Danish National Newspaper Reports on Relay Hunger Strike in China

PEOPLE’S CONGRESS II
by Martin Gøttske
Information’s correspondent

BEIJING – “These persons hate the people and at the same time are afraid of the people.”

The Chinese lawyer Gao Zhisheng doesn’t hold anything back when he describes the members of The National People’s Congress, which started in Beijing yesterday.

As a lawyer, Gao has defended in court hundreds of Falun Gong-members, democracy activists and farmers who have had their land confiscated by the state. As a private person he has sent letters to the leaders of the country and criticised their policies. He is even open about calling the Chinese Communist Party ‘evil’. Gao Zhisheng is playing with fire – and doing it even though he lives in Beijing, within the range of China’s regime, which so dreads criticism.

He puts nothing in the hope that the leaders might use the People’s Congress, China’s law-making assembly, to effect substantial improvements to the system. “I see nothing that gives hope for any changes. This assembly is despised by the people.” Gao thinks that the police’s traditional mass-arrests of dissatisfied citizens leading up to the assembly, is a sign that the leaders are afraid of the people.

The police have arrested Gao several times in an attempt to silence him. Recently, his law-firm, which last year had 20 lawyers employed, was shut down by the authorities. According to Gao, this was because his work uncovered ‘the darker side’ of the government’s suppression of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong.

From his apartment in the capital Gao has now started a hunger strike and he says that at least 70 other people from across the country have joined in.

He started it partly as a response to a string of police-attacks on Chinese activists assisting villagers with filing complaints against corrupt political leaders.

“Since September last year the police-violence in China has become much worse. Normal citizens are no longer allowed to go to courts to protest this violence. We have no other choice any more, our last way out is to hunger strike,” explains the 41-year old lawyer.

“We are against the police’s violent acts. And we are against the fact that people’s rights and interests are not being protected.”

After having starved for several days Gao is now joined by six others who have started what they call a relay, where they hunger strike in shifts.

Dangerous tactic

All the hunger strikers have—with extreme risk to themselves—publicised their names. Gao Zhisheng’s open offensive against the authorities in China seems overwhelmingly dangerous in China, where the government has either imprisoned or expelled almost all critics of the country. But Gao describes his acts as ‘a passive choice’.

“It is not a choice we have reached with happiness,” he says about the hunger strike. “It has only happened because we live under the horrible rule of the Communist Party. I say it is a tragedy that this kind of situation has emerged in this time and age; that you have to hunger strike to defend your rights.”

When questioned whether he is afraid of the reaction from the authorities, he simply says: “I have never doubted the Party’s dirty tricks.”

Shortly after Gao and his compatriots started hunger striking, the police started arresting many participants. Gao says that three of his assistants have been detained. One of them is still missing without a trace, while the two other are under house arrest. Gao was himself detained for two hours, and explains that he and his family have been under constant surveillance over the last couple of months. At least 25 of the hunger strikers have disappeared or been arrested within the last two weeks.

The authorities usually step up the security precautions prior to the National People’s Congress, but because of the increase in public protests from activists and an increase of demonstrations in the countryside, it seems they have stepped it up even more.

The mother of one of the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre has called for an end to the hunger strike on the Internet, as it might provoke a violent reaction from the authorities. But Gao says that they will only stop when the dissidents who have been sent to labour camps are set free.