Pu Zhiqiang, an executive partner at the Beijing Huayi Law Firm, is a pioneering free speech lawyer and civil rights activist. His other areas of practice include finance, real estate, reputation protection, bankruptcy, unjust competition law, antitrust law, and private housing loans.
His clients have included the investigative journalists Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, whom Pu successfully defended against a defamation suit arising from their best-selling exposé of local corruption in the Chinese countryside published in English as Will the Boat Sink the Water? (PublicAffairs, 2006), as well as, more recently, the artist Ai Weiwei.
He writes frequently in Chinese on a wide range of issues related to law and freedom of expression. His work in English has also appeared in The New York Times and the China Media Project.
Pu studied history at Nankai University and law at the China University of Politics and Law and was a visiting scholar at Yale University Law School. He lives in Beijing.
