Gao Zhisheng

Gao Zhisheng Gao's memoir, A China More Just (2007), documents his "fight as a rights lawyer in the world's largest communist state." In subsequent writing, he accuses the ruling Chinese Communist Party of state-sponsored torture and reports having been tortured by the Chinese secret police. At the beginning of 2012, Gao's brother said he had received a court document saying his brother was in Shayar jail in Xinjiang. In 2014, it was reported that Gao was released from jail and put under house arrest. He disappeared again in August 2017 in an apparent attempt to escape house arrest and was subsequently taken back into custody on his recapture in September, with his whereabouts being unknown. As of January 2025, Gao remains disappeared.

Background

Gao was born and grew up in a house in Shaanxi Province with six siblings; his father died at the age of 40, when Zhisheng was 11. He briefly worked in a coal mine. Over the following years, he defended a wide range of clients who had been victims of injustice. Gao's committed involvement with such cases, he says, is strongly bound with the emphasis of his Christian identity on morality and compassion. appealing the sentence of Zheng Yichun, a journalist and former professor who was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for his on-line writings providing legal assistance to Falun Gong practitioners, including Huang Wei, who was illegally sentenced to three years of re-education through labor in Shijiazhuang.

On 15 August 2006, after numerous death threats and continued harassment, Gao disappeared while visiting his sister's family. On 21 September 2006, he was officially arrested. On 22 December 2006, Gao was convicted of "subversion", and was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended, and placed on probation for five years. The sentence also deprived him of his political rights – the freedom to publish or speak out against the government – for one year. He had publicly confessed to a number of errors. On his liberation, Gao recanted his confession and described torture he said he experienced during his 54 days in custody. He also said his captors threatened he would be killed if he spoke publicly about the matter.

The American Board of Trial Advocates selected Gao to receive the prestigious Courageous Advocacy Award; they had invited him to receive the award personally in Santa Barbara, California on 30 June 2007.

In the fall of 2007, Gao's memoir A China More Just was published in English in the United States.

On 22 September 2007, after writing open letters to vice-president of the European Parliament, Edward McMillan-Scott, and then to US Congress calling for a boycott of the Olympics, Gao was once again taken away from his home, where he had been under house arrest, by Chinese secret police. A letter from Gao claimed that he endured ten days of torture that involved appalling beatings, abuse with electric batons, and the insertion of toothpicks into his genitalia, followed by weeks of emotional torture. Gao wrote that his torturers said his case had become personal with 'uncles' in the state security apparatus after he had repeatedly publicised previous mistreatment.

Disappearances

In February 2009, Gao was taken away for interrogation by Chinese security agents During his disappearance, in response to queries from his family about his whereabouts, police claimed he lost his way and went missing in September 2009. For several months, Gao was not charged, and the Government never acknowledged his whereabouts, nor their involvement in his disappearance. His last contact with friends or family was one phone call placed to his brother in July 2009.

In January 2010, Gao's brother, Gao Zhiyi, told an interviewer that the Beijing police told him that Gao "lost his way and went missing" on 25 September 2009, igniting fears that Gao was no longer alive. On 21 January 2010, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman issued a cryptic statement that Gao was "where he should be," and said he did not know Gao's whereabouts at a later press conference. A few days later, he met the media, appearing thinner and more subdued than in the past and said that he had abandoned his criticism of the government in the hope of reuniting with his wife and two children. He announced that over the previous year he had again been tortured, in ways that were even worse than before.

In April 2010, Gao's family reported they had not heard from him since he returned from a visit to Xinjiang 10 days previously. Gao had left Beijing to visit his in-laws in Ürümqi, carrying just a backpack between 9 and 12 April. Gao's father-in-law said Gao arrived at his house in the company of four police officers, spent just one night there before once again being taken away by police. His father-in-law called a friend of his in Beijing on 21 April to say Gao was to board a plane at 4.30 p.m. He said Gao had promised to call after returning home, but there was no word. Emily Lau and Albert Ho said Gao's disappearance "prov[ed] that justice and the rule of law is disappearing in communist China – if it ever existed at all".

The report of Gao's 2010 disappearance and detention was considered by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention which, in March 2011, called for his release. After months of speculation as to his status and whereabouts, Xinhua reported in December 2011 that Gao had been jailed for three years by No. 1 Beijing Intermediate People's Court because he "had seriously violated probation rules for a number of times, which led to the court decision to withdraw the probation." According to his brother, Gao was being held in a jail in Xayar County, Xinjiang province.

Gao was released from jail on 7 August 2014 and was subsequently kept under house arrest. Having been fed with a slice of bread and a piece of cabbage daily, he was released in bad health, but medical access was denied. Gao escaped from house arrest on 13 August 2017, spending around three weeks on the run before his recapture by the Chinese authorities the following month

Missing for seven years, Gao is currently subjected to enforced disappearance. No information about his whereabouts has been available since he was taken on 13 August 2017, and as of January 2025, his family has not heard from him or about his whereabouts. Gao's disappearance has been mentioned by the Department of State in its annual reports on Country Reports on Human Rights Practices published from 2018 to 2023.