By CHRIS BUCKLEYAUG. 7, 2014
Gao Zhisheng in 2010. Credit Gemunu Amarasinghe/Associated Press
HONG KONG — One of China’s most famous dissident lawyers, Gao Zhisheng, was released from prison on Thursday, his wife and brother said. But it remained unclear how much freedom Mr. Gao would enjoy and whether he would be able to reunite with his exiled wife and children eight years after he disappeared into a shroud of repeated detention and, he has said, torture.
Before the police detained him in 2006, Mr. Gao had embraced a succession of politically contentious cases and causes, emerging as one of China’s most prominent, and combative, human rights advocates. But his conviction that year for “inciting subversion of state power” made him an example of the Chinese Communist Party’s determination to silence dissent using means that rights advocates and a United Nations panel have called arbitrary and ruthless.
That official secrecy at first left unclear even whether Mr. Gao had been freed from prison Thursday after serving out his sentence. Later on Thursday, his older brother confirmed that he had accompanied Mr. Gao as he left the prison.
“He’s out. Everything is fine,” the brother, Gao Zhiyi, said in a brief telephone interview. He said he and his brother were in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the region in far western China where Mr. Gao had been imprisoned. “He’s in his father-in-law’s home,” said the brother. But he would not comment on how long Mr. Gao would stay in Urumqi, or what might happen next.