Recently, Yang Hui, a lawyer in Xiamen, Fujian province, was administratively punished by the local cultural bureau for transferring old books with a fine of nearly 300,000 RMB. Yang Hui said the investigation was actually due to representing sensitive cases and speaking out for grievances online. He has now been forced to resign from his law firm.
On April 21, the Cultural Market Enforcement Brigade of Xiamen City, Fujian Province, fined lawyer Yang Hui seven times the “illegal business amount” for unauthorized publication distribution, totaling RMB 283,497.20.
On April 24, lawyer Yang Hui publicly published the “hearing request of reading day punishment”, claiming that the books he sold online were private legal collection and had been published and distributed long ago. The determination of the notice seriously violated its freedom of expression as well as property rights, and “such a punishment is unheard of from the Qin Dynasty to the Republic of China”.
Yang Hui was fined nearly 300,000 for trading in second-hand books online. (Courtesy of the interviewee)
In a recent interview with the Epoch Times, Yang Hui’s lawyer told reporters the story.
On February 2, 2021, near the New Year, more than a dozen people from the Xiamen Jimei District Cultural Enforcement Brigade blocked him downstairs and waved a document in front of his eyes, stating that he was engaged in the distribution of illegal political publications at his residence, and had to enter the house to search it.
The Cultural Bureau investigated the amount of his business in Kong.com (Confucius Old Books), which are all genuine books published domestically, accumulating roughly 40,000 yuan; and the use of WeChat, registered under his real name, to contact book buyers and sell publications.
Yang Hui said, “Because I like to buy books, when I go to Taiwan, Hong Kong will bring some books back, I finished reading the net friend to read, then transferred to the net friend, transferred more than 20 books of Hong Kong edition to others, are not very good to buy domestic literature and history books, like Professor Gao Hua’s “How the Red Sun rises? There are also books like “The Collected Works of Li Rui.”
Later, the Bureau of Culture informed the Bureau of Justice, Jimei District Political and Legal Committee Secretary also called the Bureau of Justice. The news came out from inside, one is because of the agent sensitive cases, and also because he often speaks out for the grievances on WeChat, they are not too happy. It was for these two things to deal with him this time.
Yang Hui is a Christian and believes that he should act according to “right and wrong” and not according to “profit and loss”. We should speak out and do what is right, and leave the outcome to God.
He said that he has been practicing law for 20 years, and in the middle of that time, he was working and studying for 7 or 8 years, so he has been practicing for about 13 years. In the last five to six years, he has been working on Christian rights cases and other sensitive cases, including the Autumn Rain Church case and the Cao Sanqiang case.
Yang Hui revealed that after the Cultural Bureau came to check the books, the Judicial Bureau and the law firm forced him to resign, both explicitly and implicitly.
Yang Hui’s law firm, Jin Tiancheng Law Office, is one of the largest law firms in China south of the Yangtze River, with more than 3,000 lawyers and branch offices all over the country. In order not to involve the law firm, Yang Hui resigned from the firm on March 1 and wanted to transfer to a law firm in Guizhou.
In accordance with the provisions of Fujian Province, the province needs to re-apply for the transfer of practice (the province does not have to cancel the transfer), Yang Hui’s lawyer’s license has been cancelled. The company’s lawyers have already been cancelled. In Guizhou province, there is a campaign to regulate the online speech of lawyers, and the lawyers who apply for admission are subject to speech checks.
“It is very likely that there is no way to transfer to another firm, and this career is over. This is the most rational judgment at the moment.” Yang Hui laughs at herself for not being a lawyer, often being too busy, impatient and lacking in communication with others.
Representing 20 faith-based cases
Yang Hui said that he has not represented many sensitive cases, only 20 cases. There are also a few cases of Falun Gong practitioners.
He said, “The church places in China are under the control of the Communist Party, which actually wants to transform Christianity through its ideology. The Three-Self Church has the Party as its head, and we believers want to have God as our head. So that’s a fundamental difference, so there’s no compromise between the two sides.”
For example, the Qiu Yu Church is a very large house church in a local area of southwest China, and the numbers are very large. Because of his relatively large influence, that’s why the authorities found a way to weave in charges and finally sentenced Pastor Wang Yi to nine years.
“The church has been forced to go to prison, and the site has been turned into an office for the street office. The Living Stones Church in Guiyang is the most typical, with several million dollars worth of houses being auctioned off.” He said.
Yang Hui recently represented a house church case in Xinjiang, where the person concerned was a graduate of Xinjiang University with a bachelor’s degree; there were also low-cultured women from the countryside who ran from Hebei to Yunnan to preach, sharing the Bible peacefully with others, and were suddenly arrested. “There’s nothing else, it’s because there are too many people you’re connecting with, what kind of reason is this called.”
He said, “To be honest there is nothing else to help people. But after accepting the commission, I can go in and talk to the person, read the Bible and share it, and then help him say a few words in court so that he can feel better psychologically. In fact, for us, the physical aspect often does not make a difference.”
Representing the Twelve Hong Kong People
Yang Hui was the defense attorney for Qiao Yingyu, the defendant in the Twelve Hong Kong People case. He took over what he thought was an ordinary case, but the local judicial bureau immediately came to him and asked him to cancel his representation contract.
He said, “All the lawyers in the case were unable to meet with their clients. What’s worse is that the (authorities) insisted on assigning the client an official lawyer when the family had already hired one. I think this case has blocked all legal space from the very beginning.”
Yang Hui said he didn’t do much on the case, but only wrote down the obstructed meeting and gave it to the family, who sent it later.
In the article “Qiao Yingyu family entrusted lawyer: I was refused to meet by Yantian detention center” Yang Hui disclosed that all 12 parties were not arranged to meet by the detention center on the grounds that I had entrusted two lawyers. “The whole process was like a petition to the State Bureau of Letters and Calls, punching a card and leaving.”
After representing the 12 Hong Kong people and Zhang Zhan, Lu Siwei and Ren Quanniu were suspended. The two lawyers’ licenses were revoked in one day, and Yang felt that his license to practice law might be revoked in a minute, so he treated every day as his last day as a lawyer.
The Cultural Affairs Bureau is accused of staging a “Cultural Revolution”.
Yang Hui, a lawyer, was issued a huge fine by the Cultural Affairs Bureau for buying and selling books online, but despite this, he didn’t forget to review his own deep wallowing in the book collection.
“There were about 8,000 books in my house at the end of the period, and they filled up the corners of the room, and the pile grew bigger and bigger. So some of them had to be disposed of, or else the wife would have had a problem with it.” He said, “In short, he is accusing me of illegal business of more than 30,000 on top of Kong.com, but actually I bought more than that amount of books myself in the same period, so it is still an essentially consumer, book buyer.”
Lawyer Yang Hui’s private book collection. (WeChat picture)
Yang Hui said, “Originally, people buy some books, read some books, and if more books come out, some will be given away, and some will be transferred to those who are more in need, which is a good cycle. It is also a natural part of the bookish atmosphere. If the Cultural Affairs Bureau is doing this, they are actually doing a small ‘Cultural Revolution’. If they do so, all the people on the network will be investigated and punished.”
Lawyer Yang Hui’s private collection of books. (WeChat picture)
The hearing will be held on May 13. Yang Hui said it is a face-to-face confrontation. “Dialogue in words, book to book, man to man, and God to God.”
Yang Hui requested the hearing in writing. (Courtesy of interviewee)
He explained, “Dialogue by words means that your words come over then my words also go over, we are equivalent to a linguistic encounter; book to book, you give me an informative book, I also read you a passage of Romans; man to man means that you are a person and I am also a person; in fact, things are not that simple, there are evil spirits behind him, Satan controls him to do this thing, my Behind me there is also Jehovah God, who will teach me to persevere to the end.”
China is full of high pressure lines
In recent years, the CCP has punished rights lawyers in various forms of channels, but it is not uncommon to punish them in the name of selling books on the Internet.
Yang Hui believes it’s not entirely surprising that the Cultural Affairs Bureau would step in. “China is a bit like that Oswestry concentration camp, it has more than one wire net over that head, maybe it’s touching another net. It forms a very tight blockade system, so up to be called a prison.”
“He illegally monitored my WeChat, and actually obtained these things in violation of our communication rights.” He analyzed that there was tight surveillance behind the scenes. “A lot of wires, like a spider’s web, it would aggregate into a slot. This probably has a department in China that should be the Political and Legal Committee, which is able to mobilize these departments.”
“Like I sent a friend’s book one night, sent out at 12 p.m., and four or five police officers went over that night to chase these books, a weak department like the Cultural Bureau, which cannot mobilize the police, to do these things in the middle of the night.”
Yang Hui pointed out that, in fact, if these things are connected one by one, we can find that the basic legal system in China is in total collapse, and the overall legal awareness is below the bottom line. For example, the street office often comes to the house and knocks on the door, and justifiably wants to enter.
“It’s like the dance danced at Tsinghua University’s school festival, which is completely different from the dance at Waseda University in Japan, with extremely poor aesthetics. China’s sense of legalism, if shown on top of the form, is this, it’s very ugly.” He said, “No matter what you believe in, you can feel this difference between beauty and ugliness.”
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