Chinese LGBT advocates have set out to convince China’s mental health field that being professionally competent means being LGBT-affirming (and for the already LGBT-friendly counselors, that mere friendliness is not enough—they also need to have well-developed counseling skills).
This is a story about fear and the attempt to conquer fear. The wives of some of the lawyers who disappeared in China’s “709” crackdown have suffered house arrest, threats, and suppression. In their search to find their husbands, they hope no longer to be mere “political dissidents,” and instead to mature into self-aware women and citizens.
Since the establishment of the Guangdong PSB’s Foreign NGO Management Office on November 28, 2016, the office has provided registration and filing services. A total of 33 foreign NGO representative offices have been registered in Guangdong, and 474 temporary activities have been filed.
The families of lawyers arrested in the 709 crackdown, 2016.
Security officers surround Li Wenzu as she attempts to deliver a petition to the Supreme People’s Court petition office in Beijing, December 28, 2018.
(From left to right) Wang Qiaoling, Liu Ermin, and Li Wenzu hold red buckets in front of the Tianjin Municipal People’s Procuratorate Number Two Branch, June 6, 2016.
On the second day of the ‘March to Find Our Husbands,’ Li Wenzu walks through a demolished village in Hebei province, April 5, 2018.
Darius Longarino (龙大瑞) is a Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School and a Senior Fellow of the Paul Tsai China Center. Prior to joining the Center, he worked for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative in Beijing, where he managed legal reform programs promoting LGBT rights and worked cooperatively with a number of Chinese public interest law organizations. Longarino speaks and reads Mandarin Chinese, and received a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2013, where he was a Kent scholar and received the Edwin Parker Prize for Excellence in Comparative or International Law. As a law student, he interned with a legal aid organization in New York, a public interest law organization in China, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Court of International Trade. Prior to law school, he was an assistant to Professor Jerome A. Cohen at New York University School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute.
Jiang Xue is an independent investigative journalist. She worked as a reporter and editor for multiple prominent Chinese news organizations from 1998 to 2015. In 2015, with the increasing censorship in China’s media industry, she decided to leave the newspaper she was working for and became an independent journalist. She mostly covers China’s legal system and social justice. She has published multiple influential articles about 709 Lawyers’ families on her own social media account. Her mission is to tell the stories of those who are silenced by the Chinese authorities. She is currently traveling in the U.S.
