The China Media Project and the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong are pleased to announce the publication of a new book collecting the defence arguments of former CMP fellow Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强), a popular lawyer and public intellectual who has been held by Chinese authorities since May 2014 in the midst of a broad political campaign against rights defence lawyers.
Pu was indicted earlier this year on charges of “inciting ethnic hatred” and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” the latter a charge frequently levelled in recent years against rights defenders in China.
The newly-released JMSC publication, A Collection of Defence Arguments By Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强律师辩词集), is a Chinese-language compilation of many of the most important legal cases in which Pu Zhiqiang has been involved over the past decade. The cases are organised into several categories, including “Defamation Cases” (Section 1), “Administrative Proceedings” (Section 2), “Political and Human Rights Cases” (Section 3), and “Due Process” (Section 4). The book’s fifth section gathers together a number of Pu Zhiqiang’s shorter commentaries and blog entries over the years.
In a blog entry written on March 29, 2004, ten years before his sudden arrest presaged an aggressive official campaign against rights lawyers and civil society in China, Pu Zhiqiang wrote hopefully (p. 363):

And so I have found that the awakening of civic consciousness and the rise of the rights defence movement might possibly provide an outlet, a way at least by which we might reach a point of well-being. If each person does their own business properly, bringing their own rights to a point of actualisation, if when they are cheated they do a bit more than lick their own wounds, if they bow their heads to nothing unless in death, then perhaps this society will slowly grow a bit better.

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