A world away from China, Geng He seeks justice for her dissident husband

Somewhere between the desert basins and craggy mountains of far west China, in the lonely expanse to which criminals and subversives have been exiled for generations, a human rights lawyer named Gao Zhisheng presumably sits in prison.

Meanwhile, 6,600 miles away, his wife peels a tangerine in the underground cafeteria of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill. She’s been wearing the same beige blouse for three days. The bunkerlike eatery echoes with lunchtime chatter. She understands little of it.

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 The United States gets its first hard look at the heir apparent to the leadership of China as Vice President Xi Jinping visits the United States.

Across town, at the State Department about 12:30 Tuesday afternoon, the vice president of her home country is seated at lunch with the vice president of her adoptive country. Invitees sip a sparkling cuvee and dine on soy-marinated Alaskan butterfish.

Xi Jinping, the vice president of China and heir apparent to the Communist Party leadership, refers to “human rights” six times in his speech after lunch.

“Of course, there is always room for improvement when it comes to human rights,” Xi says. “We will, in the light of China’s national conditions, continue to take concrete and effective policies and measures to promote social fairness, justice and harmony, and push forward China’s course of human rights.”

Geng He, 45, will also push forward, she says, as forcefully as the Chinese government has pushed back on her husband. She, too, believes there is room for improvement on human rights in China, but her plans are different from the vice president’s.

That afternoon, Xi would engage in a business roundtable with the chief executives of Coca-Cola and the Walt Disney Co., and Geng would cap her two-day sprint around the Hill by leaning into a microphone in front of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, her printed testimony shuddering in her nervous hands, getting ready to say what China doesn’t want to hear.

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They met in the military in 1986. In Kashgar, in northwestern China, she was one of 30 female soldiers, who weren’t allowed to leave the base. A fellow soldier named Gao Zhisheng routinely sneaked out to buy sundry items for the women.

This is a kind man, she remembers thinking.

They married in 1990, after 3¹ / ₂ years of military service. Geng was an operator at a state-owned telephone company. Gao sold vegetables, wrapping some of them in newspaper, which is how he saw an article on the shortage of lawyers in China. He decided to teach himself law. Gao passed the national bar exam in 1995, two years after their daughter was born, and started representing businessmen and landowners who were victimized by government overreach. His client list grew more controversial over the years as he began to represent persecuted Christians and Falun Gong practitioners. In legal circles, Gao was viewed as both fearless and foolhardy.

“I said, ‘You’re going to get locked up and be no good to anybody,’” says Jerome Cohen, co-director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University, who met Gao in Beijing several years ago. “He said, ‘Then that’s the way it’s going to be.’ . . . Other Chinese lawyers would say to me, ‘We’ve got to get him to work on our case because he’s not afraid.’ . . . [Gao] combined ability with a huge personality and being quite aggressive.”