Zhulian: Implication by Relation

In an era of high-tech cyber surveillance, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still relies on a technique that goes back thousands of years: zhulian, or strong-arming opponents by punishing their families. Families of dissidents and activists can almost count on being singled out and harassed for simply being related or married to a regime critic. Sometimes the results are fatal.

One group, the “709 Families,” so named from the crackdown on human rights defenders and lawyers begun nine years ago in July 2015, exemplifies like no other the struggles and hardships that result from the policy of zhulian. Indeed, the CCP’s single-minded goal of making life so miserable for loved ones who would provide emotional and moral support is nowhere so clearly written.

For some families—often a spouse and a child—the constant harassment in the form of tailing by police, house arrests, evictions, forced loss of employment, and prevention of education for children is too much, leading to separation and divorce. This is a clear win for the CCP.

Some spouses, however, have been particularly outspoken, defying the continued harassment by the authorities. Li Wenzu and Wang Qiaoling, both married to human rights attorneys detained in 2015, were hounded for years, held in their homes or forcibly evicted time and again while their husbands remained in prison or in secret detention facilities. But the two women banded together, staging multiple protests, including shaving their heads (“fa” can mean either hair or law in Mandarin). In a dramatic instance of daring, Li, having heard that her husband was kept in a prison in Shandong, shouted his name from outside the prison in the early mornings for days in succession, in the hope that he would be able to hear her over the walls.

Other spouses of the convicted prisoners of conscience caught up in the 2015 dragnet have suffered more privately but no less painfully. Zhou Shifeng and Zhang Meiying married in the 1990s. Zhang suffered a stroke in 1995 which left her wheelchair-bound. But Zhou opened a law firm, and despite Zhang’s disability the couple was living comfortably: she qualified for a disability card with its attendant services, and her social security payments were drawn from Zhou’s law firm. Zhang was receiving the care she needed to remain healthy and even gave birth to a child.

But in 2015, when Zhou was detained and later sentenced to seven years in prison for the fabricated crime of “upsetting the national order,” Zhang, with her compromised hearing and mobility, had no way to take care of the paperwork that would have allowed her to continue to receive health insurance and proper health care.

According to China’s Law for the Protection of Disabled People, “a refusal to assist in a reasonable manner is equal to discrimination.” Under this law, the relevant and related institutions, including the insurance company, social security offices, the local branch of the national disability agency, and even the relevant local government offices bear a responsibility to assist a disabled person such as Zhang in completing and submitting the paperwork related to her disability needs.

But this was not a simple dereliction of responsibility.

By the time Zhou was released from jail in 2022, the human rights lawyer found his wife’s condition had deteriorated drastically. She needed a replacement pacemaker, among other critical needs, but the authorities had revoked Zhou’s legal license and shuttered his firm. He was left with no source of income and little means to seek anything but the most basic care. Zhang was repeatedly hospitalized, but the years of untended medical conditions had left her severely weakened. Tragically, Zhang Meiying passed away on July 3, leaving a husband and child bereft. Their family is just one instance of casualties in the struggle for justice and freedom in China.

The 709 Crackdown has been nothing other than the surest evidence of the CCP deliberately strangling constitutionalism, rule of law, balance of power, freedom, and democracy in an attempt to prevent such ideas from taking root and eventually changing the authoritarian system. As such, it shares a characteristic of political movements from the Anti-Rightist Campaigns to the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Massacre. Within all these politically-motivated events, zhulian has played a central role. That the human rights advocates and lawyers are innocent is understood; their persecution intolerable. That their families, including spouses and children, bear the brunt of this treatment is unconscionable.

Of course, this is what the CCP wants: to make the cost of justice too great to bear. This is what the policy of zhulian is intended to accomplish. One brave soul—a single activist or lawyer—might be willing to sacrifice a career or even a life for the greater good, as has been repeatedly the case for many individuals in China and in other authoritarian nations. But for the activist’s actions to then result in the suffering or even death of loved ones is too high a price.

I can only hope that one day, the free world can come together to support the citizens of China and loudly and boldly call out the CCP for its persecution of critics and their families. How many more need to suffer under this authoritarian yoke?

Image by sf_freelancer and licensed via Adobe Stock.