Teenage son of prominent Chinese human rights lawyer missing
Bao Zhuoxuan, teenage son of prominent Chinese human rights lawyer, is missing
Date October 10, 2015
Philip Wen
China correspondent for Fairfax Media
Bao Zhuoxuan went missing in Myanmar while attempting to flee China. Photo: Supplied
Beijing: The teenage son of a detained human rights lawyer blocked by Chinese authorities from attending high school in Australia has gone missing in Myanmar while attempting to flee China.
Bao Zhuoxuan, 16, was taken from his hotel on Tuesday by uniformed men in the Burmese town of Mong La, near the Chinese border, according to rights activists helping with his journey.
Mr Bao had been en route to Thailand where he planned to apply for asylum in the United States, having been under constant surveillance and harassment from Chinese authorities since his parents, prominent lawyer Wang Yu and legal activist Bao Longjun, were detained in July amid a sweeping government crackdown on lawyers in China.
"We believed we could find a way for him to travel as a refugee," Zhou Fengshuo, a US-based rights activist who had travelled to Thailand to meet Mr Bao, told Fairfax Media.
"He was under constant surveillance and harassment – he is just 16 years old."
Mr Zhou said the wife of the hotel owner said more than 10 officers produced Myanmar police identification and searched the guest rooms, taking away Mr Bao and the two supporters accompanying him, Tang Zhishun and Xing Qingxian.
None of the three have been heard from since, prompting rights activists to raise the alarm. Attempts by Fairfax Media to contact Mr Bao were also unsuccessful.
The route through Myanmar represented Mr Bao's best chance of fleeing China given his passport had been confiscated by Chinese authorities when he was forcibly stopped from his boarding his flight to Australia in July.
"I started to scream but one of the men put his hand over my mouth," Mr Bao told Fairfax Media in a phone interview in July. The teenager was thrown into a van and detained alone for two nights, before being released to family in Tianjin and then Inner Mongolia.
Other relatives of Chinese dissidents have fled through Myanmar, including the wife and two children of Gao Zhisheng, a prominent rights lawyer who has been held in lengthy spells of secret confinement.
Mr Bao's parents are among at least 288 rights lawyers, activists and law firm staff that have been detained or questioned by Chinese authorities since July, according to records kept by the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group.
It comes amid a broader suppression of civil society under President Xi Jinping, which has targeted intellectuals, activists, artists, lawyers, journalists and non-governmental organisations.
