Mao all but dismantled China's legal system during the Cultural Revolution, but after his death in 1976, the party reopened its courts and adopted new laws to promote economic reforms. Demand for legal services grew rapidly, and hundreds of law schools and the first private law firms opened. By the mid-1990s, lawyers were shedding their traditional role in China as civil servants loyal to the state and beginning to see themselves as independent advocates devoted to their clients.
Pu, a gregarious man who speaks in both street profanities and classical Chinese, prospered by helping companies declare bankruptcy and settle business disputes. He also learned how corrupt China's legal system could be. "It was much worse than I imagined," he said.
Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, center, and client Chen Guidi, at right, brief peasants outside the courthouse about libel trial's progress.
(Special To The Washington Post)
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And yet Pu believed that a good lawyer who took the right cases could change China. In 2003, he agreed to defend a literary critic who had been sued for defamation by one of China's most famous authors. He built his case on one of the principles he had fought for in Tiananmen: free speech.
While preparing for trial, Pu read about New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court decision on freedom of the press, and used it in his closing argument. The judge handed him a victory.
Over the next year, Pu took on four more defamation cases, defending two magazines, a newspaper and a scholar against lawsuits filed by companies and business tycoons. In a nation where censorship is standard and criticizing the party can lead to prison, he had become China's version of a First Amendment lawyer.
In February, Pu heard about a defamation suit in Fuyang, an urban backwater in the eastern province of Anhui, about 575 miles south of Beijing. A local party official had sued the husband-and-wife authors of "An Investigation of China's Peasantry," a literary exploration of poverty and the abuse of power in rural China.
"I read the book carefully, and it made me furious," Pu recalled. The stories reminded him of his own experiences in the countryside; only a decade earlier, officials enforcing the government's one-child policy had forced his sister-in-law to abort a pregnancy in the ninth month.
The authors already had an attorney, but Pu contacted them and offered his services for free. He proposed turning the case into China's version of New York Times v. Sullivan and argued that society would be better served if the courts protected the public's right to criticize party officials.
Pu said he didn't expect to win. Local party officials control local courts. In Fuyang, Zhang held a top post, and his son was a judge. But if the case attracted enough attention, a sympathetic official elsewhere might stand up for the authors on appeal, or the leadership might decide that letting Zhang win would hurt the party's image too much.
The authors, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, added Pu to their defense team soon after the party banned their book. "We knew we needed a cannon," Wu said.
'The Weapon of the Law'
The trial opened Aug. 24 in a wood-paneled room on the first floor of the Fuyang courthouse. The authors and a team of four lawyers sat on the right, Zhang and his attorneys on the left. Three judges in black robes presided from a bench under the red-and-gold emblem of the People's Republic of China.
About 100 people sat in the gallery, and more than a dozen police officers stood guard. A handful of Chinese reporters were present, though they knew their stories would be censored. Hundreds of peasants from Linquan County, where Zhang had served as party chief, were waiting outside. There were plenty of empty seats inside, but the court let only 25 peasants in.
Zhang's lead attorney spoke first, accusing the authors of fabricating material in the book's third chapter, which described events in Linquan between 1992 and 1995.
The attorney's objections included the book's description of Zhang as an official who spoke like "an uncouth lout" and was "short of stature," and its claim that he ignored Beijing's orders to reduce taxes and violently punished villagers who protested.
