Gady A. Epstein | Baltimore Sun

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Beijing, March 13, 2005 - Languishing in a prison cell in Beijing, unable to see his lawyer or his family since his detention in September, is Zhao Yan, a journalist who infuriated Chinese authorities with his strident and persistent advocacy for peasants' rights.

But that's supposedly not why he is in jail.

Consigned to a Shanghai prison cell is Zheng Enchong, a lawyer who similarly infuriated authorities for fighting on behalf of urban residents being forced from their homes by a rich developer and his well-placed friends in city government.

But that also is supposedly not why he is in jail.

A prison in the remote northwestern city of Urumqi holds Rebiya Kadeer, a self-made, wealthy businesswoman once hailed as an example of how Uighurs can prosper under Chinese rule. She fell into official disfavor almost a decade ago, after her husband became an outspoken advocate for Uighur rights and fled to the United States.

Legally, she is in jail for the same reason as Zhao and Zheng, for revealing "state secrets," the catchall crime on China's books that helps the government keep an iron thumb on troublemakers. The definition of what is a state secret can encompass almost anything the government sees fit, including facts published in official Chinese books or newspapers that would not seem to be secret by any reasonable definition.

Kadeer's crime, for example, was sending copies of Chinese newspapers to her exiled husband six years ago. She was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for that and one other related crime.

Jailed for a fax

In Shanghai, Zheng's crime was faxing to a human rights group unpublished reporting by the government's official news agency about a labor protest in the city and about a real estate controversy that had embroiled his low-income urban clients.

Zhao was detained under suspicion of providing state secrets to foreigners, several months after he joined the Beijing bureau of The New York Times as a researcher. Authorities arrested him after The Times reported in September, days before it was announced officially, that former Chinese President Jiang Zemin had offered to resign his last significant post, as head of the military - a story for which The Times says Zhao was not a source.

Zhao has yet to be formally charged with a crime, possibly because authorities are having trouble finding evidence of one or because government officials are divided about what to do with him. Authorities have yet to allow him to see his attorney. Under state secrets laws, he can be held and charged without being able to consult a lawyer, ostensibly to protect the secrets in question.

Dim prospects

Unless a high-level official intercedes on Zhao's behalf, his prospects are dire. The way China's criminal justice system works in such cases - with police and courts acting as arms of the Communist Party - all that is needed to keep Zhao behind bars is the political will to do so, not strong evidence.

"What troubles me is that state secrets seems to be turning into the weapon of choice for the authorities to deal with dissent," said Nicolas Becquelin, who is researching the government's use of state secrets laws for Human Rights in China. "This sort of fits well with a larger process that we see as far as we can monitor it, which is the criminalization of political offenses."

The state secrets laws are enforced by China's most feared police officers, the state security forces.

Over the years journalists, lawyers, scholars and doctors have seen their colleagues jailed essentially for doing their jobs: writing articles exposing corruption, researching controversial periods of history and revealing information about the spread of HIV/AIDS in China.

"It's sort of a Damocles' sword hanging over the head of any journalist or academic working in China," Becquelin said.

Zhao, once a police officer in the 1980s, stood out among those journalists who tested the boundaries of their profession. He knew he had been under the watchful eye of Chinese authorities for months, if not years.

Daring reporting

Before going to work for The Times in May, Zhao had been forced out of his job as a reporter for China Reform magazine. His daring reporting on rural corruption often coincided with an even more daring activism on behalf of the aggrieved peasants, and local officials lobbied hard in Beijing for his ouster, according to his friends and human rights groups.

In the last year, he had aroused particular attention from authorities for helping peasants in several cities try to remove local officials by using an obscure recall petition law. The law is virtually useless under China's one-party rule, but Zhao passionately believed that helping peasants understand and use the statutes could help push forward China's legal system.

"Chinese intellectuals need to educate peasants," Zhao said in an interview last April. "The rule of law in our country cannot remain just a theory or a law itself. There have to be some cases to propel the development of the constitution."

Two and a half months later, Human Rights in China issued a bulletin warning that police in the southeastern province of Fujian were trying to build a criminal case against Zhao and that local authorities elsewhere were also after him.

Zhao told a Danish radio reporter he wasn't afraid.

'Why should I run?'

"I am not going to run. I haven't done anything illegal. Why should I run? If I run, then it's just what they want me to do. If I hide, then it's also just what they want me to do," Zhao said, according to the reporter's transcript of the taped interview. "I think that when I hold up so high the constitution that the government has made - if I get arrested, isn't the constitution just humbug?"

In the end, Zhao was not arrested by regular police in connection with his activism. His arrest Sept. 16 came at the hands of state security police, who, according to Zhao's friends, had kept tabs on him before.

It is rarely clear exactly how, when or why people become entangled in the web of state security. It remains unclear whether The Times' story about Jiang in September became the primary reason to detain Zhao or whether the security apparatus took advantage of its publication to lock up a troublemaker already in its sights.

For a man who looked to his society's emerging legal system as a weapon to fight for the weak, it was an Orwellian twist of fate.

"The government still persecutes the people they do not like, but now in the name of the law," said attorney Li Baiguang, an activist and friend of Zhao's who helped him work with peasants. "The progress [of the legal system] is in terms of procedure and form. However, the content and essence of our society is still a dictatorship."

Li was detained for 37 days by local police in Fujian in December.

Attorney Zheng Enchong learned the relationship between law and power in Shanghai, where he had a history of using the law to challenge the system. He had angered local officials, who ultimately refused to renew his law license on technical grounds, according to his wife and friends.

In his final fight before his 2003 arrest, he had decided to take on one of the city's most prominent businessmen, Zhou Zhengyi, and his powerful friends at the top of city government. The city was pushing Zheng's clients out of their lifelong homes on prime real estate it had essentially given to Zhou. Zheng wrote an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao, signed by his clients, calling Zhou a "big swindler" and accusing top Shanghai officials of corruption.

On June 6, 2003, a week after he wrote the letter, Zheng was detained on suspicion of violating the state secrets law, ostensibly for faxing two pages of unpublished, internal reporting by the official New China News Service to Human Rights in China.

"The problem was not anything about state secrets. The problem was advocacy and activism on behalf of the forcefully evicted," Becquelin said.

The Chinese government can jail dissidents through any number of "legal" means, including manufacturing nonpolitical charges such as theft, fraud or crimes of violence, including murder and terrorism.

As in the case of Zheng, the state secrets law seems to have proved convenient in jailing Kadeer, a prominent businesswoman.

Kadeer's husband, Sidik Rouzi, a critic of China's treatment of Uighurs, had fled to the United States nine years ago and made pro-Uighur broadcasts on Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

Fall from grace

Before her husband's exile, Kadeer had been held in high regard by Chinese officials and had served on a provincial committee attached to the local legislature. But she lost that seat and her entree with provincial officials, who were upset that she did not criticize her husband's activities.

She was arrested in August 1999 while she was on the way to meet a visiting delegation of U.S. congressional staff. She was later convicted on charges mostly related to trying to mail to her husband old issues of newspapers that contained articles related to the government's crackdown on Uighur separatism.

The case demonstrates how wide the state security net can spread, ensnaring friends and relatives of prominent dissidents. In recent months, people in both Zheng's and Zhao's circles have been warned not to spread information to foreigners.

This month, Guo Guoting, Zheng's attorney, had his law license suspended for a year for "humiliating and attacking the Chinese Communist Party and our country's government, and slandering the socialist system," according to an overseas Chinese Web site quoting the Shanghai Justice Bureau's disciplinary charges.

Guo's offenses, the bureau said, were posting criticisms of the legal system on overseas Web sites and giving an interview for an article in the foreign media, presumably a profile of him in The New York Times.

Mounting problems

But his troubles began mounting shortly after Zheng became his client. Guo was visited by state security officials, who chatted vaguely with him while delivering the implied message that he should stay away from sensitive cases and not meet with foreign news media. Other Shanghai authorities he was acquainted with delivered the message more explicitly.

As Guo took on other politically sensitive cases, he had trouble getting better-paying clients. And state security forces appear not to be finished with him: He could not be reached by telephone in recent days; on Friday, his lawyer said that although Guo has not been arrested, his freedoms have been restricted.

Authorities are also likely keeping an eye on Li, the friend of Zhao Yan, who was released from a Fujian jail in January on one year's probation.

Fujian police had told Li that he and Zhao were "too radical" in pushing for democratic reforms, that their recall efforts were wrongly using "loopholes" in the law to the peasants' advantage. Li is forbidden from promoting the Fujian peasants' cause in domestic or foreign news media, and he is trying to assume a lower profile.

It's a sobering antithesis to Zhao's assessment of China's progress when he spoke to the Danish radio reporter in July, less than two months before his arrest. He said he had lost much because of his activism, but he had no regrets.

"If anybody that does this has to pay such a high price, then progress will only come very, very slowly," Zhao said. "But I am also lucky. Even though I have done so much, I can still sit here in Beijing and talk to you and speak the truth - I am not lying. This is a sign that there has been true progress in China."