Week of TV Trials in China Signals New Phase in Attack on Rights (original) (raw)

Asia Pacific|Week of TV Trials in China Signals New Phase in Attack on Rights

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/world/asia/china-trial-activists-lawyers.html

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Clockwise from top left: Zhou Shifeng, Gou Hongguo, Zhai Yanmin and Hu Shigen during their trials in Tianjin, China.Credit...CCTV, via Associated Press

Aug. 5, 2016

BEIJING — Chinese lawyers and rights activists appeared in televised trials throughout this week in what seemed to be a new, more public phase of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to cleanse the country of liberal ideas and activism.

Legal experts and supporters of four defendants denounced the hearings, held on consecutive days in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing, as grotesque show trials. All four men were shown meekly renouncing their activist pasts and urging people to guard against sinister forces threatening the Communist Party, before they were convicted and sentenced.

But for the government, the trials served a broader political purpose.

By airing the abject confessions and accusations of a sweeping, conspiratorial antiparty coalition, Mr. Xi’s administration was “putting civil society in all its forms on trial, and vilifying them as an anti-China plot,” Maya Wang, a researcher on China for Human Rights Watch, said in emailed comments.

“The trials thus serve two purposes: to punish the activists, but also to use them to bolster President Xi’s claims,” she said.

Subversion trials are not new in China, but the intense, concerted publicity around these trials signified a shift. Chinese state-managed newspapers, television programs and websites used the trials to offer a daily torrent of damning words against Western influence and liberal political ideas.

The legal proceedings and the drumbeat of propaganda appeared better meshed than ever, said Eva Pils, a legal scholar at King’s College London who has long studied human rights lawyers in China. “It does feel rather like a program that has been rolled out,” she said. “It’s a trial process that serves the purpose of projecting the power of the state and casting human rights advocates as enemies.”

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