BEIJING: The wife of a detained Chinese lawyer began on Wednesday on a march of more than 100km from Beijing to Tianjin city, where she believes her husband is being held incommunicado, in a bid to force authorities to explain his arrest.

Lawyer Wang Quanzhang, who took on sensitive cases of complaints of police torture and defended practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, went missing in August 2015 during a sweeping crackdown on rights activists.

His wife, Li Wenzu, has since heard little about her husband’s fate although authorities told her lawyer he had been detained. Neither Li nor the lawyer has been allowed to see him.

“We are walking to seek an answer from the Chinese legal system. Is China really a country with rule of law?” Li told reporters outside a Supreme People’s Court complaints office.

“Over the last 999 days, we have tried every possible legal means to find out what has happened to him, but there has been no result,” she said. China’s public security bureau and justice department did not reply to faxed requests for comment.

On July 9, 2015, authorities launched what rights groups say was a coordinated attempt to quash Chinas rights movement, in what is known as the 709 crackdown, after the date.

At the time, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, the Peoples Daily, described some of the prominent detainees as a major criminal gang that has seriously damaged social order.

Published in Dawn, April 5th, 2018