Witness to persecution

TAIWAN—For more than a decade, human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng paid the price for shining light on the Chinese Communist Party’s injustices. Government agents kidnapped him multiple times, tortured him with electric shock batons, and beat him until they lost their breath. They placed him in solitary confinement for three years and taunted him: The world has forgotten you and your family thinks you’re dead.

Gao became China’s No. 2 target (after Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo) for his work as a lawyer defending house churches, the banned religious sect Falun Gong, and property owners harassed by government officials. His public opposition to the “inhumane, unjust, and evil” CCP led to his detentions, first in black prisons at undisclosed locations, and then at Shaya Prison in Xinjiang. Gao says prison guards took great pains to ensure he could not hear or see anything at the official prison, afraid he would expose more abuses.

Details of the Nobel Peace Prize nominee’s ordeal emerged in his newly published book, Unwavering Convictions: Gao Zhisheng’s Ten-Year Torture and Faith in China’s Future, which Gao wrote in secret while under house arrest in an isolated village in Shaanxi province in northwestern China. The Chinese manuscript, smuggled out of the country and published in Taiwan this June, has three parts: a memoir, an explanation of his vision that the CCP will fall in 2017, and suggestions on how to rebuild a democratic China based on rule of law. An English translation of the memoir portion of the book will be released in the next couple of months.

In 2012, WORLD named Gao and other persecuted Christians in China as Daniels of the Year for their courage fighting for freedom in China. Today Gao no longer lives inside a dank cell, but he’s still confined to his elder brother’s house and yard in Shaanxi. Authorities won’t let him visit a dentist to treat his teeth, which are loose and falling out due to years of beatings and malnutrition. He hasn’t seen his wife and two children in seven years. Yet when given the option to move to America, where his family now lives, Gao refused and said he needed to stay in China to expose the truth about the Chinese government.

In the memoir, Gao details what he endured during his detentions. An electric cow prod touched his chin and a sound like “the howling of a dog when its master steps on its tail” emerged from his lips. Prison guards forced him to sit perfectly still on a stool for 15 hours a day and repeatedly blared propaganda through a loudspeaker in his cell. Yet, his Christian faith kept him going through it all, giving him the strength to stand up to government officials, regardless of how long and hard they tried to break him.

“If your only source of space and light is your eyes,” Gao writes, “your experience of these are greatly reduced [in prison]. And worst of all, others can place you in darkness. But if you have that space and light in your heart? Those are infinite and cannot be taken.”

Chinese authorities deployed hundreds of security personnel to keep watch over Gao, and Gao’s book describes his interactions with them. During one train trip, two guards squeezed into a tiny train bathroom with him as he urinated, directing him as his legs were shackled, arms cuffed, and head hooded: “Certainly it was unimaginable that this modest biological function required the mobilization of so much state power.”

But he also describes the humanity of some of the guards, who took great risks to pass him hot water or treats on holidays. He notes that every young member of the People’s Armed Police he conversed with asked him what really happened during the Tiananmen Square student protests on June 4, 1989. They knew what their teachers had told them was incomplete.

WHAT TORMENTED GAO MOST, he wrote, was the persecution of his family. Often relatives didn’t know whether he was dead or alive, and authorities harassed and followed his family members. His 23-year-old daughter, Grace Geng, told me that in middle school, seven security officers escorted her to school each day, watching her as she went to class and even when she used the restroom. Classmates shied away from her as the officers beat her in their presence and threatened to arrest the parents of any student who spoke to her. She became depressed and attempted suicide.

After Geng graduated middle school, authorities refused to let her enroll in high school. So in 2009, Geng, her mother, and her little brother decided to flee: Gao created a diversion, and his family snuck out of sight of their handlers, boarded a train to Thailand, then flew to safety in the United States with the help of the Texas-based group China Aid. Geng now attends college in California and—because of her past experience—doesn’t tell her friends who her father is or what she went through. “I always have trust issues with people that I just met,” she said. “I don’t know what their purpose is to get to know me.”

It’s now been seven years since Geng and her family have seen Gao. Talking to her father on the phone requires deft coordination: Geng first calls her uncle, and if her father happens to be around, she can speak with him when the guards aren’t watching. When she last spoke with him a month and a half ago, his spirits seemed high: “Mentally he is very happy because he is fulfilled in God,” Geng said. “Physically, my family is concerned—his teeth are missing, and he’s still eating liquid food even two years [after leaving prison]. We want him to have a physical checkup.”

When Geng first read her father’s book, she said it was “really painful; I didn’t want to accept that my father has been through those things.” But after that, she felt proud of her father: “I think he’s a really brave man. He has a big heart for China and for Chinese people.” Geng said that while she and her mother are not believers, her younger brother has professed faith in Christ and credits their father’s impact in his life.

‘He is very happy because he is fulfilled in God.’—Gao’s daughter, Grace Geng

In June, Geng flew to Hong Kong to promote her father’s book. Tears slid down her face as her plane touched down, she said, as this was the closest she had come to her father in seven years, yet he was still unreachable. Hong Kong publishers and bookstore owners refused to touch Gao’s book, fearful of mainland authorities who in recent months have detained booksellers. Next Geng visited Taiwan, where the book was published, and reunited with at least one thing she had missed since leaving China: numbingly spicy Sichuan mala hot pot.

Although Geng accepts that her father wants to stay in China, she longs for the day he is able to live and move freely like any ordinary Chinese citizen. She urges President Barack Obama and other international leaders to speak up on his behalf: “Every country wants to do business with China right now, [but] I think this is the wrong thing to do. If very powerful countries like the United States are doing this, then other countries will think that this is right and they will ignore the importance of basic human rights.”

Gao also noted in his book the tangible results of international pressure: “The unstinting attention of the foreign media is a crucial reason why China’s dark powers have not dared to persecute me to death.”