had been misled by “anti-Communist Party forces” like many other students did in forced confessions, Pu chastised the authorities for opening fire at the crackdown.
I have always upheld my convictions and these convictions have formed the way I live and think. Nothing can change that – not even the police and state security agents
“That was definitely not what they wanted to hear,” he said. “Many people wrote stuff [to please the party], but I wasn’t one of them.”
