I’m kind of tired of sitting here at my desk looking at my computer screen. You see, I’ve been trying for a couple of weeks to make headway on our next China Resource Journal. If you’re a fan of our CRJ, you know that we’ve gone to some lengths to bring to the West some of the amazing changes that have been happening in China. Slow but steady improvements in the legal structure, the greater personal freedoms of Chinese and especially of those Chinese Christians, and the marked interest by government officials about Christianity and its potential for improved governance all mark some of the positive changes that have happened in China. But as I sit here at my computer, searching the internet for clues and probing those Chinese who are affiliated with our organization, I must say that the case of Gao Zhisheng is a case that is certainly confounds me and others who I trust as evenhanded and knowledgeable China observers. Everything that I read about Gao just doesn’t add up……

Without spoiling the analysis of our upcoming CRJ, let me recap the situation. Gao Zhisheng is a self-taught human-rights lawyer in Beijing, who has recently taken cases of unregistered house-church Christians and Falun Gong adherents. A Christian himself, he has felt led by God to take on cases that dealt with human rights. In 2001, he was lauded as one of China’s ‘Top 10 lawyers’ by China’s Ministry of Justice and has been involved in many high profile

Gao Zhisheng

cases. On February 9th, 2009, he went missing and has not been heard from since. He is assumed to be held by Chinese Public Security forces, but we don’t even really know where he is or who has held him. It has also been assumed that he is being tortured, but I don’t believe we know that for sure either. Click here to read more about Gao, according to your level of interest.

So here’s my conundrum: We know for a fact that Chinese governmental change in the last 20 years has been huge. We know that they’ve rewritten or at the very least, revised many of the statues on Criminal Law and religious freedom. As I’ve written, almost ad nauseam, both in the CRJ and my book that Chinese government is very interested in Christianity and especially Christian Ethics, as a way to improve governance. If you really study these changes and analyize them from a historical and social structure perspective, it is quite stunning. I hear from Chinese friends in China all the time how these changes have improved their lives. How they are able to use the court system in a positive way and how they are finding public security officials approaching them with a different and more helpful spirit. Taking all that information, this Gao Zhisheng situation just doesn’t add up. Why would public security officials take him away? Why did they suspend his licence to practice law? After all, this is a ‘rising star’ of Chinese lawyers!

In my current analysis, I’m left with two possible answers to my questions. Number One, in his investigation of abuses of Falun Gong and subsequent letters to top Chinese governmental officials, he found out something that indicted the wrong official. If this is the case, we are now seeing in the case of Gao Zhisheng a major flaw and/or weakness of what’s left to reform in Chinese politics. This is exposing the raw underbelly of what’s left to fix in China: There are still some people who are above the law and in fact, who are the law. The second possibility, which I’ve seen before, is that Gao has actually broken the law in a way that we’re not hearing about from Western sources and was arrested for a legitimate crime. The most famous of these types of cases is South China Church leader Gong Shengliang.

Gong, who was the 2006 poster-boy for Chinese governmental persecution of Christians, whose arrest triggered massive protests of Chinese governmental officials. Some months after his arrest, he wrote a letter to the China Aid Association, admitting that he seduced and molested several female members of his church network and use excessive force against those who said negative comments against South China Church. His confession certainly brought out the need for restraint on the part of the Western church, looking in on a situation where they didn’t have all of the facts.

So what’s the story with Gao Zhisheng? For now, we don’t know but I’m confident that over time we’ll find out. Information will continue to come in about his situation. And when it does, I’ll be sure to bring you the truth about Gao Zhisheng.