Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (41 page)

After graduating, Pu taught at a small college in Hebei, then enrolled in graduate school at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, where he studied ancient Chinese literature and legal texts. Like many of his classmates, his dissatisfaction with the party’s rule continued to grow. Inflation was spinning out of control and corruption seemed to be getting worse. Pu looked up to scholars who advocated democratic reform, such as the physicist Fang Lizhi, and with each attempt by the government to censor and suppress “spiritual pollution” and “bourgeois liberalization”—code words for the liberal ideas that threatened the one-party system—he grew more disgusted. Then, in the spring of 1989, a former party chief, Hu Yaobang, who had been ousted for being too soft on dissent, suffered a fatal heart attack during a Politburo meeting. Two days later, Pu joined tens of thousands of students who marched through Beijing to mourn his death. It was the start of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

The movement was a turning point in Pu’s life. He was twenty-four, older than and respected by many of the undergraduates, and he emerged as one of the many leaders of the demonstrations. He helped organize the marches and the boycott of classes. He participated in the hunger strike. He delivered speeches and gave interviews to foreign reporters. It was an emotional time, and one of his teachers recalled that Pu struck his head with a bullhorn in frustration when party leaders refused to receive three students who knelt four hours on the steps of the Great Hall of the People with a petition. Pu spent weeks camped in the square, and he was there on the night of June 3, huddled with a few thousand others near the Monument to the People’s Heroes, when the army began shooting protesters as it entered Beijing. Fires around the city gave the sky an eerie glow, and loudspeakers in the square repeated the government’s martial law warnings again and again. Pu could hear the crackle of gunfire, dull and distant at first, then sharper and closer. He decided it would be safer to stay in the square than try to leave, and he was right. The bloodshed took place on the streets outside Tiananmen. On the morning of June 4, when soldiers occupied the square and ordered the tearful students to clear out, Pu was among the last to leave but he was unharmed.

The party conducted investigations at every university afterward, but many officials sympathized with the students and there was a perfunctory quality to the process. It might have been possible for Pu to escape punishment by going through the motions of criticizing the protests, voicing support for the government and condemning the party leaders who were purged. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “I have a stubborn disposition, and I didn’t think I had done anything wrong,” he wrote in an essay published overseas more than a decade later.

As graduation approached, university officials pressed Pu to submit a self-criticism. He responded with an essay he sarcastically titled “Baring One’s Heart to the Party,” in which he defended his activities during the demonstrations, arguing that he had acted with good intentions. “At the time, I thought the government was ridiculous,” he wrote of his participation in the hunger strike. “We were nearly starving to death, but you were still so devoid of human sympathy. As a result, my attitude hardened. I believe my thinking was the same as others. We were all trying to help the Communist Party and the government correct their mistakes.” One of the professors assigned to Pu’s case asked why he couldn’t include just a few boilerplate sentences endorsing Deng Xiaoping’s “Four Cardinal Principles,” the ideological underpinning for one-party rule. Pu replied that he opposed the principles, and said he would say so in the essay if the professor insisted. The professor just shook his head and told him to leave the essay the way it was.

Considering his refusal to toe the party line, the university could have expelled him, but instead it let Pu graduate with a “serious administrative warning” in his file. The warning ended his dream of a career in academia, because it meant no university or government agency would hire him. “Thinking about it today,” Pu wrote later, “maybe the Communist Party didn’t really want people to examine their thinking and sincerely submit. Maybe from the start, it wanted to make people hang their heads just superficially, to make everyone despise themselves and face that reality. I didn’t do it, and my mind has always been at ease. Although I lost many opportunities over the years, I never regretted it.”

For years, Pu drifted from one job to another, working as a salesman, a secretary, even at an agricultural market. Then, in 1993, a friend urged him to try a career in law, because his master’s degree was technically a law degree. Pu began studying for the bar and took the exam twice before managing to guess enough answers to pass. He was not enthusiastic about his new profession, but he was almost thirty, married, and the father of a two-year-old boy. “I didn’t do it because I thought it would be interesting. I did it because I had nothing better to do,” he told me. “I had to make a living, and with June fourth on my record, I couldn’t get a better job.”

The legal profession was still in its infancy in China when Pu began practicing. Mao had all but dismantled the nation’s courts during the Cultural Revolution, and the government was essentially starting from scratch when it began rebuilding the judicial system in the 1980s. It took time, but gradually lawyers shed their traditional role as civil servants loyal to the state and became independent advocates devoted to their clients. The first private law firms opened in 1992, and Pu started taking on cases just a few years later. He helped companies declare bankruptcy and settle business disputes, and studied the law as he went along. But he quickly learned that a lawyer’s connections were more important than his skills. Connections brought in clients, and connections helped win cases. It wasn’t that evidence and knowledge of the law never mattered, just that they didn’t always matter. Judicial corruption was common. There were late-night mah-jongg games, where lawyers were expected to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to judges. They also gave judges extravagant gifts, or simply paid them cash bribes.

Pu found the legal environment depressing, but he prospered. In four years of college and three years of graduate school, he had cultivated a network of acquaintances who could help him find clients. “I had a lot of friends, and to be a good lawyer in China, you had to have friends,” he said. Soon he was handling twenty to thirty cases a year, earning a big portion of his firm’s profits and taking home a comfortable salary. At the same time, though, he struggled with his conscience. “If I told my clients I wouldn’t use my connections, they would never agree. So when they ask me if I have connections, I always say yes,” he told me. Pu tried to set limits. He resolved never to ask a friend to break the law or do anything dishonorable. He tried never to give bribes. If a client asked him to subvert the legal process, he would reply that the best he could do was slow it down. Still, sometimes he did things he wasn’t proud of. “Sometimes, I had no other choice,” he said.

Pu didn’t handle criminal cases, but once, early in his career, he agreed to represent a peasant woman from a village on the outskirts of Beijing who wanted to sue the local police. Officers there had been running an extortion scheme, arresting women and forcing them to confess to prostitution, pay hefty fines, and implicate men who could then be shaken down, too. Pu’s client had been beaten badly for refusing to go along. When he accepted the case, pro bono, he believed that he was finally doing something good with his law license—seeking justice on behalf of an ordinary citizen. The local court, however, refused even to accept his lawsuit, and the police retaliated by framing and arresting his client’s brother-in-law. Pu was powerless to help, and the experience left him with tough questions: Did he take the case to make himself feel better about his job, or because he believed he could actually make a difference? Did his involvement only make the situation worse for his client? Afterward, Pu decided he would never again raise clients’ hopes if he didn’t think he could really help them.

Six years passed before Pu accepted another case that tapped into his idealism about a lawyer’s ability to make a difference. In 2003, he agreed to defend a literary critic who had been sued for defamation by one of China’s most famous authors, Yu Qiuyu. While preparing for trial, he read about
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
, the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision on freedom of the press. The decision protected the publication of all statements, even false ones, about public officials except those published with reckless disregard for the truth. By setting such a high burden of proof for defamation, Pu read, the Court made it possible for American news organizations to report on civil rights infringements in the South without fear of being sued. He thought the case was an inspiring example of the power of the law to move a society, and he incorporated the decision’s reasoning into his defense. Uninhibited discussion of public issues was so important to society, he argued, that public figures should not be allowed to use the law to intimidate their critics. The judge never addressed his argument, but Pu won the case.

Suddenly, Pu began to feel better about being a lawyer. He had found a legal principle he wanted to fight for—freedom of speech—and he began to believe that a good lawyer who picked the right cases could make a difference. Over the next year, he took on four more defamation cases, defending two magazines, a newspaper, and a scholar from lawsuits filed by companies and business tycoons. In a nation where censorship is standard and criticizing a party leader can result in a prison sentence, Pu was carving out a niche for himself as a free-speech lawyer.

The four cases were still pending when Pu heard about a fifth, Zhang Xide’s lawsuit against the authors of
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry
. The case was different from the others, because Zhang was a public official. Pu purchased a copy of the book, pirated editions of which were widely available despite the government’s decision to ban it. “I read the book carefully,” he recalled, “and it made me furious.” It reminded him of his own experiences in the countryside; only a decade earlier, rural officials enforcing the one-child policy had forced his sister-in-law to abort a pregnancy in the ninth month. The authors Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao already had an attorney, but Pu contacted them and offered his services for free. He told them he wanted to turn the case into China’s version of
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
and argue that the nation would be better served if the courts protected the public’s right to criticize party officials. He also faxed them a copy of the argument he filed in the case he won a year earlier. The authors were impressed. A few weeks later, in a meeting in Pu’s office in Beijing, they invited him to join their defense team.

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UGUST 22,
two days before the trial was scheduled to open, I met Pu on the platform at Beijing’s mammoth western rail station and we boarded an overnight train to Fuyang. There are more than a hundred cities in China with populations over one million, and many Chinese have probably never heard of most of them. Fuyang, however, a gritty railway hub that calls itself the nation’s Liquor Capital, had been in the news lately. A few months earlier, authorities discovered that factories there were producing fake baby formula that had caused dozens of infants to starve to death and left more than two hundred others severely malnourished. Local officials were accused of taking kickbacks and looking the other way. It was not the first scandal to hit the city. A huge airport sits unused outside Fuyang, the vanity project of a former mayor who wanted to make it easier for himself to jet off to Beijing and Shanghai. He was later implicated in a massive bribery case and executed. The party was so worried about corruption in Fuyang that afterward it distributed a photo of his corpse to city officials as a warning.

It was a nine-hour journey from Beijing to Fuyang, and when Pu wasn’t sleeping in his bunk, he sat hunched over a stack of court papers, working on his defense under the dim lights of the train car. Given the city’s reputation for corruption, it seemed doubtful he had much of a chance of winning the case, and I asked him why he was even bothering. He laughed, and acknowledged he didn’t expect to win. “I still have to do a good job,” he explained. “That’s my obligation to my clients.” But there was more to it than that. The party claimed to govern by the rule of law. It debated legislation, set up courts, hired judges, held trials—it wrapped itself in the trappings of the law, because doing so conferred an aura of legitimacy on it. It was a charade, of course. The party spent three times more on its riot control police than it did on courts and prosecutors, and when push came to shove, it believed it had the authority to do whatever it wanted, legal or not. Pu understood this as well as anyone. But he believed the legal charade offered an opportunity. Using the courtroom as a stage, he intended to present a convincing case to the public. If he did a good job, the party could still rule against him, but it would have to drop the charade, expose its commitment to the law as a fraud, and pay a price in damage to its image. The stronger the case he presented, Pu believed, the higher that price would be, and if it were high enough, party leaders might think twice about putting themselves above the legal system. In that moment of hesitation, something remarkable could happen. The charade could become a reality—the party could be constrained by its own sham laws.