‘Three policemen have come. They want to take me away. I can’t send you messages anymore.’
Zhang Chunxiao recalled these as the last words her husband left her before his detention in Laos on Friday 28 July 2023.
Lu Siwei was taken by Lao police while trying to travel to Thailand, where he would board a flight to the United States to reunite with Zhang and their 14-year-old daughter.
Mr Lu is a well-known Chinese human rights lawyer, whose license was revoked by authorities in 2021 following years of representing clients deemed to be dissidents by the authorities.
Ms Zhang believed that the only reason her husband became a target for the Chinese government is the ‘sensitive’ cases he took on: those of fellow rights lawyers Yu Wensheng, Qin Yongpei and Chen Jiahong; poet and activist Wang Zang; and one of the four ‘Tiananmen Liquor protesters’, accused of distributing liquor bottles that bore the image of a lone man blocking a line of tanks, a reference to a figure of resistance to the 1989 military crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. He also represented one of the 12 Hong Kong activists who were intercepted by Chinese coastguards at sea on their way to Taiwan.
As if disbarment isn’t punishment enough, Lu has been closely monitored by the Chinese authorities and subject to an exit ban since May 2021.
Lu’s detention by the Lao authorities while trying to flee China and join his family sparked an outcry from international society. CSW and more than 80 NGOs signed an open letter calling for his immediate release, as he is at serious risk of forced repatriation to China where he faces the high likelihood of torture and other ill-treatment.
Lu Siwei is the latest name on a long list of Chinese nationals who have been disappeared in Southeast Asia, demonstrating the long reach of China’s authorities beyond its borders, often with the collusion of the authorities in these states, in a phenomenon known as transnational repression. A report from Freedom House shows that China is the world’s worst perpetrator of transnational repression.
A long list of victims: China’s transnational repression
Disappeared victims sometimes reappear in detention in China, while the whereabouts of others remain unknown.
They include Wang Bingzhang, founder of the overseas Chinese democracy movement, who was kidnapped in Vietnam in July 2001 and is now serving a life sentence in Guangdong. It was left to his daughter Ti-Anna Wang, now an advocate for the families of Chinese dissidents who have had their loved ones disappeared by the authorities, to tell his story, as she did at the TEDx Toronto conference in 2013.
Activist Peng Ming was kidnapped by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents in Myanmar/Burma in 2002 and later died while serving a life sentence in prison in China in 2016.
Hong Kong-Swedish book publisher Gui Minhai was disappeared in Thailand in 2015 and is now serving 10 years in prison in China.
Other victims include 20 Uyghur asylum seekers who were forcibly deported from Cambodia to China in December 2009, the teenage son of detained rights lawyer Wang Yu, and two activists who were disappeared from Myanmar in October 2015. More recently, activist Yang Zewei was disappeared in Laos in May 2023 and has just been confirmed as being held in detention by the authorities in Hengyang, Hunan province, China.
However, the veteran human rights defender Dong Guangping is the case most similar to Lu Siwei’s story.
Another man imprisoned for his quest for freedom and family reunion
Dong Guangping was arrested by police in Vietnam on 24 August 2022 while waiting to find a way to Canada to join his family. In May 2023, news emerged that he had been held incommunicado in Zhengzhou No 3 Detention Centre for months without charge or pending trial.
This is Dong’s third failed attempt to be reunited with his family in Canada.
In November 2015, he was set to leave Thailand to start a new life as a political refugee with his wife and daughter in Canada, when the Thai authorities forcibly returned him to China. He was detained and sentenced to three years and six years for ‘inciting subversion of state power’ and ‘illegally crossing national borders’.
In December 2019, three months after his release from prison, in defiance of the exit ban the authorities imposed on him, he attempted to swim to Taiwan, where he planned to travel to Canada to join his wife and daughter. He got into difficulty due to the bad weather conditions and was fortunately rescued by a boat. Sadly, he was later returned to life under surveillance by the authorities in his hometown in Henan province.
In January 2020, he managed to escape his government minders and fled to Vietnam. Sadly, he never found safe passage from Vietnam to Canada. Instead, he was arrested and deported to China by the Vietnamese authorities after two years and seven months of waiting and hiding in Hanoi.
‘It is beyond heartbreaking to learn that after my father’s courageous attempt to escape persecution in China – a perilous journey over the past three years that we had hoped would end with our happy reunion in Canada – he is, instead, once again behind bars in China,’ said his daughter Katherine Dong said in a statement.
‘I have been kept apart from him since 2015. I implore Chinese officials to relent in their cruel pursuit of my father simply because he stands strong for human rights.’
‘I beg them to free him and allow him to join us here in Canada.’
Like that of so many others, Katherine’s plea to the Chinese authorities has fallen on deaf ears. Her father is now facing yet another prison sentence in China, for his struggle for a more just China and for his unrelenting pursuit of freedom and family reunion.
Now Lu Siwei and his family are facing a similar fate.
The tragic stories of Lu and Dong remind us that the international society must do more to ensure that human rights defenders are better protected from the risk of transnational repression.
UN member states must take China’s long record of transnational repression into account when deciding on asylum applications. The right to seek asylum under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the principle of non-refoulement must be upheld.
By CSW’s China Team
Featured Image: Chinese human rights lawyer Lu Siwei. Credit: RFA
Editor’s note: This blog is part one of a two-part series looking at China’s targeting of human rights defenders and their loved ones. Part two will look at the arbitrary exit bans that the Chinese authorities have imposed on many human rights defenders and their families.
