"A Mild Shanghai Lawyer and His Accidental Crusade" is the headline to this "Saturday Profile" in today's NYT that tells the story of Guo Guoting, who did not intend to become an activist. Some quotes from what I consider a must-read-in-full story:
For his efforts to defend a friend and principle, Mr. Guo has recently been driven from the law, deprived of a livelihood after most of his paying clientele was scared away, but not before adding his name to a long and growing roll of accidental activists, people driven to do something in their own immediate spheres by the intolerable injustices they encounter in everyday life.Posted by Marcia Oddi at September 18, 2004 07:07 PMOne of those is the dispossession of the powerless, which has long been the dirty little secret behind much of China's extraordinary urban development. Local authorities have been able to condemn buildings and clear land without so much as a hearing, and distribute the land to developers in murky, no-bid sweetheart deals.
In Shanghai, a fantasyland of skyscrapers today in a city where tall buildings scarcely existed only 15 years ago, these stories have a particularly breathtaking quality to them. In some instances, residents of old properties in choice areas of the city have been summoned to the police station only to return and find their houses demolished.
Mr. Zheng had angered local officials by filing a series of lawsuits and court motions designed to at least slow the land expropriations.
In a touch that could have been borrowed from Kafka, the city government accused Mr. Zheng of violating security laws for faxing public documents about a real estate case to a human rights group in the United States.
That was when Mr. Guo took up his case, filing an appeal for his schoolmate in the Shanghai High People's Court. Immediately, he said, there were warnings to stop, subtle at first, but then increasingly menacing. Then his main business, representing maritime shippers, began to fall off, his clients frightened away. "The authorities called me in 18 times to tell me to abandon this case," he said. "It's not a legal matter, it's a political matter, they'd say.
"Finally, a midlevel cadre warned me, 'If you pursue this case any further, whatever comes of it will be entirely your own responsibility.'