9:10 am HKT Jun 30, 2014 LAW & POLITICS
Protesters in Hong Kong hold pictures of Chinese human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang as they march to the Chinese liaison office on May 14. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By Stanley Lubman
In a Beijing apartment in May, about 20 people met to discuss the Tiananmen protests in June 1989 and the determination by the government and the Communist party to suppress discussion of that tragedy. One man at the meeting, Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer and one of China’s best-known “rights defenders” (weiquan), was arrested and now awaits trial for “picking quarrels and provoking troubles,” a crime with no clear definition.
His case dramatically illustrates the contradiction between attempts to increase legality in an authoritarian regime and that regime’s overwhelming anxiety about maintaining social stability. The vagueness of the “crime” of “picking quarrels” – authorities didn’t say who Pu allegedly picked a quarrel with, or about what — allows police unlimited discretion to detain and arrest offenders for almost any action.
Pu isn’t the only one to be arrested over the troubling charge of quarrel-picking. In another recent example of repression of potentially punishable conduct, anticorruption activists were sentenced to six and a half years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” and “gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place” after they photographed themselves holding a banner that called for release of detained members of the New Citizens Movement, a civic group that advocates for greater public transparency. The charges against them included “using a cult to undermine law” because they had sent messages online calling attention to the trial of a member of the Falun Gong movement. A third defendant received a three-year sentence for “picking quarrels.”
On the day after the three were sentenced, the daughter of one defendant was notified by police that she had to surrender her passport because she, too, was “provoking quarrels and stirring up trouble.”