China Uses Heavy Hand Even With Its Gadflies

Zheng Enchong in his Shanghai home. Police sometimes keep him from attending church. (By Feng Zhenghu)

Zheng quickly made up his studies, however, and entered Fudan University to study economic administration. Before the 1980s were out, he had also taught himself law and qualified for a license to practice. Sensitized by his past, he started defending Shanghai families expelled from their homes to make way for the explosive development that would turn the city into China's largest, richest and most modern.

"Why did I worry about those people who lost their homes?" Zheng asked, sitting one evening in his living room in front of a wall full of legal manuals and case files. "Because I had the same experience."

Feng Zhenghu, a friend and fellow activist, said Zheng started out like any other lawyer but began to see his clients' problems as the result of government corruption and misconduct. As a result, Feng said in an interview, Zheng gravitated increasingly toward human rights cases and confrontation with Shanghai authorities.

His tactic was to use the letter of Chinese law, which offers broad guarantees in theory, to harass city officials seeking to plow ahead with development deals. By asserting that the deals were often driven by officials' desire for self-enrichment, Zheng became known as an adversary up and down the Shanghai government and party bureaucracy.

"In such cases, it's their own interests they are protecting," Feng said. "Why are they so concerned? It's just speaking out and writing articles, right? Well, it's because people respond to these ideas. They want change. They can produce a lot of pressure on the government."

Zheng converted to Christianity along the way and started attending services at a Wesleyan church about a 15-minute walk from his home. His wife, Jiang Meili, also became a member. Their faith, Zheng said, has given them values that inform his legal activism.

In recent years, several dozen lawyers have made it their business to use Chinese law to defend people against the government. Like Zheng, a number have suffered retaliation.

One, Li Heping, was kidnapped and beaten in September. His car was recently rammed by a police vehicle as he took his son to school. Another, Teng Biao, was kidnapped for about 40 hours last month, presumably because of his friendship with Hu Jia, the Internet essayist sentenced Thursday to 3 1/2 years in prison. Gao Zhisheng, a lawyer who became famous defending practitioners of the spiritual movement Falun Gong, has been under house arrest for months.

In defending homeless families caught up in land confiscation, Zheng got into particular trouble by suggesting publicly that corruption had infected senior officials in the Shanghai leadership. Specifically, he pointed a finger at Huang Ju, a former mayor who rose to the Politburo's elite Standing Committee; Chen Liangyu, the Shanghai party secretary; and two sons of Jiang Zemin, the national party leader and president before Hu Jintao.

"Corruption is a large-scale problem in China," Zheng said, dressed in two layers of sweaters to ward off the chill in his heatless apartment. "But the biggest problem of all is corruption in land seizures. So that's why they're always after me."

Shanghai authorities acted first to invalidate Zheng's law license. Undeterred, he kept taking cases. Then came the criminal prosecution.

Zheng had been given a New China News Agency dispatch describing the Shanghai land disputes. Unknown to him, he said, it was an "internal" article, distributed only to officials above a certain level. He gave the dispatch to local reporters for the BBC and Agence France-Presse and faxed a copy to a U.S.-based human rights organization.