Caixin profiles online critic and attorney Li Yinzhu. The article begins with a description of a meeting with a provincial official who demanded Li remove a blog post that called on China’s top Supreme Court justices to resign:
Yang refused to obey and walked out.
The next day, National Day in China, Yang posted a blog in the morning and another in the evening, each as acidic as his previous essays. Under the heading Yang Jinzhu Tells You Truth, he challenged the chief justice of the Supreme People’s Court, Wang Shengjun, to a debate, and said the Chinese justice minister, Wu Aiying, should step down.
And he wasn’t finished. A week later, Yang posted a new essay called The Mission of Chinese Lawyers that once again stood up to what he sees as a judicial system gone awry.
“Faced with the backtracking of justice in China, few Chinese lawyers speak out,” he wrote. “The collective silence has turned what should be a dynamic group of Chinese lawyers into a flock of sheep.”
With that, Yang stepped right on a landmine. And two days later, he was expelled from the legal firm he helped start, the Hunan Tong Cheng Law Firm in Changsha.
