One lone voice fights for human rights in China

When thousands of laid-off workers marched down Victory Road in Liaoyang, China, this month, protesting corrupt factory leaders, the foreign media was tipped off by something called the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. When an evangelical Bible smuggler faced a possible death penalty in China early this year – the world knew through the center.

Of the known human-rights cases in China, about two-thirds first come to light from the Hong Kong-based outfit, China watchers say.

Yet the "center" is just one person – a Chinese Don Quixote named Frank Lu Siqing.

Armed with a cellphone, a pager, and a rare network of some 2,000 mainland sources, Mr. Lu works 14- hour days, tilting at the windmills of Chinese state security and disseminating news that does not appear in China's state-controlled media.

What's remarkable given his subject, supporters say, is that Lu is practically the only person doing such work.

So effective has China been at intimidating and shutting off any investigation or criticism of its internal behavior that at the annual UN human-rights body in Geneva last week – no country sponsored a critique of China. (The US has regularly done so, but was voted off the 53-member commission last year.)

Conduits of information out of China on prisoners of conscience or dissenters have dried up, leaving mainly second- or third-hand networks of academics and exiles.

"Practically no one is left," says one American source. "They are either retired or in prison."

"In China, the scale of abuses is very large. What we know is the tip of the iceberg," says Robin Munro, a veteran British-based human-rights expert. "In most parts of the world, human-rights awareness comes from the NGO community, people plugged into activist circles. In China, since 1949, no groups have been allowed in. A human rights monitoring effort in China invariably means arrest. What allows Lu to exist is his base in Hong Kong, and his sources."

CHINA watchers say his sources – who report on news that is omitted or not considered for official media – give Lu's operation its edge. For example, China to this day has not reported on nearly two months of protests – both in the north and the south – of laid off workers seeking pensions and back pay.

Until last year, Lu ran his entire operation out of a single crowded room in a Hong Kong walk-up. Since 1996, he has single-handedly put out some 2,500 reports on cases of abuse – twice as many as the three major China human-rights watch groups combined.

Lu was born in Hunan Province, in central China. But he says his parents left him when he was two months old. They were forced to participate in the Cultural Revolution, the Mao-dictated project of social engineering to overhaul traditional China. Lu was raised by a family friend, and did not see his parents for nearly 13 years. "This was very painful," he says. "I don't want to talk about it."

But he remembers reading Chinese characters at age 5, considered early. Such reading included the political posters that saturated public spaces during the Mao era. "Even then, I knew it was a lie. Even as a child, you have some judgment, and you see these writings, and you know they aren't true."

At the same time, Lu dreamed of being able to say what he wanted. "I wanted free expression. I was so angry. I felt the lie could not be changed, yet I remained angry at the lie.

Year by year, you think this over..."

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