The wife of a dissident Chinese lawyer missing for more than a year said she was relieved to learn he is alive and appealed yesterday to the government to allow him to leave China and join his family in the US.
Attorney Gao Zhisheng (高智晟) resurfaced suddenly on Sunday, saying he was living in northern China, but it was not clear under what conditions.
Before being jailed and otherwise muzzled four years ago, Gao was the most dauntless of a new group of civil liberties lawyers. He took on sensitive cases involving underground Christians and the banned Falun Gong and advocated constitutional reform.
Since he went missing on Feb. 4 last year from his hometown, the government has given vague explanations about Gao’s whereabouts, heightening worries he had been jailed or tortured as he was previously.
“I am tremendously relieved that my husband is alive,” Gao’s wife, Geng He (耿和), said in a statement issued by Freedom Now, a non-governmental organization that represents prisoners of conscience.
Geng and her two children fled China a month before Gao was detained and now live in the US.
“I am so happy that my children were able to speak to him,” she said. “My children and I have not seen their father since January 2009. We urge the Chinese government to allow Zhisheng to leave the country and be reunited with us in the United States.”
Contacted briefly on Sunday on his cellphone, Gao said he was living in Wutai Shan, a mountain range famous as a Buddhist retreat, and that he was “free at present.”
“I just want to be in peace and quiet for a while and be reunited with my family,” Gao said. “Most people belong with family. I have not been with mine for a long time. This is a mistake and I want to correct this mistake.”
Li Heping (李和平), a Beijing-based human rights lawyer and friend of Gao’s, said he also spoke briefly with Gao and believed Gao was being followed by authorities.
“I believe he does not have freedom,” Li said. “First, when we were speaking, he sounded like he wanted to hang up. He told me that he had friends around him. I’m sure that the people around him are limiting what he can say.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion