MCLC: life and death of Cao Shunli

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: life and death of Cao Shunli
***********************************************************

Source: China Change (3/18/14):
http://chinachange.org/2014/03/18/the-life-and-death-of-cao-shunli-1961-201
4/

The Life and Death of Cao Shunli (曹顺利) (1961 — 2014)
By Yaxue Cao,
 

Her name in Chinese means smooth, but her life, which ended on March 14,
2014, had been anything but smooth.

Exactly six months ago on September 14, 2013, Cao Shunli was disappeared
in the Exit & Entry area of Beijing Capital International Airport where
she was en route to Geneva to attend human rights training. It wasn’t
until late October when her arrest was confirmed.

“Ms. Cao Shunli’s secret abduction was due to her participation in a
two-month sit-in action in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that
began on June 2013,” a dozen or so rights lawyers wrote to demand that the
government publicize Cao Shunli’s condition  after she fell into a coma in
Beijing Chaoyang Detention Center and was rushed to an emergency room on
February 20.

“The action in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was a
rights-protection action which Cao Shunli and 60 other petitioners were
left with no choice but to take after having applied to the State Council
Information Office requesting to participate in the drafting of the
‘National Human Rights Action Plan’ civic human rights report, and also
applying for the information office to disclose relevant governmental
information, but receiving no response whatsoever and having judicial
avenues blocked off,” the lawyers wrote. “Their actions were entirely for
the protection of civil rights enshrined in the third clause of Article 2
and in Article 42 of the PRC Constitution and they were in line with the
principle spirit of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights which China has signed.”

Two months after China detained Cao Shunli for her cooperation with the
UN, China was elected a member of the UN Human Rights Council on November
12 over the opposition of activists on the ground and international human
rights organizations.

Despite deteriorating rapidly
<http://wqw2010.blogspot.com/2013/12/blog-post_1972.html> (in Chinese), in
December, Cao Shunli’s case was sent to the prosecutors for indictment and
the recommended charge was switched from “illegal assembly” initially to
“picking quarrels to create disturbances.”

Indeed, when it comes to persecuting citizens for disobeying or opposing
the regime in any shape or form, picking a charge is just like flipping a
switch or changing lanes.

According to New York-based Human Rights in China (HRIC), Cao Shunli had
focused her efforts on two specific areas
<http://www.hrichina.org/en/content/6961> over the last few years:
formulating the country’s domestic plans to advance human rights, and
reporting the progress to the UN Human Rights Council in advance of its
Universal Periodic Reviews (UPR).”

An organization also taking part in the UPRs, HRIC compiled documents
<http://www.hrichina.org/en/content/6961> Cao Shunli had prepared and
submitted to the UN between 2008 and 2013. The group of documents reflects
“Cao’s systematic pursuit of her goal using the law and the court system,
as well as the international human rights mechanisms, to press for greater
transparency and accountability, and the Chinese authorities’ systematic
resistance to such participation by invoking, among other reasons, state
secrecy.”

In March, 2013, Cao Shunli submitted a report
<http://www.hrcchina.org/2014/03/report-submitted-to-17th-session-of-un.htm
l> to the 17th session of the UN Human Rights Council Working Group on the
UPR through Human Rights Campaign in China (权利运动), a mainland
China-based 
rights organization. It was also the year when China bid to become a
member of the UN Human Rights Council again.

On the very day Cao Shunli’s secret detention was made public, the head of
the Chinese delegation Wu Hailong
<http://www.un.org/chinese/News/story.asp?NewsID=20740> (in Chinese) told
the UN that, in 2009 when China underwent the first  universal periodic
review on human rights, China accepted 42 recommendations made by member
states and promised that “when the time comes for China to be reviewed
again, the world will see a China that is more prosperous, more
democratic, improved in rule of law with a more harmonious society and
happier people.” Mr. Wu went on to tell the UN panel that, four years
later, all of the 42 recommendations have been, or are being, implemented
and China has by and large fulfilled its promises.”

From the way China secretly detained Cao Shunli and subjected her to
inhumane treatment that led to her eventual death six months into her
detention, one can gauge how much the Chinese government hated her and how
it would rather see her die.

From a Law School Graduate to a Petitioner

“Cao Shunli was born in Beijing in 1961 to a worker’s family with four
siblings,” Cao Shunli’s brother Cao Yunli
<http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2014/03/201403152232.shtml#.UyZ3ufldXa
S> told the overseas Chinese website Boxun recently. When she was ten in
1971 during the Cultural Revolution, her family was forcibly deported to
her father’s ancestral home in Zhaoyuan, Shangdong (山东招远), because her
father’s family was landowners—one of the enemy classes–before Communist
rule. Six years later when Mao Zedong died, the Caos were allowed to
return to their home in Beijing.

In 1979, she was admitted to Beijing College of Political Science and Law
(now China University of Political Science and Law). After graduating, she
became a graduate student in the Department of Law at Peking University.
Three years later, she was assigned to work at a research center in the
Ministry of Labor and Human Resources (now Ministry of Human Resources and
Social Security).

During China’s housing reform in 2002, Cao Shunli exposed corruption in
housing distribution in her work unit and eventually lost her job as a
result of reprisals from her supervisors.

She became a petitioner. As nearly all petitioners in China, she was
subjected to all manner of suppression and frequent surveillance and house
arrest. More than once, she was given administrative detention. Because of
her own experience, her attention turned to China’s human rights
conditions, especially the conditions and demands of petitioners.

According to a recent published account
<http://2newcenturynet.blogspot.com/2014/03/blog-post_14.html?spref=tw>
(in Chinese) about Cao Shunli’s life, having collected a large number of
petitioners’ cases from 2006 to 2008, she thought of a new way to seek
solutions: Submit them to the Foreign Ministry to be part of the human
rights report China was to submit to the UN and China’s National Human
Rights Action Plan.

Cao Shunli and her petitioner friends began to make appeals, and send
documents, to the Foreign Ministry as well as the State Council’s
Information Office.

In summary, they appealed <http://www.hrichina.org/en/content/6961#1> to
the Chinese government, in its preparations for the National Human Rights
Action Plan and the UPR State Human Rights Report, to “[include] the
participation of non-governmental organizations and representatives from
vulnerable groups,” and to [include] in the two documents “descriptions of
the rights violations suffered by petitioners and rights defenders over
more than a decade” and “the government’s responsibility and concrete
measures to solve these problems.”

It didn’t go well.

On February 16, 2009, she organized the “Beijing Rights Defense Walk.”
According to the announcement
<http://www.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2009/02/200902161651.shtml>, the
purpose for the walk was to demand that “the State Council’s Information
Office respond to the application by petitioners and rights defenders for
participating in preparing China’s Human Rights Action Plan” and that
“Beijing Public Security Bureau Dongcheng branch return the Human Rights
Condition Surveys filled and signed by 323 people that the PSB branch
illegally confiscated.”

From late 2008 all the way to Cao Shunli’s arrest in September 2013, Cao
and her petitioner group would make the same appeals over and over again
in writing and through demonstrations, futilely. In the course of five
years, she would be put in labor camps twice for a total of 27 months and
subjected to numerous arbitrary detentions and disappearances.
2009 was also the year when China underwent the UPR on human rights.

Two Stints in Reeducation-through-Labor

In the March 23, 2009, issue of China News Weekly (《中国新闻周刊》), an
associate 
professor of Peking University named Sun Dongdong (孙东东) penned an article
<http://news.163.com/09/0404/05/561IOQ950001124J.html> (in Chinese)
advocating forceful incarceration of people with mental illness in
hospitals to ensure social order. By “people with mental illness,” he
meant “99% of the chronic petitioners.”

The comment was widely condemned for its absurdity and alleged attempt to
justify what the government had been doing: forcefully putting petitioners
in mental hospitals. After all, the year before in 2008, professor Sun
defended the overall safety of Chinese milk formula in the wake of the
melamine-tainted milk formula scandal that victimized more than 300,000
infants.

For days petitioners gathered outside Peking University’s west gate to
protest Professor Sun’s comment. On April 10, Cao Shunli was detained
while protesting outside Peking University, her alma mater. On April 18,
five days after China announced its National Human Rights Action Plan
2009-2010 <http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2009-04/13/content_1283983.htm> (in
Chinese), Cao Shunli received an oral notice that she was to be sentenced
to reeducation-through-labor for 12 months for “picking quarrels to create
disturbances” in the police station.

During RTL, she refused to obey some of the rules in the labor camp, such
as refusing to admit that she was a criminal, she told Boxun
<http://www.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2010/04/201004202335.shtml> upon
release in April 2010. To punish her, she was denied food for five days
and was force-fed for three days.

Her friend Zhou Li (@lee91741  <https://twitter.com/lee91741>) tweeted
<https://twitter.com/lee91741/status/445140710401261568> the other day:
“I asked her when she was released from RTL that year, ‘Did they torture
you?’ She said, ‘I had never been on a hunger strike, but they still
force-fed me, from the nose, very painful, but forget about it. We’ll
still do what we do.’”

Ten days after Cao Shunli was released in April 2010, she was detained
again and sentenced to another 15 months in RTL. According to right lawyer
Teng Biao (滕彪) 
<http://www.chinesepen.org/Article/hyxz/201012/Article_20101218023802.shtml
>, who defended Cao Shunli in her case, a neighborhood police testified
>that Cao Shunli was a “key person” in the neighborhood, and that the
>“relevant organ” detected that Cao Shunli and others had bought train
>tickets to Shanghai and tickets to visit the Shanghai Expo (世博会). To
>prevent her from going to Shanghai, they obstructed her application for
>an ID card, forcibly detained her in a warehouse where, to defend
>herself, she smashed the window glass. All the time the police recorded
>her on video and used it against her.

Quoting Chinese law and regulations, Teng Biao also argued that Cao
Shunli, suffering from multiple illnesses, should not be put in a labor
camp to begin with, and that the Beijing RTL Commission’s refusal to allow
her to get medical treatment outside the camp was illegal and inhumane.

“They killed her; they actually killed her, slowly, one stab at a time,
they tortured her to death”

Out of the RTL camp in 2011, Cao Shunli picked up her work where she had
left off. She continued to collect human rights condition questionnaires,
she prepared requests for information disclosure from the State Council
about China’s National Human Rights Action Plan, and she once again
petitioned to participate in the writing of this action plan.

“She collected several thousand cases of human rights abuses,” her friend
Zhou Li tweeted, “Can you imagine how much work that was?”
“She even translated over a thousand pages of international laws,” Ms.
Zhou said in another recent tweet.

On June 18, 2013, Cao Shunli organized a group of mostly female
petitioners and they went to the Foreign Ministry. They demanded that they
be included in the writing of China’s human rights report to the UN Human
Rights Council due on July 22. The international conventions that China
signed require a country’s human rights report to be written by diverse
groups and to represent the true picture of the country’s human rights
situation.

The MOF first gave them the runaround, then rejected their request
outright. Cao Shunli and her group decided to sit in day and night on the
sidewalks outside the MOF gate.

“During the 24/7 camp-out in front of the MOF,” Ms. Zhou Litweeted
<https://twitter.com/lee91741/status/445192498609389568>, “when people
were tied, they would lie down on a piece of cardboard off the sidewalks,
but Cao Shunli never did.  She always sat up in the chair and she sat
straight. She told everyone: ‘Take a break when you are tired, but as for
me, I should sit. We don’t want them to see we are all lying around. We
want them to see that we are legitimate, we are serious.’ She sat there,
for ninety days and nights.”

Cao Shunli had had liver problems for a long time. But after she was
detained in Beijing Chaoyang Detention Center, she was denied treatment,
and even the medications she had carried with her were confiscated,
according to her lawyer. Her health deteriorated rapidly. A checkup
demanded by her lawyer last November found Cao Shunli was suffering from
tuberculosis in both lungs, pleural effusion, and hysteromyoma.  Repeated
applications for medical parole by her lawyer and family were denied.

Since Cao Shunli’s death, the hospital has been under heavy guard to
prevent mourners from gathering. Netizens who signed a signature campaign
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ipEtKyluRVPCg2dOKxb65jSzgt-YITWRo-OrLCimD
Ss/viewform> demanding the truth about Cao Shunli’s death were
interrogated by police, according to reports on Twitter. As of now, the
family does not know the whereabouts of her body.

As soon as the news of Cao Shunli’s death broke, Sina Weibo censored her
name; the Chinese propaganda authorities instructed
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/03/minitrue-cao-shunlis-death/>that
“concerning so-called rights defender Cao Shunli dying of illness while
awaiting trial: the media must not report the story, and interactive
[online] platforms must take care to thoroughly delete all related images
and commentary.” A search for Cao Shunli on Baidu, the Chinese search
engine that thinks it is Google, gives the search result of  “according to
relevant law, statues and policies, the search results shall not be
displayed.”

Cao Shunli died, and she must die anonymously in silence. The Chinese
government does not want anyone to see a trace of her anywhere.

Indeed, she is little known. Writing this piece I had trouble finding a
direct quote from her. But going through the reports to different offices
of the Chinese government, to the UN, she had prepared all these years,
one is shocked by their volume and more so by the persistence behind it.
On Twitter, when a veteran activist expressed bewilderment at how little
she knows about Cao Shunli, one tweep replied, “she looks just like a
petitioner.” And Ms. Zhou replied, “[she] worked. She just worked.”

Since her death, the US, Britain, EU, Canada and more governments and
international human rights organizations expressed sadness and
“disturbance.” But I feel there is a general inertia and hollowness in all
the condemnations. It is like the only thing the world community has left
to do is talk the talk.

Last fall during the UPR at the UN Human Rights Council, Cao Shunli’s name
was never mentioned, yet she was the one Chinese who had had faith in the
UN system, who connected ordinary Chinese victims of rights abuses to the
UN’s human rights framework, and who inspired many more Chinese to demand
their universal political and civil rights.

Michelle Obama and her daughters will arrive in Beijing Wednesday. The
White House officialsannounced
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obama-will-try-to-avoid-po
litics-during-trip-to-china/2014/03/17/3e440321-de8c-462d-8ff6-bfa9d6a5c686
_story.html> that the first lady will “avoid contentious topics, including
China’s human rights violations.”

That is a shame. When the first lady and her daughters sit down with
China’s first lady and have a good chat, enjoying China at its “finest,”
they will avoid talking about Cao Shunli, one of China’s most courageous
woman warriors who happens to be about the same age as the two illustrious
first ladies, or any Chinese languishing behind bars for fighting for a
different China. Too bad Michelle will not be seeing the real China,
because Cao Shunli is China, China is Cao Shunli.
 
 

Sources:

http://wqw2010.blogspot.com/2013/12/blog-post_1972.html
http://www.hrichina.org/chs/xin-wen-gong-zuo/zhong-guo-ren-quan-jian-xun/lu
-shi-he-wei-quan-ren-shi-qiang-lie-yao-qiu-jing-fang
http://www.un.org/chinese/News/story.asp?NewsID=20740
http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2014/03/201403152232.shtml#.UyZ3ufldXaS
http://www.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2009/02/200902161651.shtml
http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2009/04/200904071636.shtml
http://www.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2010/04/201004202335.shtml
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/03/minitrue-cao-shunlis-death/
http://www.chinesepen.org/Article/hyxz/201012/Article_20101218023802.shtml
http://2newcenturynet.blogspot.com/2014/03/blog-post_14.html?spref=tw
http://wqw2010.blogspot.com/2013/04/blog-post_3990.html: